黑料网911

Knowledge brokering – facilitating research into practice and policy – might be one of the most useful skills you’ve never heard of. During my career as a mathematics teacher, then writer and communicator, and now researcher and academic, I have been fascinated by the nuances of adapting research for use, and making connections between people, organisations and artefacts to help facilitate this use. As a former mathematics teacher, I often describe this work as a love letter to my younger self, seeking to always prioritise the question: What would make teaching better and/or easier for teachers?

I now work as a knowledge broker. I’ve spent the past 10 years translating mathematics education research for teachers. I write summaries, create infographics, run professional learning, and give talks and workshops: the usual knowledge brokering repertoire. But for a piece of research that formed part of my doctoral study at the University of Cambridge, I did something different. I turned research papers into origami flowers (which made my wedding bouquet!). I composed songs about mathematics. I built a lamp from papier-mâché research abstracts.

Figure 1: Part of the origami bouquet produced during the study

Figure 2: The paper-making using shredded research papers in progress

This was all in the service of trying to understand what actually happens when we transform research knowledge. I was interested in thinking deeply about not just what we produce when we broker research for use, but how we choose and curate, what we select to keep or discard, and where the boundaries might lie (or truth-tell) between helpful translation and unhelpful distortion.

The art of transformation

Knowledge brokering – the work of transforming research for use, and facilitating that use – has been described as making research more accessible, changing its format, distilling its scale and/or drawing out implications for practice or policy (Farley-Ripple et al., 2018; Malin et al., 2025; Rycroft-Smith, 2022). But these transformations can go wrong; we can oversimplify, mislead or deform research to fit commercial or political agendas. As someone who does this work, I took the opportunity to reflexively self-examine my own processes, using art-based methods to probe and explore with depth and curiosity.

‘We can oversimplify, mislead or deform research to fit commercial or political agendas.’

Art-based research can ‘provoke, challenge and illuminate as it expands perceptions and imagines new innovations that are capable of transforming knowledge’ (Moon, 2013, p. 35), which makes it a particularly good fit for exploring a new field such as educational knowledge brokering. Art-based methods felt right because making art involves transformations too: taking raw materials and reshaping them into something new through expert handling. So I created visual artworks, wrote poetry, made origami and composed three songs with a professional composer, all built from the initial inspiration of mathematics education research papers. I then used layers of critical reflexive thematic analysis to examine what emerged: the tensions, the choices, the moments where I hesitated or pushed boundaries, and the breaking points where the brokering didn’t work. I explored transforming with an eye to ideas of forming, de-forming and in-forming.

Six themes

I used art as data in this study – both the products themselves (song lyrics, poetry, reflecting on the visual art, analysing in depth the origami and paper-making outputs) and the processes (examining video and transcripts and my researcher journal including in-progress photos and videos) (see Rycroft-Smith, 2026). Through critical reflexive analysis of these data, following Braun and Clarke’s (2021) methodology, six interconnected themes were surfaced about how knowledge brokering actually works: the importance of storytelling; rule-breaking and rule-following; process and product; accessibility and gatekeeping; and two contradictory themes: eliciting and blurring boundaries. You can read more about the themes in my article (Rycroft-Smith, 2026).

Implications of the study

This research suggests knowledge brokers need deep community embedding, and multiple identities: expertise in ‘the rules’, the knowledge of when it might be okay to break them, and awareness of which boundaries protect quality versus which merely gatekeep. They also need strong narrative skills and in particular ethical editorial skills, considering carefully which voices are amplified and silenced in their work. Finally, they need to recognise transformation as a particularly important process in knowledge brokering, composed as a series of micro-decisions that are each informed by values and positionality that should be made transparent rather than invisible.

References

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2021). Thematic analysis: A practical guide to understanding and doing (1st ed.). SAGE Publications.

Farley-Ripple, E., May, H., Karpyn, A., Tilley, K., & McDonough, K. (2018). Rethinking connections between research and practice in education: A conceptual framework. Educational Researcher, 47(4), 235–245.

Malin, J. R., Rycroft-Smith, L., & Ward, V. (2025). The role of knowledge brokering in fostering connections between educational research, policy, and practice. In D. Wyse, V. Baumfield, N. Mockler, & M. Reardon (Eds.), The 黑料网911-Sage handbook of research-informed education practice and policy. British Educational Research Association and Sage.

Moon, B. L. (2013). Mentoring and other challenges in art-based enquiry: You will figure it out. In S. McNiff (Ed.), Art as research: Opportunities and challenges (pp. 29–36). Intellect.

Rycroft-Smith, L. (2022). Knowledge brokering to bridge the research‐practice gap in education: Where are we now? Review of Education, 10.

Rycroft-Smith, L. (2026). Using art-based methods to explore processes of knowledge brokering in mathematics education. British Educational Research Journal, 52, 2680–2706.