Investigating the challenges and opportunities of a bilingual equity knowledge brokering network: A critical and reflective perspective from university partners

Abstract

Public education systems are often large, diverse, fragmented, and historically very hard to change. While previous reforms targeted primarily school staff, large-scale policies now include a broader audience including non-system organizations (e.g., knowledge brokering organizations) that may influence directly or indirectly policy implementation. Arguing that knowledge brokering organizations can contribute to policy implementation by bridging equity policy and research and practice at the local level, we put forward that their networks and relationships with districts, schools, and community organizations can bring about substantial changes to the organization and practices of schools on equity issues, even though they may face obstacles in implementing change due to particular contexts. We aim to better understand the role of knowledge brokering networks and of the university partners who act as knowledge brokers to bridge Ontario Ministry of Education policy goals with equity research and practice. As knowledge brokers working in a bilingual province-wide equity knowledge brokering network, we use our experiences as a particular case of a non-system role in system-wide reforms. We build on these experiences to question and self-reflect on our role as knowledge brokers who accompanied practitioners and community coalition leaders towards equity and inclusion over a 2-year period. By analyzing knowledge brokering functions, we show the challenges and opportunities we faced as knowledge brokers in guiding local equity and inclusion initiatives: 1) the roles we carried out during interactions and practices that could take on different meanings as knowledge producers and mobilizers; 2) we point out how and why these knowledge brokering functions and our roles within a bilingual province-wide network needed to adapt to local realities by providing for a more flexible planning process that allowed for sufficient time to identify local needs and to produce, if necessary, the knowledge that incorporated cultural context considerations or particularities.

Problem statement

Public education systems are often large, diverse, fragmented, and historically very hard to change. One of these challenges is to painstakingly orchestrate policy coherence with the different layers of governance and the web of system and non-system actors (Honig, 2004). While previous reforms targeted primarily school staff, large-scale policies now include a broader audience—people and organizations at school, district, and governmental levels—that may influence directly or indirectly policy implementation and its outcomes (Honig, 2004; McLaughlin, 2006). These reforms are driven by different ideologies that legitimize the presence and expansion of third-party organizations and actors. Among these ideologies, we first observe the neoliberal one that assumes that outsourcing services to the market can do better to address the so-called inefficiencies of schools and districts and improve social welfare (Burch, 2009). Second, it also comes from the knowledge society that seeks to increase connections, application, and relevance between knowledge produced and their various audiences (Meyer, 2010). Non-system organizations and their actors (e.g., community coalitions, advocacy organizations, universities, and knowledge brokering organizations) are believed to bring an extensive and varied range of specialized knowledge, priorities, and interests (Wallace, 2003) and to shape school actors’ understanding of policy expectations and their responses. They can play, if they have similar priorities, a crucial role in system-wide efforts by promoting equitable opportunities for all students and help mitigate the effects of unequal social and educational conditions and processes.

Some studies have explored how and why certain non-system actors have an indirect influence on policy implementation processes and outcomes (Coburn, 2005; Coburn et al., 2008; Morel and Coburn, 2019). Thus far, non-system actors, who intervene in joint system efforts to achieve equity in districts and schools, may exert different levels of authority and/or power in influencing system actors to change their practices. Although these non-system actors do not play the same role or exert the same level of authority within schools, they are still described as being a mediating link between policy and practice. Coburn (2005) highlighted how academics and professional development providers connected teachers with policy messages in consequential ways. The author identified at least three dimensions—mechanism (how teachers learned about policy messages), content (degree of depth and closeness to the classroom), and intensity (brief to regular encounters) that shaped teachers’ responses to policy expectations. Coburn et al. (2008) examined the underlying processes of negotiation between university partners and district administrators—more specifically, how authority and status shaped these interactions. They showed that the quality of advice and assistance and the nature and dynamics of the relationship between internal actors and external partners can lead to instructional improvements, if university facilitators gain the credibility needed to persuade those in authority to move in particular directions. Morel and Coburn (2019) analyzed how district administrators and professional development providers who occupy informal broker roles interact with others, focusing on how they accessed and shared information and resources. Their findings have shown that even when district administrators had the same potential influence as non-system actors, the latter were more likely to shape the available information in the network. They explained how district administrators often sought out substantive information about the reform, but that they did not always share it with their network.

Arguing that knowledge brokering organizations and their actors may contribute to policy implementation by bridging equity policy and research and practice at the local level, we put forward that their networks and relationships with districts, schools, and community organizations may face obstacles in implementing change due to particular contexts. In this article, we aim to better understand the role of knowledge brokering networks and of the university partners who act as knowledge brokers to bridge Ministry policy goals with equity research and practice. Thus, as knowledge brokers working in a bilingual province-wide equity knowledge brokering network, we use our experiences as a particular case of a non-system role in system-wide reforms. We build on these experiences, and on some of what the province-wide network has done, to question and self-reflect on our role as knowledge brokers who accompanied practitioners and community coalition leaders towards equity and inclusion over a 2-year period. We employ a knowledge brokering framework in order to explore how the network performed their functions, such as increasing accessibility to and engagement with knowledge about marginalized groups, increasing networks and partnerships through events, providing shorter, tailored tools, advocating for marginalized groups, and promoting wider knowledge dissemination. By analyzing knowledge brokering functions, we show the challenges and opportunities we faced as knowledge brokers in guiding local equity and inclusion initiatives: 1) The role we carried out during interactions and practices that could take on different meanings as knowledge producers and mobilizers; for instance, we point out how and why the roles of allies or critical friends changed the ways we supported practitioners, and how these roles were influenced, in part, by the different phases of these relationships and by our partners’ priorities; 2) we point out how and why these knowledge brokering functions and our roles within a bilingual province-wide network needed to adapt to local realities by providing for a more flexible planning process that allowed for sufficient time to identify local needs and to produce, if necessary, the knowledge that incorporated cultural context considerations or particularities.

Conceptual framework: Knowledge brokering organizations and the role of brokers

We begin by anchoring our work at the intersection of policy implementation and knowledge brokering organization fields. In so doing, we seek to explore the functions of knowledge brokering organizations and our role as brokers working within the equity network. A knowledge brokering organization designates “people or organizations that move knowledge around and create connections” (Vanhoof and Mahieu, 2013: p. 186) between different knowledge sources, needs, and demands. Knowledge brokering organizations can, thus, be understood as intermediary organizations that: (a) connect research producers and users; (b) have explicit knowledge brokering mission statements, and (c) promote resources to address research-practice-policy gaps (Cooper, 2013). Cooper (2013) identified four categories of knowledge brokering organizations including governmental intermediary organizations (e.g., ministries of education and school boards), not-for-profit intermediary organizations (e.g., university research centers and advocacy organizations), for-profit intermediary organizations (e.g., textbook publishers and instructional program vendors), and membership intermediary organizations (e.g., professional organizations and networks organizations). These different categories of organizations and knowledge brokers are composed of individuals, trade groups, investment firms, philanthropies, and market research firms that also serve the market model of education by selling consulting services and products as well as financing research projects (Ball, 2012; Burch, 2009). For academics or university professors, those roles may differ from the more traditional ones by having to mobilize, disseminate, and lobby for knowledge. In our case, knowledge mobilization network organizations are non-partisan, province-wide initiatives and are part of the Ontario Ministry’s strategy to support knowledge-based, research-informed decisions about their provincial education goals in a collaborative partnership with universities (Briscoe et al., 2015). Knowledge brokering networks are primarily involved in connecting and maintaining networks across different stakeholders (Cooper, 2013) and whose “aims and purposes include the improvement of learning” (Hadfield et al., 2006) cited by Briscoe et al. (2015), p. 21). Since third-party organizations are part of neoliberalism that have gradually reshaped education by introducing: 1) standards against which students are assessed; 2) students’ aggregate results in the standardized tests made public, and 3) institutions becoming more accountable for their performance (Harris and Herrington, 2006), we might think that “improvement of learning” essentially relates, in the knowledge brokering literature reviewed, to students’ testing achievement.

Some studies have examined the organizational functions of knowledge brokering organizations (Cooper, 2013; Meyer, 2010; Vanhoof and Mahieu, 2013). Cooper (2013) identified at least six organizational functions that include: 1) building relationships and partnerships that connect practitioners with diverse stakeholders (e.g., experts, practitioners, and community coalition leaders); 2) building capacity and providing coaching in support of new professional skills and knowledge (e.g., antiracist and culturally responsive pedagogy and identity-based data informed decision-making); 3) increasing awareness and engagement with specific equity and inclusion content and topics; 4) increasing accessibility by providing shorter, tailor-made applicable resources; 5) providing assistance or support for organizational development such as planning, implementation, or evaluation, and 6) increasing policy influence—using knowledge to lobby in favor of some policy priorities or change (Cooper and Shewchuck 2015). Their findings have shown that while knowledge brokering organizations have deployed many products and events to facilitate knowledge mobilization, their efforts remain modest across organizational contexts, domains, and disciplines (Cooper, 2013; Rodway, 2015). Their limited impact can be explained by numerous factors such as the restricted number of members to which resources and events are disseminated, or the passive transmission of tools rather than actionable messages. Another important limit may be that these resources, events, or tools may not correspond to system actors’ own priorities and ways to define the problems they face.

Other studies have attended to the various roles and tasks of knowledge brokers, consultants, counselors, or any other actors in knowledge brokering organizations (Briscoe et al., 2015; Cooper, 2013; Morel and Coburn, 2019; Rodway, 2015). In relation to capacity-building, providing resources and increasing awareness, Cooper (2013) underscored how brokers often acted as negotiators, interpreters, promoters, and facilitators of knowledge mobilization between different organizations. Consequently, knowledge brokers perform many tasks that involve at least three different steps: knowledge production, translation, and mobilization. With regard to building relationships and partnerships that connect users with diverse stakeholders, Morel and Coburn (2019) explained how brokers aim at bridging the gaps to enable links with networks that other actors do not have access to and to mediate between them. They showed how brokers tend to enable districts to access nonlocal information and expertise to support practice and face contextual opportunities and constraints that shape the ways they interact with other actors. In relation to increasing policy influence, Briscoe et al. (2015) have shown how knowledge brokers tend to align their work with provincial educational goals or shared similar views with the government. They stressed how knowledge brokers increased their impact by allying themselves with key organizations and individuals that can have a considerable outreach. We can understand this mode of operation through the impact of the system of accountability and performativity that now characterizes the world of education, while questioning the limits that this can pose in order to access local priorities and to partners’ roles.

Setting the scene: Ontario’s education system and its equity policy orientations

We continue by describing Ontario’s educational system and situating the bilingual equity knowledge brokering network within the complex web of French and English boards, schools, and non-system organizations that influence, directly or indirectly, system-wide reforms. We, then, provide an overview of the Canadian national areas at the federal level related to official languages and multiculturalism and how they have shaped Ontario’s equity policy orientations. We also present Ontario’s equity and inclusion policies and the different conceptions and philosophies they convey and the ways they have evolved throughout the years and through political parties’ standpoints. In doing so, we show how these policies, in conjunction with increased diversity and the number of immigrants in the province, have come to shape the implementation process of equity-driven initiatives in school boards and schools, and how these latter have also been formulated in the context of the federal policy of multiculturalism.

In Canada, the educational systems fall under provincial and territorial jurisdiction. In the province of Ontario, English is the main language of instruction in the majority of schools in the K-12 school system. There are 72 school boards and close to 5000 publicly funded schools (Government of Ontario, 2018). There are four separate publicly funded school boards: English public (n = 31), English Catholic (n = 29), French public (n = 4), and French Catholic (n = 8) (People for Education, 2018). Out of the 5000 publicly funded schools, 450 French-language schools offer education in French to the minority French-speaking population. These schools are administered by their own French school boards (‘conseils scolaires’). The French-language schools have evolved to respond to the needs of a linguistic minority group and can be seen as sites of social reproduction and language maintenance where dominant values and cultural norms are transmitted and maintained by school actors through the nature of social relationships and the linguistic planning policy (OME, 2005). Since the 1990s, the province has witnessed significant demographic changes due to increased immigration. Ontario is one of the provinces that welcomes the most immigrants, be they English or French speakers (Statistics Canada, 2019). These demographic changes shifted the profile of the French-speaking student population towards an increasingly diverse population composed of immigrants from Haiti, France, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Mauritius, Burundi, Morocco, Lebanon, Algeria, and Côte d’Ivoire (Statistics Canada 2019). Some studies have shed light on the impact of these significant demographic changes on the inner workings of French-language schools, particularly in relation to the recruitment and retention of new immigrant teachers (FCE, 2014) and their integration into the teaching community (Dalley, 2020). Dalley (2020) underscored how immigrant teacher candidates enrolled in teacher training programs experienced difficulties integrating into the teaching staff. Her study revealed the difficulties with which they struggled to establish meaningful and professional relationships with the teaching staff who accompanied them during internships or practicums. These difficulties if not resolved may ultimately distance many potential teacher candidates from the profession and worsen the current teacher shortage. In addition, it will hamper not only the ability to respond to the Ontario Education Ministry’s equity policy but also the social cohesion, respect, and acceptance of difference promoted through the federal multicultural policy.

While the provinces have jurisdiction over their educational systems, the federal government’s engagement in education relates to its responsibilities in areas of national interest such as citizenship, official languages, multiculturalism, and human rights (Joshee, 2009). Of these areas, two important national agendas have shaped equity policies in the province of Ontario: official languages and multiculturalism. First, the recognition by the federal government of two official languages, French and English, that relates to a legacy of colonization and a historical and political compromise that culminated in the Official Languages Act of 1969. In this Act, both French and English languages have equal status. Fourteen language policies coexist in Canada, one federal, ten provincial, and three territorial, along with a growing recognition of Indigenous languages (Cardinal and Foucher, 2017). The repatriation of the Constitution and the Proclamation of the Constitutional Act in 1982 and the creation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that requires provinces to implement section 23 of the Canadian Charter “Minority Language Educational Rights,” empowers rights holders to send their children to a minority school to be taught in the minority language. In the face of the erosion suffered by the minority, rulings of the Supreme Court of Canada have taken a remedial perspective, in particular the Mahé judgment (1990), which sends a strong signal in favor of linguistic minorities by recognizing their right to manage and control their schools (Power et al., 2011). Arrangements to soften these admission rules have allowed more families, especially those from immigrant backgrounds, to send their children to French-language minority schools. That means that newcomers—not designated as right holders, but who are French-speaking or who speak neither French nor English—can be admitted to a French-language school based on an evaluation by an admission committee that assesses the interest in and competency for learning in French (OEM, 2009a). Further, the federal policy on multiculturalism also shaped the province’s policy in its ideology and practice. The 1980s and 1990s saw a period of neoliberal restructuring where the federal government rearticulated the multiculturalism policy, first enacted in 1971, and based it on a business strategy to attract elite global investors and their capital to Canada (Segeren, 2011). The new version of this policy views diversity as a political and economic asset and as an exploitable resource. Likewise, the Ontario Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy of 2009 was also constructed as an opportunity to capitalize on diversity, a key element in creating a politically active and economically productive citizenry (Segeren, 2011).

In Ontario, the New Democratic Party (NDP), a social-democratic political party, initiated the first version of an equity policy in 1993 (Ontario Ministry of Education and Training OMET, 1993a). The Policy/Program Memorandum (PPM) No. 119 on Development and Implementation of School Board Policies on Antiracism and Ethnocultural Equity ¹ required that all school boards develop and integrate the principles of antiracism and ethnocultural equity into all aspects of education programs and board operations in their policy as well as in their implementation plan. The policy focused mainly on antiracism and race relations to unveil systemic discrimination experienced by ethnoracial and cultural groups and to change institutional policies and procedures, as well as individual behaviors and practices that may be racist in their impact. While this policy sought important social changes following debates and a growing body of knowledge available on antiracism in the 1990s, neither resources, funding nor accountable measures supported its goals (Ontario Ministry of Education and Training OMET, 1993b). When the Conservative Party, a right-wing political party, came into power 2 years later, they reduced fiscal spending and, thus, limited the capacity of school boards to implement the equity policy (Rezai-Rashti, Segeren, Martino, 2015).

In 2009, under the centrist Liberal political party, the government elaborated the policy document “Realizing the Promise of Diversity: Ontario’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy.” The strategy promoted inclusive education, adding the notions of biases and power dynamics that limit all students’ prospects for learning and growth or social mobility. The government’s 1993 edition of the PPM No. 119 was revised and amended accordingly. The amendment broadens the scope of the policy to create a system-wide approach to removing all discriminatory barriers. It now calls for an inclusive approach where all students can recognize themselves in the curriculum and within the whole school organization and focuses on making them feel safe and secure. While the province’s policy (re)orientation attempted to move beyond the federal multiculturalism policy, Segeren (2011) suggests that its ultimate policy goal, to prepare students and foster social cohesion and its emphasis on diversity as an asset for prosperity and citizenship, are shaped by the federal government’s ideology. Despite a stronger focus on equity that acknowledges social construction of diversity and system-wide barriers, Segeren (2011) mentions that the policy (re)orientation did not strongly depart from the 1993 version in respect to the influence of the federal policy on multiculturalism. The policy still appears to borrow from the federal multiculturalism conception of equity that mainly promotes diversity, respect, and acceptance of difference in a way of creating a unified Canada. If diversity is mainly celebrated and referred to as an asset or a strength—which makes sense when valuing students’ cultural differences, namely, those related to language, religion, or gender identity—this appreciation loses its meaning in the face of low socioeconomic statuses which are barely addressed. Ignoring or neglecting increasing socioeconomic inequalities in policies that focus on valuing diversity risks projecting a unified image of minority groups that are, nevertheless, characterized by differences (Bélanger, 2019). This is especially true of socioeconomic differences if we consider the situation of recent immigrants who might not yet be fully integrated in the job market and must still fight to have their foreign diplomas recognized.

However, there are notable shifts and tensions emerging between the 1993 version of the PPM No. 119 and the latest one. For example, the definition of equity has changed in meaning, moving from a social-democratic notion towards an emphasis on the economy and the individual (Rezai-Rashti et al., 2015). This can be observed through an overemphasis on the individual rather than on the system. Segeren (2011) suggests that the policy fails to account for the level of schools: “System-wide policies fail to account for the diversities among schools in a given district related to language, religion, culture, ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic status among others” (p. 148). The policy definition assumes that all schools uniformly implement the policy and appears to forget the contextual challenges they may face. Some authors have also noted the issues related to the changes in approach from antiracism towards inclusion pedagogy. Since equity in education involves empowerment and the process of inquiry and discovery of knowledge that are not fixed, multiculturalism, that mainly celebrates diversity, appears unequal to the task of removing barriers and creating equity. The original version of the equity policy of 1993 considered an antiracist pedagogy that rejected Western or Euro-centered conceptions of knowledge and research in favor of epistemologies that could advance political action towards the elimination of racism (Niemonen, 2007). Consequently, inclusive education that broadens the scope of the policy and focuses on all types of exclusions may clash with an approach espoused by some antiracist educators who claim “race is much more important than social class in explaining disparities in socioeconomic status attainments” (Niemonen, 2007: p. 160). Rezai-Rashti et al. (2015) note that the recent equity policy also involves accountability mechanisms such as the expansion of measures and data-used, testing and reporting of outcomes. They explain that even though devolving more power to individuals and school boards can appear as an encouragement towards action and to make changes, they stress that it made them in fact more accountable and gave them the “illusion of greater autonomy” (p. 142).

In 2013, the Liberal government brought a second amendment to the 1993 version of the PPM No. 119. The latest revision shifted from antiracism and ethnocultural equity to the development and implementation of a broader equity and inclusive strategy. By doing so, the Ontario Education Ministry (OEM) further broadens the scope of diversities including, but not limited to, gender, gender identity, language, physical and intellectual ability, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. This latest version also states that the Ministry must provide more resources and “review and conduct research on promising practices on equity and inclusive education, and will disseminate this information through boards” (OEM, 2013: p. 8). School boards had the responsibility to create local policies and administrative procedures in order to implement, monitor, and report to all stakeholders involved in the progress of the Strategy. The Ministry published Ontario’s Education Equity Action Plan to guide school practitioners in removing systemic barriers and discriminatory institutional and instructional practices that may have an impact on students’ achievement and well-being (2017) and on how to measure the outcomes of these adjusted practices.

University partners as knowledge brokers?

When in 2017, the Ministry launched the Ontario’s Education Equity Action Plan, public funds were granted to our university in an effort to implement a bilingual province-wide knowledge brokering network. The knowledge brokering network subscribes, to some extent, to the provincial action plan by attempting to combine and reconcile the Ministry’s education goals related to the recent equity policy. The network was initiated to mobilize knowledge from research and to facilitate the use of best instructional practices to support the implementation of the guiding principles of equity and inclusion of Ontario’s recent equity policy (OEM, 2009b, 2014, 2017). This meant addressing issues related to community reach and power relations between stakeholders, as well as stressing the importance of ethnocultural diversity and of refugee and newcomer education including working with racialized and marginalized groups, students with disabilities, addressing gender and sexuality education, and minority language education in pluralistic contexts. For the minority language education, this entailed assists decision-school leaders and teachers understanding the complex and multi-layered issues related to the ways the multiple social categories intersect at the individual students’ experiences all the while recognizing the established institutional norms and practices that perpetuate inequities in schools. The Network was established based on a relational model for knowledge brokering of teacher educators, teachers, school administrators, and teacher candidates (Ng-A-Fook et al., 2015). In this way, the Network emphasized the establishment of “a relational knowledge network that sought to disrupt the assumed linear and top-down transfer of knowledge from universities to teachers and served to promote and mobilize evidence-based research, social innovation, and best practices” (Ng-A-Fook et al., 2015: p. 11 ). In that sense, it raised important questions and considerations about the role that as university partners we played as knowledge brokers. This included our views regarding “evidence-based research” and “best practices,” if and how they could eventually be implemented in a context different from their point of origin and, lastly, the ways in which we approached equity according to the various policy definitions and approaches promulgated over the years. While the foundational ideology of the relational model is to build trust and equal relationships among teachers, teacher candidates, principals, and university professors, this model can also obliterate our status as university professors and positions of authority in a specific area of expertise as a relevant aspect to attend to in thinking about the ways to build relationships with various partners.

In reflecting on our experience, we begin by looking back at the various organizational brokering functions and our role as knowledge brokers working within a province-wide bilingual network that sought to bridge the Ministry’s equity and inclusion goals, research, and practice. We first began the knowledge brokering efforts by launching two separate French and English events to promote the Network and its activities with our potential partners. During our first year, we sought to address the issues related to these significant demographic changes and their impact on the inner workings of French schools, particularly in relation to the recruitment, integration, and retention of new immigrant teachers. Our first event included five workshops offered to partners on these topics. During the initial launch, it became clear that not only did we need to find ways to (re)build relationships with the districts, but that we would also need to find ways of opening-up sometimes hard conversations on issues such as recruitment, integration, and retention of new immigrant teachers. These initial conversations made it clear that we would need to establish some common ground so that neither university partners nor district administrators would blame each other over any inadequacies in the training of teacher candidates, but rather would come to concrete solutions on how to better integrate them in schools. On a more practical note, the launch also reminded us that the teacher shortage in French schools curtailed the possibilities for us to provide support for new professional skills and knowledge at the university. In other words, we were limited in our original plan to reach out and support teachers, as they were so in demand in schools that they could not be freed up to participate in Network activities. Thus, it was mainly school administrators who attended the launch. We then continued by holding separate French and English meetings, mostly at the University, to which various partners (e.g., district administrators, leaders of community coalitions, teachers, and graduate students) were invited. Two meetings were held for the French side in 2017–2018 and five in 2018–2019, including one on a school site. The purpose of the French meetings was to build relationships and partnerships that connected the various stakeholders from different districts and to pursue discussions about where they were in terms of equity-driven initiatives and practices in their respective boards and schools and what were their perceived needs in terms of professional skills and knowledge, and how the university partners could support them.

We also intentionally envisioned the two-way communication strategy for our partners. For example, during the Network launch in 2017, artistic performances were offered both in French and English as a way to more easily talk about issues surrounding diversity and to build trust in our relationships with partners. However, some challenges have arisen in our attempts to work in similar ways with the various partners in French and English. Working with the French-speaking minority schools required an initial assessment of the situation and the building of new connections with community coalitions and advocacy organizations, all the while reinforcing existing ones. This was further complicated by the fact that we realized that we needed to devote more time among the French linguistic minority group to reach as many partners as possible—sometimes geographically far away from each other—to develop trust and to slowly attempt to change the power dynamics, while simultaneously feeling pressed to rapidly line up with our English colleagues who already had established partnerships and ongoing relationships with numerous community coalitions. Since the neoliberal turn, our Network, like any other organization, was also under pressure to account for what we were doing. Taking the time to reach socially underrepresented groups through our Network, always more difficult to reach, presented a challenge. Nevertheless, this did secure individual participation, sometimes from people viewed as “champions” in the area of equity and diversity practices, but left aside other groups, such as teachers practicing farther from the urban centers and/or those less prepared or equipped and confident to handle these issues. Also, some other teachers might have had strong institutional and professional identities that differed from those needed to work collectively in a network.

We came to realize that while our organizational function of increasing accessibility by providing shorter, evidence-based practices on equity, as well as inclusion tools and resources, were paramount to our work, we noted that the French minority schools struggled to find, adapt, and translate research and knowledge. One of the reasons for this is that our English-speaking colleagues could count on a variety of resources available to them in the scientific community and could share, adapt, and disseminate them on the website and other social media. However, the resources available in French were scarcer and, thus, less readily available. The scarcity of resources raised issues in terms of both knowledge production and dissemination in French. Should we translate English resources into French? Would it be pertinent to also translate resources, even if they are fewer, from French to English? If so, how do culturally and contextually sensitive views of instruction and student diversity, for example, adapt and transfer from one community specificity to another? Would we be reproducing and imposing knowledge that did not correspond to the communities’ and schools’ needs or priorities? What were the privileged models that were favored and disseminated through our website and video productions and what and whose issues did they address?

Another area where our work diverged was in terms of the degree of policy implementation among English and French school boards. When the Ontario Ministry of Education revised the PPM No. 119 in 2009, it noted that only 43 out of the 72 school boards reported having enacted an equity policy (OME, 2009c). The Ministry outlined that their degree of implementation varied from a one-page statement to comprehensive documents including guidelines and resource materials. Some English school boards and schools appeared to have adopted the early version of PPM No. 119 that had stressed an antiracist pedagogy as the privileged approach, while some French school boards and schools had adopted the recently promoted inclusion approaches. Some French-speaking boards explained how they had devoted their time and resources to train their district administrators, school leaders, and teachers through a combination of inclusive education and antiracist approaches to tackle the many issues arising as a result of an increasingly diverse student population. Some French-speaking Catholic schools were happy to report that they were able to participate in the gay pride parade for the first time the year before. District administrators explained how the participation in this event was the result of ongoing discussions with the Archbishopric and the need to stand by their LGBTQ student community. These discussions made us realize that the Ministry’s shifting definition of equity from an antiracism approach towards an inclusive education approach still coexisted in the ways some school boards framed school issues. This offered us different perspectives on how they came to recognize specific marginalized groups and other complex contextual issues and priorities, as well as how they struggled to understand the recommended approaches to support the implementation of the Ministry’s designed “for all” policy. In our attempts to align our work, sometimes unwillingly, with the Ministry’s policy goals, we were concerned, especially among our francophone partners, about the risk of obliterating socioeconomic contexts. As Lubienski (2003) mentions, the differences in socioeconomic classes, especially when we think about poverty, attract, unfortunately, less attention for three reasons: 1) it causes discomfort to talk about it; 2) poverty refers to this convenient belief that it explains school failure; and 3) linguistic and ethnic diversity, unlike socioeconomic differences, appear to be more easily highlighted or showcased. Moreover, considering that the recent equity policy mainly focuses on the individual rather than on groups, we were also concerned about the risk of minimizing the complex issues that the increasingly diverse French-speaking linguistic minority schools were experiencing. As a Network, how can we, first and foremost scholars, contribute to the policy implementation of the Ministry’s vision while at the same time advancing a better understanding of complex issues and interrogating and challenging the limits of political actions? While the knowledge brokering network sought to promote and disseminate data and best practices on equity and inclusion, we wondered how to position ourselves between the voice of political power on equity while promoting the voices of local and practitioners’ realities and challenges. As university partners, how do we enact our role between these two positions? In other words, how can we, as researchers, help in effecting education policies by finding practical solutions for school boards and schools, and how can we buffer them from the exerted pressure that may focus their attention on specific priorities regarding equity and inclusion rather than on those they want to pinpoint?

More generally, we observed that by acting as knowledge brokers, we not only became increasingly aware of the many issues and experiences that our various partners faced in dealing with iniquities and exclusions of minority groups, but also self-aware of how our authority and status as professors shaped these interactions. Retrospectively, we, as university partners, came into the Network with different understandings of what knowledge brokering was, how we could contribute to knowledge mobilization with teacher educators, teachers, school administrators, and teacher candidates and of how to approach these relationships given the different stages of partnership-building. In a relational model, the role of knowledge brokers can take on different meanings as knowledge creation and mobilization can be carried out during interactions and practices shared during meetings and through the ways we coached and supported changes in practices. We, thus, attempted to position ourselves by adopting different roles with practitioners. Some of us adopted the role of a critical friend, as a facilitator of change in school improvement initiatives and professional learning through the use of theoretical and practical knowledge, provocative questioning, challenging convictions and expectations, and helping shape equity outcomes, but without determining them (Gurr and Herta, 2013; Potvin, 2016). Consequently, the goal was to support the professional reflection of practitioners by helping them to identify their professional needs and develop the skills required to implement the relevant equity and inclusive practices through knowledge mobilization. Others have taken an ally role and entered into a supportive relationship and a process of agreement (Hardiman and Dewing, 2014). Their goal was to take action for social change by challenging their own privilege at individual, community, and institutional levels. These differences could be explained, in part, by the way we see our roles, and by the different phases of these relationships between university partners and practitioners. In our initial phase, in the French minority community, it appeared crucial to understand that we were building trust and the foundations of the relationships and to acknowledge each’s other position that played out in the dynamics that unfolded in our interactions. Otherwise, how could we address and challenge them if we assumed that everyone involved in the network was equal? It was also sometimes difficult to understand what our role was; to know how to play a critical friend role while at the same time disseminating the knowledge that we have acquired in the belief that it can benefit network participants. Sharing taken-for-granted practices, or practices viewed as best, instead of making available findings from peer reviews scholarly research negated, in a sense, our role as critical friend working in an academic context as knowledge brokers or, at minimum, made that role difficult to navigate.

During the 2 years we met with the partners, we also observed how physical space had an impact on building and maintaining our partnerships. This impact was twofold. We held regular meetings at the Faculty of Education with local partners (e.g., mainly district administrators and graduate students). However, in our attempts to open the dialogue about where they were in terms of equity-driven initiatives and practices in their respective districts and schools and what their perceived needs were, our geographical location was too far away for some partners to participate. In acknowledging the ways physical space impacted the relational aspect of our connections with partners, we decided to make ourselves more accessible and move closer to them by offering that they host and lead one meeting in a location of their choice. Consequently, we held a meeting in one rural school and reached new partners that would not have come otherwise. Second, the choice of the faculty as a meeting location could also have sent a strong message about who held the formal authority in this partnership by deciding where, when, and to whose convenience the different partners had to adapt to. We, thus, observed how we needed to be more flexible, especially in our attempts to reach geographically distanced partners by choosing more accessible locations for our meetings, and reaching a more equal way of working together.

We also observed that increasing policy influence and using knowledge to lobby in favor of some policy priorities raise important questions about our role as university partners given the institutional constraints (e.g., lack of recognition in our activities) and takes time. Some authors have argued that to gain in policy influence, it is not so much the number of partners involved in the network that makes it successful (Briscoe et al., 2015), but rather the involvement of top-level decision-makers or powerful organizations and individuals that have access to political spheres. We were fortunate to gain the participation of the French district administrators who worked to build their own local equity policy and administrative procedures although we would have appreciated interacting with teachers and teacher candidates if there was no shortage. In the second year, some of the district administrators initially voiced their concerns that the newly elected Conservative Party government would withdraw the funds allocated for implementing equity measures. We spent an entire meeting talking with district administrators about how they could reassure teachers and have them continue with any equity and inclusion activities without worrying about the government pulling out the funds. District administrators had distinct visions about the best ways to reassure teachers. Some strongly believed that releasing a statement from the board would suffice. Others argued that such a message would have limited impact on creating a safe and secure environment in which to pursue local equity and inclusion activities. Part of the conversations focused on what and how we, as knowledge brokers, could provide further information to guide them in the decision. While the idea of a knowledge synthesis on this topic was brought up, we did not have either the human resources or the mandate to produce new knowledge. One of the limitations of the relational model of knowledge brokering, especially for university partners, is that it does not include the production of knowledge as a function of the network. After the meeting, it became clear that the network’s mission needed to include the roles of both knowledge producers of policy briefs and of policy advocates for school boards and schools. We, thus, started to discuss and elaborate a strategic plan with our French partners in order to set local equity priorities for the boards, as well as timelines and mechanisms that would monitor and assess their progress. Two goals had been set: 1) training principals on issues of equity and inclusion in their schools and 2) the integration of African perspectives and knowledge in the curriculum through classroom pilots. However, the emergent work of the Network was stopped when the newly elected Conservative government cut the funds devoted to it in 2018.

Implications and Conclusion

Based on the challenges and opportunities we faced while working in a province-wide bilingual equity knowledge brokering network and acting as knowledge brokers during a 2-year period, we propose three main implications for research and practice in the fields of policy implementation and knowledge brokering organizations. First, we sought to pinpoint how, through our own participation, working in a bilingual network to reach more system and non-system actors that promote equitable opportunities for all students is crucial, and how the role of the French and English school contexts shaped the network brokerage functions in consequential ways. While the knowledge brokering network’s mission set out to reach the same objectives for both English and French schools, we wish to point out how and why the knowledge brokering functions and the role that we performed needs to adopt a more flexible planning approach adapted to local realities, including practices that take into account the cultural context particularities. In our work, it became clear that one of the challenges of acting as knowledge brokers was not having sufficient existing knowledge of the priorities of the communities we worked with and where the resources were more scarce. However, we were pressed for time to disseminate knowledge, and we observed that concepts and practices cannot simply be reduced to an act of translation from English into French. As underscored by Hill (2001), words are powerful tools to convey messages about expected changes in reforms. However, these words can have limited effect because of the significant gap between the specialized vocabulary of government and local communities. While a knowledge brokering network must frame and adapt concepts and practices in accessible ways, we argue that there are considerable and sensitive aspects that need to be addressed in using work that has been produced and talked about in one language context—English—into translating, adapting, and conveying these concepts and practices into another language context—French in our case. This also raises important questions about what type of research knowledge production and methodologies are being promoted by knowledge brokering networks and organizations. If Saussez and Lessard (2009) have argued that the orthodoxy of evidence-based education in the United States prioritizes methodologies and promotes experimental studies as the golden standard, we question whether the promotion of knowledge brokers and knowledge networks in Ontario can lead implicitly to an orthodoxy of pragmatic research (e.g., best practices) and collaborative methodologies at the expense of other types of knowledge and methodologies. Further investigations could, thus, examine the challenges of working in bilingual knowledge brokering organizations, and how and why the role of knowledge brokers working in linguistic minorities contexts, whether it be French, Hispanic, or Indigenous languages, could be explored in terms of acknowledging and using concepts and practices specific to cultural contexts.

Second, we wished to point out how and why the scientific authority and role of university partners as knowledge brokers may shape the ongoing processes of understanding and negotiations with various partners (e.g., district administrators, teachers, and community coalition leaders) in knowledge brokering efforts, even through the more relational model. We showed how their position in the relationships provided access to knowledge resources and shaped the flow of information with and around different partners. This position can also shape what and who gets access to the various resources (e.g., evidence-based tools and funds) and what is posted on the website and can influence what is said about equity and inclusion in and around schools (Morel and Coburn, 2019). We also pointed out the position held by some partners who have long standing relationships with university partners. Some partners were more vocal than others in advocating for their agenda and priorities. Although the meetings were organized to provide a space to all to express their equity issues and the way they tackle them in the school environment, we personally struggled at times to create new connections with less visible other system and non-system actors. Further investigations could, thus, examine the relationships between knowledge brokers with the various partners, and how and why these relationships may work to reinforce and reproduce the discourse and position of some voices at the expense of less visible organizations and partners. This also calls into question who gains access to the Network’s connections, which voices are heard through the communication channels, who holds the authority and the status in our attempts to build knowledge bridges with school boards, schools, and community groups.

Third, we underscored the role of policy influence and advocacy. While university partners can play an educational role to support the implementation of equity policy and instructional changes seeking to achieve greater inclusion (e.g., providing advice), as suggested by Coburn and Woulfin (2012), the political dimension of the knowledge brokering relationships appears crucial. Our reflections sought to shed light and document by illustrating how in our own role as knowledge brokers, we strived to find a balance between the recent equity policy (re)orientation shaped in the ideological foundations of the federal multicultural policy (e.g., promotes acceptance of difference as a way of creating a unified society and diversity as a cultural and economic asset) and its shortcomings by addressing the contextual issues that school practitioners and administrators faced. In particular, among the diversified French minority there exists a more collective understanding of equity, somewhat lost in the Ministry’s equity policy that assumes a more individual slant. By grappling at times between the Ministry’s broad definition of equity and grassroot-level contexts along with other complex issues related to the minority groups, we raise the question of the necessary political skills that university partners may need to serve as advocates for certain groups. This suggests that knowledge brokers’ ability to mobilize different resources comes not only from their knowledge of equity and inclusion but also from their understanding of policy demands. Their political skills consist of how to embrace particular policy ideologies and enact policy directions and/or changes in instruction and how to mobilize and reconcile texts (e.g., curriculum materials, policy texts, standards, and tests) to influence and persuade others to implement expected changes (Dulude et al., 2017; Lowenhaupt, 2014). These skills do not resonate the same way for academics who participate in networks and who define themselves more as critical friends wishing to accompany actors and facilitate discussions, than as allies. Further investigations could, thus, explore the role of university partners in order to analyze how they use different rhetorical appeals and mobilize resources to negotiate, influence, and convince school actors to make changes. This begs the question: What do university partners bring in terms of scientific authority to school actors to build networks and facilitate equity?