“UNIFIED”: Bridging the Researcher–Practitioner Divide in Mind, Brain, and Education

Abstract

Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) science is by definition transdisciplinary. However, the communication and collaboration between constituent disciplines needed for true transdisciplinarity remains relatively rare. Consequently, many of the potential benefits of MBE science remain unrealized for parties on all sides of the discipline. The present commentary first conducts an analysis of the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of transdisciplinary partnerships in MBE. A new, free, and international web platform (“UNIFIED”) is then proposed to broker relationships between researchers and teachers within schools. This website would allow users to form collaborations based on a system of tags indexing their research interests as well as practicalities such as their location. Such a website appears well placed to realize many of the opportunities, and mitigate the threats and weaknesses, of transdisciplinary MBE research. The article concludes with an appeal to interested researchers and schools to contribute to the development of the project.

Developing a Self-Reflection Tool to Assess Schools’ Openness

“…The development of the Open Schools Self-Reflection Tool (OSOS-SRT) was the response to follow the organisational change during the implementation. Based on the recent methodologies for assessing the impact of RRI in education (Hobbiss et al, 2019;van Atteveldt et al, 2019), it analysed the school community engagement in research and innovation. Furthermore, it is supposed to enable easier access to scientific results for students, to take up gender and ethics in the research and innovation content and process, and to act as a bridge of formal and informal science education, on the EU recommendations for the science education and on the development of responsible citizenship (EC, 2015a) as well as to analyse schools' e-maturity (Kampylis et al, 2015;Sotiriou et al, 2016;EC, 2019b).…”

“…• Management: The aim of the instrument is to assess the vision, the leadership of the school community key stakeholders towards the adoption of a changing culture towards openness (Earley and Greany, 2017;Hobbiss et al, 2019), and the overall innovation potential of the school community (George and Desmidt, 2018) and to highlight the appearance (or not) of the key factors that can catalyse the cultural changes (e.g., coherence of local or national policies, development of a shared vision and understanding, development of motivation mechanisms and specific plans for staff competencies, school autonomy). This section of the instrument includes a step-by-step approach for the school heads to define a root of development and to locate the current position of their school in the innovation journey.…”

Partnering to Learn: A Collaborative Approach to Research Translation for Educators and Researchers

“…Another promising approach to increasing the ecological validity of research for educational practice—one that aligns with the transdisciplinary goals of multidisciplinary fields such as the SoL—involves stronger engagement with stakeholders and a bidirectional approach to research—for a move away from research being done “to” educators to research being done “with” and “by” educators in partnership with researchers (Farley‐Ripple et al, 2018; Hobbiss et al, 2019; Levin, 2013; van Atteveldt et al, 2018). Rather than the traditional one‐way direction of research to practice, a bidirectional reciprocal partnership could assist in addressing challenges of translation relating to knowledge production and use.…”

“…Second, the transformation of research into usable knowledge for practice has been shown to benefit from the support of knowledge brokers. Effective knowledge brokers can support educators to build research capabilities as well as their understanding of the research evidence, and work with them to co‐construct contextually relevant applications (Brown, 2020; Cooper et al, 2020; Farley‐Ripple, 2017; Gorard et al, 2020; Hobbiss et al, 2019; Neal et al, 2015). Involving educators in the design, implementation, and evaluation of research in their own context can also assist in preventing the misinterpretation of research findings when translated into the classroom context (Howard‐Jones, 2014).…”

“…Effective approaches to multidisciplinary research and its translation into educational practice are important if we want to bridge the gap between research and its use. The development of multidisciplinary research models and, by extension, models of translation, has immense value for the field with reciprocal benefits identified for both researchers and educators (Hobbiss et al, 2019). Furthermore, there are global calls for the systematic approaches to support the implementation of, leadership in, and evaluation of evidence‐informed practice in schools (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2014; Department of Education and Training, 2018; Howard‐Jones et al, 2016).…”