Knowledge Exchange is an interesting department with branches at each of the schools at UAL. Darla-Jane Gilroy is the Associate Dean of Knowledge Exchange at CSM. She gave an overview of the programme to our Applied Imagination course in May, and I had some follow-up questions for her as knowledge exchange seemed an apt place to discuss a cross-disciplinary exchange.
Before our conversation, I reviewed the 80-page KE Strategy 2021-2026 to make sure I understood Knowledge Exchange’s objectives. The impression I had gotten both from Darla-Jane’s presentation to the class and after reviewing the document was that currently most of the KE focus was bringing partnerships to the university as a whole, but that there wasn’t much focus on communicating that to students, or ways for students to directly engage with KE.
This makes sense from their graphic below, orienting KE ecosystem in overlap with Places, Creative economy, and UAL in equal parts.
It is re-iterated with further graphics, like the one below showing some of the KE objectives and sites of engagement. A large percentage of the engagement and objectives are oriented towards areas external to the university or acting as an intermediary between the university and external stakeholders or R&D. Only one of these are towards students with “Graduate Futures” being around Empowering creative agents.
This emphasis on outward-facing collaborations or KE at the expense of facilitating knowledge exchange within the university is one of the key areas I wanted to discuss with Darla-Jane. I understand the value of the R&D and justification of arts or creative degrees as being a legitimate and valued addition to the economy. But how can students access resources from Knowledge Exchange? Do students know about Knowledge Exchange? Is there anything KE is doing or can do to foster knowledge exchange within the university or schools directly?
As I experienced from meeting her before, Darla-Jane is warm and enthusiastic. She said that KE had conducted student feedback sessions recently to gauge understanding of issues and knowledge of the department and that the responses showed there was a lot of work to do. Students didn’t know about KE and were vocal about the lack of space for collaboration and exchange in the university. Darla-Jane expressed a desire to empower students to stop thinking “this is just the way it is” and instead feel “we have the power to change how it is.”
She said they were going to be trying to get the message out to increase student knowledge about KE as well as conduct workshops for staff so that they had knowledge and access to direct students to KE as well.
Another idea that we discussed was a “Hub” space at CSM that could function as an open space for people (students or staff) to teach anything. This sort of unpressured space to do things could function as a structured site for Knowledge Exchange. I expressed great interest in this concept as I think this sort of thing can be a step in the right direction towards creating space for exchange. I will follow up with her in September about this.
She was also excited to hear about my efforts as School Rep to create some exchange with C&E, Spatial Practices, and GCD. She said she thought that Andreas Lang (Spatial Practices director) and Rebecca Ross (GCD director) as well as Paul Finn (GCD platform leader) would be enthusiastic about this. She’s going to email an introduction between us as I haven’t been able to get a response from Rebecca Wright.
I feel hopeful about this conversation and the possibility of aligning with KE to further cross-disciplinary exchange at the university. Darla-Jane emphasized her desire to promote the idea that creative thinking has value and ended with this statement of support: “we are extraordinary and can do extraordinary things.”
There are two things to follow up with Darla-Jane about, but even having these conversations between departments feels like there is attention being called to these issues which is the first step to meaningful change.