Course Description

Knowledge Translation (KT) has received increased attention in the population health literature over the last two decades, particularly in Canada, in part because granting agencies increasingly ask academics to build KT plans into their research projects. 

However, the aspiration that knowledge inform action and policy has been a preoccupation for far longer, as have been academic efforts to understand the relation between knowledge and action.  Given this longer history, the contemporary population health literature will be critically reviewed in the light of an interdisciplinary tradition that examines how actors, organizations, companies and/or movements mobilize ideas to influence consumers, populations, institutions and policy. 

Students will be invited to examine critically what we can learn about KT by thinking like a movement, lobbyist, political scientist and marketer, and thinking about power. 

The course will be of particular interest to students who are keen to examine how the findings they and others generate in research settings may contribute to fostering public understanding and in stimulating action for positive change.  While the course will focus on systems-level change, the intention is to explore key KT concepts and planning strategies that can be applied to influence action in a range of settings.

Whereas many students register for the course assuming that doing KT is about designing an info graphic, or briefing note, or op ed, media release, website, video, speech, etc., this course will invite students to take a step back in order to create an overarching strategy by which to move knowledge into action (K2A), and thereafter assess what content ought to be communicated through these formats in order to advance your K2A objectives.

The design of this curriculum was supported by the UBC Centre for Community Engaged Learning (http://students.ubc.ca/about/centre-community-engaged-learning).  The pedagogy is organized so that students learn about the subject in part by reflecting on a pan-Canadian population health KT and community engagement campaign called Generation Squeeze (http://gensqueeze.ca Links to an external site.), which the instructor founded from his research and KT lab at the University of BC.  Generation Squeeze is also an output of the two-decade-long, ongoing KT activity organized by the Human Early Learning Partnership (http://earlylearning.ubc.ca) to influence the social determinants of health.  This case study will be featured throughout the semester to allow students to apply a critical review of the course readings to the evolution of an actual KT initiative in order to bring the literature to life in a real setting.