- Build a stronger bridge between research and policy
- Strengthen understanding of the knowledge base in the field
- Prompt dialogue
Society & Culture
How ‘Horton’ is a hook to talk about research
When Kara Finnigan communicates with her peers about reforming troubled school districts, she does so with journal articles such as “System-wide Reform in Districts Under Pressure: The Role of Social Networks in Defining, Acquiring, Using, and Diffusing Research Evidence.”
Or with presentations at academic conferences on such topics as “A Tale of Two Districts: The Importance of Collegiality in Urban Education Reform” or “Using Social Network Analysis to Understand Leadership Churn Under Accountability Policies.”
But when the associate professor of educational policy at the Warner School of Education wants to communicate with the policymakers who bring reform about — or with parents and other stakeholders who will be affected — she starts by talking about Horton the elephant.
That’s right: the Dr. Seuss character who placed a speck of dust on a flower and discovered Whoville inside.
Finnigan is not speaking down to her audiences when she talks about Horton; rather, she explains, she’s dangling a “hook” to attract and hold the audience’s attention. She’s acknowledging that scholars need to find different ways to communicate their work to non-academics if scholarly research is to have the broadest possible impact. “Otherwise, nobody’s going to pay attention,” she says.
The importance of this kind of public scholarship was brought home to Finnigan this year when she was one of 32 scholars chosen by the American Educational Research Association to participate in a series of events to better connect research and policy.
This included nearly two days of training in how to give TED-like “ED” talks to: