{"id":194782,"date":"2016-12-02T08:24:19","date_gmt":"2016-12-02T13:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=194782"},"modified":"2016-12-05T06:57:22","modified_gmt":"2016-12-05T11:57:22","slug":"researcher-uses-blogs-ted-like-talks-to-reach-a-broader-audience-as-a-public-scholar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/researcher-uses-blogs-ted-like-talks-to-reach-a-broader-audience-as-a-public-scholar\/","title":{"rendered":"How ‘Horton’ is a hook to talk about research"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"professor
Kara Finnigan, shown here giving an “ED talk” at an American Educational Research Association forum earlier this year, used Horton the elephant as a \u201chook\u201d to engage her audience in her research on reform in troubled school districts.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Kara Finnigan<\/a><\/strong> communicates with her peers about reforming troubled school districts, she does so with journal articles such as \u201cSystem-wide Reform in Districts Under Pressure: The Role of Social Networks in Defining, Acquiring, Using, and Diffusing Research Evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or with presentations at academic conferences on such topics as “A Tale of Two Districts: The Importance of Collegiality in Urban Education Reform” or “Using Social Network Analysis to Understand Leadership Churn Under Accountability Policies.”<\/p>\n

But when the associate professor of educational policy at the Warner School of Education<\/a><\/strong> wants to communicate with the policymakers who bring reform about — or with parents and other stakeholders who will be affected — she starts by talking about Horton the elephant.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right: the Dr. Seuss character who placed a speck of dust on a flower and discovered Whoville inside.<\/p>\n

Finnigan is not speaking down to her audiences when she talks about Horton; rather, she explains, she\u2019s dangling a \u201chook\u201d to attract and hold the audience\u2019s attention. She\u2019s acknowledging that scholars need to find different ways to communicate their work to non-academics if scholarly research is to have the broadest possible impact. \u201cOtherwise, nobody\u2019s going to pay attention,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The importance of this kind of public scholarship<\/a><\/strong> was brought home to Finnigan this year when she was one of 32 scholars chosen by the American Educational Research Association to participate in a series of events<\/strong><\/a> to better connect research and policy.<\/p>\n

This included nearly two days of training in how to give TED-like \u201cED\u201d talks to:<\/p>\n