This episode of I Can See CLRiE Now introduces Wilfrid Laurier University's newest research centre, the Centre for Leading Research in Education (CLRiE). We explore how the executive imagined and is building a dynamic, growing community of educational researchers. We talked to Steve Sider (CLRiE Director), Alexandra Gottardo (CLRiE Associate Director) and Danielle Law (CLRiE Executive Committee member) about their involvement in the Centre, and their vision for the growth of the Centre going forward.
Glossary of Terms
Our Guests:
Resources
Speakers
Katelyn Leece: KL; Amanda Di Battista: AD; Steve Sider: SS; Alexandra Gottardo: AG; Danielle Law: DL
[Intro Music]
KL: Hello and welcome to the first episode of “I Can See CLRiE Now” the Centre for Leading Research in Education’s podcast series. I’m Katelyn Leece, the Research Associate for CLRiE and your host for this podcast. I’m here with Amanda Di Battista, a CLRiE member and our guest producer for this episode.
AD: Thanks Katelyn, I’m really excited to be here! And it was such a pleasure to work with you on this episode —I’m really excited to help kick off the series. Podcasts are such an interesting way to help bring the voices and stories of amazing researchers and their partners to new audiences. In the spirit of talking to new audiences, why don’t you tell us a bit more about the series and what listeners can expect?
KL: Of course, I’ll be happy to. So, In this podcast series, we are going to talk with CLRiE researchers, students, and community partners about educational research. That’s our, that’s our MO. So, our goal is to make that research accessible to everyone in our communities and beyond. So, each episode is going to feature the voices of researchers and their community partners as they describe in their own words the impact and value of educational research. So, we are excited to see how it changes and grows.
AD: Great! As a way to kick off this episode we thought we’d start by giving you a bit more information about the Centre for Leading Research in Education and some of the incredible research that takes place here.
KL: So, CLRiE is what it’s affectionately known as, is Wilfrid Laurier University’s newest research centre, with offices on both the Waterloo and Brantford campuses. It had kind of an organic start as a coming together of four faculty members who all pretty much had the same idea: an interdisciplinary centre focused on educational research at the university, considering it would be the perfect next step to amplify the important work that they and their colleagues were already doing.
Even in its earliest days, CLRiE had committed to breaking down barriers between disciplines in support of a common goal, that goal being supporting research and strengthening knowledge mobilization networks with an education focus. So, cut to today, and the Centre has nearly 80 members, including Laurier faculty, staff, and students as well as folks from across Canada who are doing really important work in education.
AD: So, Katelyn, when I first heard about CLRiE, there was like all this talk about vines. What’s that about?
KL: [laughs] Yeah! We have a lot of people ask that. To our lovely listeners, you’re about to get a sense of just how much we love plant metaphors to really help explain the organic nature of the research that is going down at CLRiE and how we think about learning journeys. So, the six Laurier professors who came together to establish the Centre really wanted a way to outline the kinds of research in education that it would support without putting future members in a box, so to speak which is very common in research, in academia.
So, in contrast to other research centres that might be organized by either a narrow subject or a set of research clusters, CLRiE decided on the imagery of vines to illustrate its goal to nurture and grow interdisciplinary connections between researchers and the community. So there are seven in total, I won’t go through all of their names now because that would be kind of lengthy, but they are so intertwined – it’s not uncommon for folks to realize that their research falls within more than one of those categories. So, The vines really just represent an aspect of education across the lifespan, from indigeneity to digital literacy and internationalization to cognitive processes, they’re really by no means mutually exclusive!
AD: Amazing! So in this episode, we talked to three members of the CLRiE executive committee, their involvement in the Centre, and their vision for the growth of the Centre going forward. We hope that this sets the stage for future episodes. Ready to go?
KL: Yeah! Let’s get started!
[Musical break]
SS: Hi, I'm Steve Sider, I'm a professor in the Faculty of Education at Wilfrid Laurier University, I'm the Director of the Center for Leading Research in Education, CLRiE. My research is at the intersection, or in the intersection, of inclusive education, school leadership and what that looks like in international and comparative perspectives.
AG: I'm Alexandra Gottardo, I'm a professor in the psychology department in the developmental area, and my research is in language and literacy broadly defined from infancy up until adulthood, with a focus on second language learning. I am also the associate director of CLRiE.
DL: Hello, I'm Danielle Law. I am an associate professor in developmental psychology and youth and children's studies at the Brantford campus of Laurier. And my research focuses on social, emotional learning, aggression and cyber bullying in the space of social media and technology use in general among children up to age 25, and I'm an executive member of CLRiE.
KL: So we essentially wanted to set up this podcast, this inaugural episode of If I can see or I can see CLRiE now just to discuss what CLRiE is what the executive committee and actually, I mean, we're almost talking, bringing back to roots about being the organizational committee, what your vision was for CLRiE and where you see it going and why you became involved in the research center to begin with. So Alexandra, I guess we will kick start with you. What's your vision for the center?
AG: So the reasons that I was involved in forming CLRiE are twofold. One of the things I was interested in is enhancing collaborations across different departments at Laurier, across different areas in the Psychology Department or the Faculty of Science, and having an opportunity to do that in a more structured way, rather than one of those informal things where you agree that you're going to work with people, but you never get around to it. And the other thing that I wanted to do is I wanted to showcase some of the amazing stuff that's happening at Laurier that gets ignored because we are all in our little silos, in our little offices working like crazy, but we're not able to share that well, both within the university and also outside the university. So those are my two goals.
KL: Yeah, I always find it amazing when you know a new member wants to connect with the center and you know, I ask them, "Have you ever heard of this person who does this area or who is in this area of research?" And they're like, "No, I've never heard of them. I don't know what work they do, but I'm really excited to connect." So, yeah, I think that's a great vision for the center moving forward is to break down those walls between faculties. What about you, Steve?
SS: I'm going to date myself a little bit with my illustration to talk about kind of what motivated this, but there was a show in the 80s called Cheers, and in that show, there's all these people from a whole variety of different sectors. We would say in academia just from different lives, and they would get together at this bar. And there was this kind of this theme song, you know, it's a place where everyone knows your name. I won't sing it for you. But that idea of a place where people can gather together and to share what's happening in this case, in their in their research as a way to kind of frame what they do, but also to make connections with other people who join them there. I remember when I first came to Laurier, I'm part of a very small faculty, and so there was there were just a few of us doing research and it wasn't like I could turn to 20 or 30 people and say, Hey, I need some help in this area, or how would you craft this grant application? But I was very fortunate to be part of someone that Alexandra knows at Western, Jacqui Specht, and Jacqui invited me to be part of a center at Western called the Canadian Research Center for Inclusive Education, and that that invitation really helped me develop a network of other scholars in this case, in that center's case across Canada, who then really encouraged me, gave me feedback, helped me understand what's a good SSHRC application look for, look like, who said, "Yeah, I'll jump on that SSHRC application with you!" Or said, "Hey, have you thought about this person in British Columbia who's doing similar work?" So that I use that as an illustration to say that experience with Jacqui and the Centre at Western really helped me think about, well, what might a center at Laurier look like? Not necessarily across Canada, although we do have members from across Canada. But to think about how can I be part of something bigger than my faculty or my particular research interests, which probably there's very, very few people at Laurier who are doing work on inclusive education—lots of people doing work on an inclusive education—but inclusive education, school leadership, what does that look like in Ghana, Haiti, across Canada? So this this research center has given me an opportunity to connect with with like-minded people who have somewhat similar interests, and so I guess I'll finish by saying the vision for me then is to say, how can we use this, you know, these vines that we imagine being these various people who come to the bar, so to speak, how can we imagine these these vines being grown and make connections and linkages so that other people, myself included, but those who are maybe new faculty here who have compelling interests can find other people who would join them in that common space to to catalyze and develop new ways forward for them.
KL: Yeah, I think it's really powerful to have a group behind you for sure when you're going through, like you said, with new faculty as well. I mean, making those connections is just absolutely crucial to their starting a career in academia.
SS: So new faculty and grad students, right? And we're seeing more and more grad students come to CLRiE, and I think that's really a healthy thing for them to see beyond their department or the unit that they're doing their masters or Ph.D. to see, "Oh, my goodness, there's people in social work, there's people in music..." there's people in whatever the discipline might be who share some, some common. Potentially common interests as well, research interests.
KL: All right, Danielle, how about you? What was it? Why do you want to become involved and what's your vision?
DL: Well, it builds off what both Steve and Alexandra said, but also a component of that mentorship piece and the student involvement piece, as well as bridging the gap between the community and the university. I think is also really important because I think many of our research questions are meant to help the community and to learn more about the community, how we can do things better and the way we can do that properly, I guess, is to build relationship with the community and try to bridge that gap so that the university doesn't seem like an intimidating institution. So how can we build relationship with community members, with parents, with teachers, with students, with just everyday people and see what their questions are? See what they're curious about because then ultimately, they're also leading the research with their questions, and then we help to guide that process with the work that we do here. So it's kind of this reciprocal relationship between the community and and what we do. And then at the same time, we have our graduate students who are fantastic and they now through CLRiE have a network where they can collaborate with others, their peers from different disciplines. Because I think oftentimes in grad school, you're you're stuck in your own lab and your own department, and you and I shouldn't say stuck, but here you're in your own lab, with your own peers, with your own classmates that you see for six years or whatever it might be. But you don't get to see what other students are doing and what else is out there. And through CLRiE, they get that opportunity to do that. And so I really hope that we can foster interdisciplinary research among students, build a a bridge or fill that gap between what the university does and what the community wants and what the community needs and how we can create leaders both in the community and also here at the university.
KL: Definitely. And I love being a part of the centre at this stage because I still feel like we're a bit of a seedling and just watching it grow and helping it grow and kind of tending to it. I, I find really fulfilling because, you know, I think we're slowly finding our way to the community to make these impacts and to connect with people to make sure that our research matters and has an impact. So it's, it's really exciting that we're at this point. So what strategies are CLRiE using to create that dynamic and growing community of research researchers, I should say? Yeah, go ahead, Alexandra.
AG: So a couple of things I thought of as we were discussing. One of them is that the importance of graduate students and teaching students not just to work in their own labs, but to work across labs. And just as I was walking over with Danielle and Steve, we were talking about the fact that what I like to do with my students is showcase them through the CLRiE Tuesday Trellis. And I like to let Katelyn know what did they do? What amazing thing did they do? What presentation, what podcast they were involved in? And in terms of that, then letting other students know what's happening in psychology, in education at Brantford through CLRiE. So I think it's important to do that because students often don't get the recognition and except for, you know, if they get a big award, but if they've done something smaller, they don't. The other thing I like to do is I like to let the community members that I'm involved with know that I'm part of CLRiE so that they know that I'm part of a bigger thing than just me doing my research. So I try to introduce that in the various events that I've been involved in the community. And I guess one final thing is that we are actually trying to mention CLRiE when we talk to new faculty or potential new faculty to let them know that this is a potential resource that they could have that might set Laurier apart from another institution.
SS: Well, I love and there's been a number of things I've loved that are resonating with me right now. Like Danielle, you've talked a lot about relationships. And I hear that and what Alexandra is saying, as well as far as grad students and so forth. I think long term, for me, relationships are the core of what we do as a Centre—relationships among faculty members among our community partners. I love that what you said, Danielle, about the leadership piece, because sometimes we think about the center and we think about research and we think about education, but we forget the L right that leadership component, which I I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of‚ but it is a strategy, from the perspective of how does the research we do lead to or engage others in leading community change as an example, I think that's actually really, really powerful. And I think back to some of the conversations I remember Eileen, Alexandra and I talked about this idea of leadership, and I think it was either Alexandra or Eileen Wood who said, "Let's reframe the idea of leadership" and I'd actually forgotten that until you just you just mentioned that. I'll mention a couple of other kind of specific strategies that I think we've done. I think to a large degree successfully. Some of its branding things. So we have banners, we have a website. You've done a great job, Katelyn, with keeping our website up to date, we have a place where materials are housed, where members can access various things. We have a Twitter account. Those are all strategies that I think communicate what CLRiE is doing. But I think there's also been a really invitational aspect where we are having those casual or informal conversations with people. Our Vice President of Research Dr. Jonathan Newman, right? Just letting Jonathan or Charity or Stephanie, other people from the Research Office know, Hey, these are things that are happening at the at CLRiE. That's there's great things happening at CLRiE these are some of the things that our members are doing new research grants, new publications, whatever it might be. And I think that's that's a strategy to ensure that those in senior leadership who are doing who are super busy doing lots and lots of things, but have a little bit of a snapshot of what one center knowing there's lots of amazing centers at Laurier, but how one center in in its infancy, you said as a seedling, right in those first, what are we, nine months, ten months old, right? I mean, as far as research centers are concerned, we're like a newbie. But just to keep that messaging going, these are really amazing projects that people are doing who are associated with the research center. I think that's been strategic and I think the being intentional with communicating that, whether it's through physical or electronic sources or just those relationships and the the conversations we have to say, here's what's happening is not just a banner, it's not just a website, but real people's lives are being touched by the collaborative nature of the research center.
KL: Like any good relationship, a strong foundation of communication I think can really go a long way
SS: And it can be messy. I think that's one thing that struck when I think strategies, I often think it's something that's really deliberate and intentional. It's really thought out. Sometimes I think strategically, it's not all about crisp, clean messaging. Sometimes it's just a matter of saying, Hey, we don't quite know what we're doing here, right? It's messy and a little bit more opaque, but there's other people who have abilities to help us make that a little bit more clear, whether that's again people from the research center or our deans or whoever it might be.
DL: Mm-Hmm. And it's being honest and vulnerable because I think oftentimes we have this, we sit in a position of we we need to know what we're doing. I mean, even starting this podcast, we have this idea that we should feel like and sound like we know what we're doing, but we we don't, and it's messy and that's OK. And and I think that leads to also how we create leaders and when we think about our students and especially like undergraduates and wanting to get them engaged in research, oftentimes they're apprehensive, they're scared. They think it's boring. They don't know what it is. But I think part of what I hope CLRiE can do for them and what I try and share with them is that it's OK to not know, it's OK that it's messy, but let's try it anyway. What are these questions that you have? Let's try and explore them. And so trying to trying to get them to think about what they are curious about and then how can we figure all of that out together? And then having similarly doing that with community members, because oftentimes when at least when I'm working with community members, they want me to tell them what to do or they think I have the answer to something. And oftentimes the answer is way more complicated than than they think or than we think. And so that's another opportunity to help create leaders through them, because now they've asked the question. And when you ask the question, you become a leader and we all work together to figure out that answer with whatever expertise and knowledge base we have. And so each time I work with community members or students, I remind them of how we can figure all of this out together, and CLRiE is here to support us in doing that.
KL: So how are you building this culture within CLRiE that helps inspire high quality educational research? I guess that's a big one, so...
SS: Do you want me to start on this one? [Katelyn: Sure. Go ahead, Steve.] So I'm going to build off again what Danielle and Alexandra have already talked about. But I think that idea of culture or organizational culture is really important and it's stuff we study, right? We know what makes healthy organizations work, and I think relationships are at the core of what makes makes a an organization hum or work in a in a way that's that's healthy and beneficial for everyone. That that high quality education research piece is really interesting because I think one of the things I'm noticing early in our time as as a center is the fact that we are being very invitational and reaching out to other researchers here at Laurier, other organizations or units at Laurier to get a better sense of what are their, what are the pressing questions that they're working on, what are the things that they want to know about and what are those intersections with, with CLRiE? So hopefully that builds a culture that says we don't have to do with, you know, we remember when we had these first conversations about what the vines are going to be that that are going to kind of make up CLRiE. And we're like, Oh, this is going to be this is going to be this vine and this is gonna be this vine. And then we spent time saying, OK, what's this math and literacy vine actually going on? What's the name of it going to be? How much do we talk about vines right now? We don't, really, because I feel like there's this, it's more like there's an ecosystem, and that ecosystem is one in which people, we're inviting people to share their ideas. We're inviting faculty members right here to say, I'm interested in this particular project. We're not saying, Oh, it's aligned with and maybe we need to. But I think there's that. I think there's something healthy about not just thinking about it in these vines, which we originally imagined as being really healthy and again, that idea of things connecting and growing and so forth. But we really haven't talked much about those aside from, let's get the language of the vines, right?
KL: Yeah, I think it's a way to make people feel included that there is something or there is a part of the research center that resonates with the research that they're doing. But I keep finding that, you know, there isn't a single member who's a part of CLRiE that is only involved in one vine the way that they intersect, even beyond what people might imagine. Like, they might be surprised. Oh, I I could very well be a part of the teaching and learning in a digital world, but they don't think of themselves as that. But I do. Yeah, just as an outsider looking in. So it's it's very inclusive, and I think that that does have a lot to do with the interdisciplinary nature of it. It's very welcoming in the best way.
DL: Yeah, I and I think also when you think about healthy vines and that are interwoven on a trellis is that they are interwoven on a trellis because we are so collaborative. It's, I think, represents that collaboration that CLRiE strives for. And I think through that collaboration, we can get a bigger picture of what it means to do good quality research because we can get research methods from different disciplines. We can garner and learn more about things that include variables from different disciplines and see how does it work with my field and what I know, and we can get to be a big, a bigger picture and maybe a more nuanced, at the same time, a picture of how things work if we're working together and all of that is can create, you know, stronger research. And I think too, at the same time, when we're thinking about how to do good quality research, when we're working all together with multiple disciplines, we also have access to members of different not only different expertise, but also levels. So we have junior faculty, we have more seasoned faculty and we have students, we have community members bringing in all sorts of different ideas and ways of doing things. And all of this can work together to create good research.
AG: I also think something that has happened both at the student level and at the faculty level is that we are reaching out and doing things that we never imagined before. So when I think about a recent grant that I've just submitted with the Northwest Territories, I would never `have thought of doing that and I'm very excited about that opportunity to work with them and do something completely different. There are other grant applications that I'm either doing or thinking about in terms of trying to create leading research in education, and some of those will be with CLRiE folk that I wouldn't have worked with otherwise. At the student level we're also, I think pushing our students because they're getting to talk to more than just their advisor. And I think that that's one of the things that, you know, happens with students. They work in their lab with their advisor, their advisor is the expert, so to speak. And that's what they see. But when there are bunch of professors talking and they're students there, they get to see that there are other ways of doing research, other ways of seeing the world, and they can branch out and think about things in a different way. And maybe they then come out with sort of a hybrid between what their advisor thinks and someone else thinks that defines them better as researchers when they eventually go out into the world.
SS: Can I add on to what you just said, Alexandra? And this is one of the things that I guess I would love, I mean, we can have this conversation, I guess, as part of this podcast. But just for us as an executive to be thinking about going forward is, I feel and Katelyn really like the way you said the vines in a way give people something to kind of hook them in right. In a way, it's like [Katelyn: that's what vines do, they latch on.] They latch on, that's right. And you're like, Oh, I see myself there, and we know that that's an important part of inclusion as to see yourself represented. And I think it's also healthy when when people are then a member of CLRiE to not necessarily align themselves just with a vine or a couple of vines, but more with the the goal or the vision for what CLRiE is. One of the concerns I have as we kind of get and thinking about culture as we move from the seedling to maybe being a little bit bigger plant is how do we ensure that all of our members feel like they continue to be actively and authentically engaged with what is happening at the center? I think our executive members feel that way because we meet regularly and we're talking and, you know, I think we share a lot of common interests. But I'm not sure—and I this is one of the things we have to explore and do some research in—is what what do what do our members who have joined six months ago, do they feel authentically, actively engaged with with CLRiE? That's, I think, is a next part of that organizational culture component to move us to a place of does like Cheers. Is everyone coming back? Sorry, if this is coming back to the bar, so to speak, coming back into CLRiE feeling like they are still welcomed and it's a it's a, this is a place I want to go. Or does, do people start drifting away from us because, drifting away from us meaning CLRiE, because we're not actively engaging them in what CLRiE is. So I think that's something we have to wrestle through.
[Musical break]
KL: OK, I liked that conversation. Okay, last question, everyone. This is the last question that I have for you. How or maybe should I say, what is the role of CLRiE in creating space to foster the integration of education being both formal, informal and public, and research at Laurier?
DL: Well, I think education and research are synonymous. So I think they work together and they kind of mean the same thing. We can't have education or teaching and learning without research, and we can't share our knowledge without teaching or educating. So the two things work together, and I don't know how we can tease them apart. So I think along the same lines of the vines that we talked about, education and research are intertwined, and I don't know that we can really separate them. So when it comes to how CLRiE tries to really do this, it's really in my mind about taking the knowledge that we garner through our research, teaching it at all sorts of different levels so it could be to our undergrads in a formal classroom. It could be just sharing knowledge in informally in the relationships that we build with them. And then it's also how we communicate with community members and try to share our knowledge that way and really making what we share accessible to different audiences.
AG: Can I just follow up on that, because one of the things that's happened sort of informally is that a lot of us are taking MITACS students this summer. So several of the CLRiE faculty. And originally we were just asking similar questions as our interview questions just to give us something that was common. But what's happened informally is that now we're setting up seminars, meetings for these students in the summer so that they can get together so they don't feel like they're alone. And then some of the stuff that I've been doing with our Laurier students is I've actually been talking to our incoming undergrad thesis students and our outgoing undergrad thesis students who might be hanging around this summer and said, Would you like to come and join us and show the other students what you, you know, the international students, what you've presented? And this gives them an opportunity to meet people from other parts of the world where they may not have because maybe they've lived all their lives in Waterloo Region. So they get to come, they get to meet, they get to learn about different people and that part of the learning is going to be informal. It's not going to be formal. We're not going to say, you know, you need to answer these five questions about what it's like to live in, I don't know, Columbia, for example, one of my students or in Waterloo Region. No, it's going to be chatting about stuff and then just learning about people from other cultures in a way that is accessible, that is is natural, right? Because they're all young people talking to each other. And so I think that that's an example of informal education in a very powerful way that I'm sure will change everybody in the room in terms of those undergraduate student.
DL: I love that because it goes back to what we were talking about when it comes to relationships and how ultimately CLRiE is about building relationships and how these strong relationships, however we build them informally or formally, it's where everyone will know your name. And so we feel comfortable to share the questions that we have and and work together. And ultimately, I think good research is starts with good relationships
AG: and they are also going to be researching and doing research so they can share that part too.
SS: Well, just to maybe going a little bit of a different angle and to challenge the idea that education and research are synonymous. I agree with you, but think about it from the perspective of maybe back up. One of the things that I've really appreciated about CLRiE is, and this is Steve Sider learning kind of experience. I think when I originally was imagining just in my little silo what CLRiE would be, I was focused pretty much on kindergarten to Grade 12 education. And I think Alexandria, you and Eileen really helped say, OK, what about education across the lifespan, right? So it's not just thinking about that formal stuff that happens in school. But one of the things that if I think about it from the perspective of teachers and school administrators kindergarten to Grade 12 educators, most, I would argue, do not see education and research being synonymous back to this, this comment. They they do research, but they don't necessarily call it research, right? And I think that is maybe an area where CLRiE can bring some clarity to our teaching colleagues to say what you're doing in your Grade 2 classroom or your Grade 12 physics classroom is informed by your own research assessment evaluation, the research you're doing when you're doing professional learning. The data that you're collecting in your classroom so that kindergarten to Grade 12 educators start recognizing that education and research can be and should be synonymous and speak to each other. But we we live in a world that kind of separates them, right? We think of this is what educators do, and this is what researchers do. So maybe it's an opportunity for CLRiE to provide an invitation again to those in K to 12 settings, knowing we reach far beyond that to start thinking about you're an educator and you're a researcher, and let us help you kind of unpack and know what that means.
AG: I think the, another thing that's happening with some of us at CLRiE, and I think that's where we're pushing Steve a little bit too, is we're not only thinking of teachers as educators. Eileen and I have some projects where we're thinking of parents as educators and getting parents to buy in that they can actually teach their children something and then getting them to work with schools or in the water from the water project, getting them to work with conservation area experts about how you know, they can talk about things about water quality, about ecosystems, those kinds of things and having those family dialogues so that parents who, might not have ever thought that education had anything to do with them. It was the thing the school did. Now we're trying to say, yes, you can help your kids and you have expertise too. Or we can help you to gain some expertise and some words so that you can talk about this at home and you can create a culture of curiosity and knowing and learning at home. Whether you have a ton of money or no money at all, that doesn't matter. It's about the way you discuss things and you encourage people, your kids to think about things in different ways.
DL: So then they're fostering leadership in their own homes and leaders in research too.
SS: And I think that's also where CLRiE has a mandate. Alexandra, Yeah. I'm learning, right? As a parent, I should also understand that parents are educators for sure, the first educators. But I think the fact that we have so many members representing so many different disciplines and sectors helps us also Katelyn, you use the word formal, informal in public, and sometimes again, where we have or we have a tendency as faculty or researchers to do this, where we think, Oh, my research is in this domain, I work in formal education and then to interact with colleagues, some of our Indigenous colleagues to find out what does informal education look like, which is very rich and very meaningful and very important and very illuminating for a researcher such as myself. So again, I think that's the richness. Or has the potential, at least to be the richness of CLRiE is where you can be challenged to think, OK, well, when you're talking about education, Steve, are you also factoring in family members, elders, grandparents, other members of the community? That's, that's good. That's, that shapes and and shifts the direction of the research. I might be involved with that if I didn't have that kind of critical friends that I wouldn't be thinking about as strategically or as deliberately as I do now or as I should do now.
KL: That's one of the things that I've been learning in my role is that I can't silo what education is. I just think about Julie Mueller all the time telling me, Well, it's not just in the classroom, it's not just education in the traditional sense. So, so I'm even me, someone who doesn't have any subject matter expertise or experience. I feel like I'm learning in this role, which is very empowering.
SS: Mm-Hmm. Well, we can't have this podcast finish without saying that the center is successful, you know, we talk about culture of success or a culture of research, right? And how does that happen? We have faculty members who are involved. We have community members who are involved. We have students who are involved and we have people like yourself, right Katelyn? who helps stimulate and give shape to research through your through your role as a research associate, but other research associates or research assistants who can, you're critical. This is this is kind of off the top of your head thinking, but you're critical to that, that culture of CLRiE. Because if it was Danielle and Steve and Eileen and Alexandra and Julie and Richelle, we'd be all doing our research projects right and we need some glue. What would be a metaphor for what would work with the gardening a gardener? We need a gardener. We need a gardener to help us just keep the keep the plant and keep the soil toiled. Tilled. Keep the soil tilled. Keep things watered. Prune things. Talk to the plants. And that's really…
AG: keep us organized…
KL: Well, I do, I do think that Alexandra, you mentioned just the point about time, the time to do things, the time to get engaged as to like, how do we make sure that all of our members feel like they're a part of the center? That is one of the things I feel my role takes on is to, I guess, put things in front of people and constantly invite them to the table. And obviously, with the help of the entire executive committee behind me, it feels like it's possible. And I like that things are growing in that direction that we are learning as we go about how to engage people as part of Laurier, you know, as part of the Waterloo Region, but also part of Ontario, part of Canada, how do we engage with those people? How do we keep them engaged? Awesome. Did anyone else have anything, anything other itching to to get off their chest about CLRiE, about, you know, where you see it going in the future, how you see it evolving?
SS: I'll make a quick comment, and I always say quick. Sometimes it's not so quick, but the comment about you just made me also think that there is an ecosystem and sometimes we think the ecosystem are faculty members, external members are students. But really, we have to also be aware that a research center like CLRiE wouldn't exist if we didn't have support from deans, if we didn't get financial support from deans, if we didn't get financial support from the university that allows us to have physical spaces, allows us to have a research associate who helps us bring those things together. I think that's really important and sometimes we devalue that. We think it's it's tokenistic, right, kind of support, but it's not. It's it really allows a center like CLRiE to exist and to be sustainable. So it's important that we honor and recognize that as well, I think.
KL: Well, I want to thank every single one of you for agreeing to participate in this episode zero of "I can see CLRiE now." I think this is a great foundation. This is a great starting point and I can't wait to watch it grow.
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KL: This has been the first episode of “I Can See CLRiE Now” the Centre for Leading Research in Education’s podcast. Stay tuned for more episodes featuring CLRiE researchers, students, and community partners in conversation about leading educational research. Follow CLRiE on Twitter, @WLU_CLRiE, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you to Danielle Law, Alexandra Gottardo and Steve Sider for speaking with us today. Thanks also to Amanda Di Battista, who was instrumental in the production of this episode and, with guidance from Shawna Riebling, taught us the ins and outs of academic podcasting. The CLRiE podcast was recorded and produced on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnawbe and Haudenosaunee peoples. For more information, click on the Land Acknowledgement link in our show notes. This episode of “I Can See CLRiE Now” was made with support from Laurier University’s Office of Research Services.