“Lipstick In School”: Thanks and a partial reflection on the Montreal KT/KB workshop

I’d like to introduce our next guest blogger, Alex Bielak, who in trying to leave a comment ended up writing us an entire blog posting!  Alex has been a fixture in the science communication world in Canada, both as an excellent communicator and writer himself, but also through his knowledge translation & knowledge brokering activities at the Environment Canada Science and Technology Liaison Office. It look as though he will continue to carry the torch for KT/KB in his new role at the United Nations University! 

It is with great pleasure that I turn the pen (or I guess in this case the keyboard) over to Alex: 

Alex Bielak

9^th November 2010

Thanks to Nicole for the opportunity to write a guest blog. Such are the vagaries of technology that I posted my comments earlier and lost them, then posted them again, but they had expanded and were too long to go up without moderation and then the system ate them!  Much to be said for working in Word first and then cutting and pasting.

I want to follow-up on Louise’s post here as well as some of the subsequent comments by Louise and Michelle. And as for that title, we’ll get to it soon.

First off it was a remarkable meeting. It could not have been closer to how we originally envisaged it than it was, and we hit our numbers (sold out even). There was an unheard of 63% response rate on the evaluations and of those 100% said the event was good – excellent.

For the sake of completeness I want to add to the thanks that Louise expressed. While she mentioned some of the Workshop Committee, as well as the folk that helped organise her break out session, there were some other wonderful people who deserve kudos.

Mehrdad Hariri was mentioned by Louise and deserves another mention for supporting the concept of an add-on workshop to the main CSPC under whose auspices we held the workshop.

Jaime Dawson (who took over as Committee Chair when I departed Environment Canada for the UN) did a great job as did the wonderfully organised and unflappable Sheila Allan. The rest of the crew at Environment Canada’s S&T Liaison also all pulled together on a variety of fronts to make this a class event all the way.

Thanks to the three Davids (if in doubt always add another David): Clements (who used to be with CHSRF – the “grand-parent” of KB – until just recently, and is now with the Canadian Institute for Health Information), Phipps (with ResearchImpact one of the three hosting partners) and Yetman (with CIFAR). Bernadette Conant (and her sidekick Kristina Goreham) with hosting partner, CWN, Elin Gwyn (OMAFRA) and Eric Gagne (a colleague with EC’s Science Policy Division) rounded out the committee.

The generous support of collaborating partners CHSRF, York University and the British High Commission (yeah Nicole) ensured that we had the latitude to fully deliver on what we promised participants. Various other talented folk (including Louise who is a brilliant, talented and trusted colleague) helped organise, run, participate and present the skill and capacity building sessions and expert panel that went off so successfully. Andrew Campbell came all the way from Oz and did us proud as the keynote speaker: his presentation can be found here.

Finally, my new boss, Zafar Adeel (Chair of UN-Water and Director of UNU-INWEH) recognised the importance of the workshop, let me continue to see my involvement through and is interested in having UNU-INWEH involved in helping take the discussion further nationally and internationally.

So to that title…

A friend sent this wonderfully apropos story to me just last week.

A certain private school in Washington was recently faced with a unique problem.  A number of 12-year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom. That was fine, but after they put on their lip stick, they would press their lips to the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints.

Every night the maintenance man would remove them, and the next day the girls would put them back. Finally the principal decided that something had to be done.  She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man.  She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night (you can just imagine the yawns from the little princesses).

To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required. He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it. 

Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror.

There are teachers … and then there are educators

This put me in mind of the Dr. House video clip  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK7mJFwx7vA) shown by Melanie Barwick during her and David P’s breakout on “making sense of KMb”. It is almost the flip side of the story above.

Ultimately, it’s all about how you tell the story and how it is understood. The KT/KB workshop was a step in ensuring that this concept is mainstreamed in a variety of sectors.

The discussion will continue…

Alex Bielak

Senior Advisor to the Chair – UN-Water

and

Senior Research Fellow and Knowledge Broker

Freshwater Ecosystems Programme

United Nations University – Institute for Water, Environment & Health (UNU-INWEH)

and past-Director S&T Liaison, Environment Canada (till Sept 2010)