Stephen MacGregor, Amanda Cooper, Michelle Searle and Tiina Kukkonen
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Co-production and arts-informed inquiry as creative power for knowledge mobilisation’, part of the Special Issue on Creativity and Co-production.
The days of research reports going unread by all but their authors and articles being hidden behind publisher paywalls are giving way to more collaborative research approaches. One that has provoked great attention in recent years is co-production, an approach that acknowledges the unique knowledge and expertise different individuals can bring to the research process. However, the evidence base for co-production has not kept pace with the excitement surrounding it.
In our recent Evidence & Policy article, we asked, ‘How can seeing co-production as a creative endeavour create opportunities to move knowledge into action?’ To answer this question, we examined three cases focused on promoting shared understanding and action in the Canadian education sector. Each case used artful practices to promote meaningful reflection, understanding and representation of individual and communal experiences.
Unique to our study was the use of a realist perspective. Realist explanations look to develop reasoned pathways from specific mechanisms and contexts to observed outcomes (see Pawson & Tilley, 1997). Researchers typically refer to these as CMO configurations and represent the expression as: context + mechanism = outcome. These explanations are helpful because we can learn about the possibility of transferring lessons learned from one instance of co-production to another. What’s more, by comparing these CMO configurations across our three cases, we can identify common propositions about arts-informed approaches to co-production.
Based on our analysis and case comparisons, we landed on two CMO configurations for using the arts in co-production. First, the arts enabled new ways of building mutual understanding among co-production partners, leading to more positive attitudes about co-production. At the same time, it appeared that the practical costs of co-production using arts-informed approaches (e.g. the financial costs and time requirements of in-person meetings to create visual displays) could also result in stakeholders feeling overburdened or developing negative feelings about the process in general.
The second CMO configuration concerned how arts-informed approaches throughout different phases of the co-production process (planning, conducting, disseminating and applying) simultaneously ensured findings were relevant and useful while seeding interest in future collaboration. However, the contextual factors and mechanism could also induce negative outcomes, particularly the potential for co-production activities to appear tokenistic if organisational structures and norms crowd out meaningful engagement. Based on these two CMO configurations that were common across cases as well as those which were specific to each case, we concluded by proposing the following recommendations for arts-informed approaches to co-production:
- Address context specificity and sensitivity: The purpose and stakeholders involved influence the strategies that need to be employed, and feedback loops to assess and adapt throughout implementation are necessary to encourage reciprocity between stakeholders, especially between researchers and practitioners, policymakers and community members.
- Promote engagement by providing relationally focused experiences that generate opportunities for creative, joyful exploration and access to different ways of seeing.
- Enhance and intertwine skills through hands-on training and practice (e.g. training student leader-researchers to collect data), exploration of diverse modes of representation (e.g. drawing mind maps and visualisations, writing composite narratives), and the creation of shareable art/research products (e.g. designing and fabricating a board game).
- Broaden thinking and impact through researchers considering: (a) the timing and staging of arts-informed approaches; (b) how the methods and approaches are tailored to the context and stakeholders involved; (c) the range of potential impact and types of outcome on a variety of stakeholders, and (d) the support researchers or evaluators with a background in, or understanding of, arts-informed approaches might offer.
While this work is only an initial step in interrogating how arts-informed approaches can generate visible, dialogic, evocative and embodied knowledge, it nonetheless contributes to current understandings of co-production and how notions of creativity feature in debates about linking knowledge with action.
Stephen MacGregor is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, Policy and Governance in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. His research centers on knowledge mobilization as a mechanism to promote school improvement and systems change, with an emphasis on leadership practices for increasingly complex educational environments. Mixed methods approaches are a recurring theme in his work, including the use of social network analysis to analyze interaction patterns among diverse research stakeholders.
Amanda Cooper is an Associate Dean of Research and Strategic Initiatives in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University and Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy. She founded the Research Informing Policy, Practice, and Leadership in Education (RIPPLE) program to increase the use of evidence in public service sectors. Dr. Cooper’s research on knowledge mobilization includes four areas of inquiry: research producers (funders and universities), research users (practitioners and policymakers), research brokers and measuring research impact.
Michelle Searle is an Assistant Professor of Educational Evaluation in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University. She holds a PhD in curriculum with a focus on assessment and evaluation; she is also an experienced educator and Credentialed Evaluator with the Canadian Evaluation Society. By using mixed and multiple methods in her research that are often infused with Arts, she gains a deeper understanding of the phenomena under study and uses this knowledge to inform policy, practice and scholarship.
Tiina Kukkonen is a visual artist, arts educator, and researcher. Formally trained in Fine Arts, she dabbles in many different media and has taught visual arts to learners of all ages in community and school environments. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from Queen’s University in Kingston (ON) where she currently teaches visual arts education to aspiring teachers. Tiina is a member of the Kingston Fibre Artists and currently serves on the executive committee of the Canadian Society for Education through Art (CSEA) in the role of Director of Provincial Liaison, Social Media, and Advocacy.
Image credit: Photo by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
MacGregor, S. Cooper, A. Searle, M. and Kukkonen, T. (2022). Co-production and arts-informed inquiry as creative power for knowledge mobilisation. Evidence & Policy, 18(2), DOI: 10.1332/174426421X16478737939339. OPEN ACCESS
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