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Marc Renaud began by saying that he has had the fears expressed to him by
researchers in the Humanities that SSHRC is trying to destroy the past by
transforming, and that it should keep the Standard Research Grants program.
U of S is uniquely positioned to be very active in Aboriginal research – how can
SSHRC help in this regard?
Cecilia Reynolds: few Education students are receiving SSHRC Doctoral
Fellowships. There is a misperception that Education graduate students are going to
remain as teachers. The drop-out rate of Education graduate students is high; the
average time to complete a doctorate in Education is 5 years. These facts prevent
success in the Doctoral Fellowships competition among Education graduate students.
Marc Renaud: the SSHRC document is weak on students: a possible move is to fund
training environments rather than students, but SSHRC is not in the “education
business” – this is up to governments.
Lawrence Martz: SSHRC should avoid funding students for a long time at a minimal
level.
Bruce Waygood: many people are concerned that SSHRC is restructuring along the
same lines as CIHR, because CIHR is openly not interested in supporting the success
of universities. The model is useful when considering how CIHR mobilized public
support, but other aspects of the model are potentially harmful. The success of the
CURAs, etc, is resulting in an increased awareness of SSHRC as a funding agency,
which could result in a high level of support for the transformation process. A major
concern is an increased investment in community research initiatives without
providing a “path” to follow (i.e. a consistent funding stream). A major concern
related to community-based research is that it requires community input into
publications, which can slow down the traditional publication rate. There is thus a
need for a restructuring of the peer review system to account for these potentially
slower publication rates.
Marc Renaud: SSHRC is not planning to “mimic” CIHR’s restructuring process.
Pam Wiggins: could the U of S help to develop new performance indicators and
evaluation systems for community-based research?
Bruce Waygood: suggested Karen Chad and Nazeem Muhajarine to help with this.
Nazeem Muhajarine: assets are not available for this right now, but he is interested in
looking at it.
Nazeem Muhajarine: SSHRC should remain distinctive from CIHR as it transforms
itself. CUISR has funded 81 community research projects, which has led to a change
in the cultures of communities in terms of their attitudes towards research and using
research to influence and shape their realities. This has gone so far as to result in a
request from the municipal government that CUISR become part of a “regional
research centre” with the Comprehensive Community Information System (CCIS)
and the regional intersectoral community. People in communities generally do not
care where research funds come from, but the success of community-based projects
such as CUISR has led to an increased recognition by community members of
SSHRC-funded projects. CUISR has demonstrated a very slow publication rate (5 out
of 81 projects have publications so far), but uses other (non-peer-reviewed)
performance indicators to evaluate the success of its projects.
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Marc Renaud: an outside evaluation of the CURA program is required in order to
capture and understand some of these different performance indicators. However,
traditional peer-reviewed measures are still necessary.
Karen Chad: benefits to communities can be measured in terms of the growing
amount of matching funding being committed from community members. Policy
change is a second important performance indicator.
Ernie Walker: in the SSHRC transformation process, there appears to be an
increasing importance placed on infrastructure and the quality of the learning
environment, but these can take a long time to establish. How would SSHRC assess
what constitutes a “quality learning environment”? Time is a major concern, as
SSHRC wants to increase its budget and public awareness of SSHRC-funded research
(through means other than publications). This could take a very long time when
working with communities, especially Aboriginal communities where trust and
understanding always must be established. Therefore, how would SSHRC accurately
measure the impact of a research project on a community in a short amount of time?
Marc Renaud: Peter Stoicheff’s report to SSHRC should provide descriptions of
different types of performance indicators.
Evelyn Peters: SSHRC wants researchers to make their work relevant to the general
public, but researchers have not really been trained to do this. What is required,
therefore, is a shift in the way training of researchers is carried out, and in the way
SSHRC determines what is rewarded. University researchers are increasingly dealing
with competition between teaching and research responsibilities – especially in the
human sciences, where students are not as involved in their professors’ research
projects. Should universities be organizing the structure of teaching differently so as
to better support the research side of this relationship? Policy research is not
evaluated in the same manner in the same way as academic peer-reviewed articles.
SSHRC should also be talking to governments regarding how they could be
improving working relationships with academics and facilitating the involvement of
civil servants in academic research. Mechanisms for information sharing between
governments/policy makers and researchers must be improved. Can SSHRC talk to
federal and provincial governments to that this can be improved? There is a lot of
“grey literature” (reports that only provincial or federal departments have access to)
that researchers cannot access, which is very frustrating.
Marc Renaud: what is required is a shift in approach. It is not a “plea for relevance”,
but a focus on impact.
Lawrence Martz: SSHRC’s Release Time Stipends (RTS) can be counterproductive,
as the best researchers are removed from the teaching environment to undertake their
research, which reinforces the notion that teaching is secondary to work done outside
of the classroom by academics. Students must be better integrated into communitybased research projects.
Brett Fairbairn: Saskatchewan has a comparative advantage in community-based
research, but there is a disconnect between involvement in interdisciplinary and
community-based research and relating to university departments’ measures of
research success. Appropriate incentives and structures need to be designed to
facilitate this change. Another concern is that SSHRC would alienate existing
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departments that are not traditionally involved in community-based research if it did
not, at the same time, preserve the Standard Research Grants.
Murray Fulton: there is a strong fear that the restructuring process is favouring
interdisciplinary research. SSHRC does want to move forward, but should not plan to
remove the “safety mechanism” of the Standard Research Grant program.
Researchers involved in strategic granting areas (interdisciplinary, policy-oriented,
entrepreneurial) are generally not the same researchers that rely on the Standard
Research Grants program (individual, independent, theoretical). There is a need,
therefore, to legitimize targeted aspects while also legitimizing more traditional
disciplinary research. These two types of research can be mutually supportive and, as
such, room must be allocated/created for both of them.