Partnerships-based research wins $6.4 million to tackle social, educational challenges

Two U of T research projects are receiving $2.8 million each from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to work with partners to tackle pressing social, economic and cultural problems, and five researchers have won smaller awards to begin developing new partnerships.

SSHRC’s partnership grants program supports formal partnerships between academic researchers and external partners to advance knowledge and understanding on questions of intellectual, social, economic and cultural significance.

Professor Shelley Stagg Peterson of the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) is leading a project entitled, “Assisting and supporting children’s oral language and writing development through play in classrooms, daycares and homes in northern communities.”

The project aims to bridge the gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal children’s literacy and to strengthen and sustain research and teaching capacity in northern Canadian communities. Based on the ideas that children learn best through play and that teaching and assessment of both children and educators should be culturally and linguistically appropriate, team members will develop and evaluate a play-based assessment and instructional framework.

“We’re going to be in four settings in the north with very different populations,” said Stagg Peterson, who will be working with co-investigators Janette Pelletier and Eunice Jang of OISE. “We hope to develop a tool that will be useful to teachers, parents and other caregivers in specific contexts, yet can be used around the world.”

The project grew out of Stagg Peterson’s belief in the importance of writing for literacy and her past research with Kindergarten and Grade 1 teachers in northern Ontario.

“These teachers were telling me that students coming into their classes didn’t have the vocabulary and the familiarly with oral language they felt was foundational to being successful in literacy.”

Project partners include aboriginal organizations, other universities, northern school boards and learning associations.

“I’ve been humbled by the incredible commitment of our partners,” said Stagg Peterson, who noted that several of them traveled for three days to attend an important interview in the application process. “This project isn’t just ours. It’s been shaped by work we’ve already done with our partners.”

Professor Ito Peng of sociology is the director of a project called “Gender, migration and the work of care: Comparative perspectives.”

Her team, which includes U of T co-investigators Monica Boyd of sociology, Cynthia Cranford of sociology at UTM and Rachel Silvey of geography, will investigate the changing meanings of care—of children, elders and the disabled.

“The issue of care,” said Peng, “is a huge global concern today not only for wealthy countries in the global north, where demand for care seems to grow continuously, but also for developing countries in the global south, because demand for care in the global north is creating a powerful incentive for women to migrate to work as care workers.”

These “care chains” are increasingly globalized, carrying women from low and middle income countries to immigrant-receiving countries like Canada to work as caregivers. The result is “care deficits” in caregivers’ countries of origin and increasing social inequality in receiving countries.

The project will examine how this realignment of care is influencing migration and how migration in turn is influencing social welfare and care.

Fifteen institutional partners include the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Service Employee International Union – Local 1 and UN agencies.

“I hope this project will give us a new understanding of how care and care work are changing, how we are all interconnected globally through care, and how government policies can shape how care is provided and the pattern of care migration,” said Peng.

“Congratulations to Professors Stagg Peterson and Peng, and to their partner researchers and organizations,” said Professor Paul Young, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation. “It is through collaborative research like this that universities can help identify and target genuine social problems—and begin to solve them.”

Young went on to note that the SSHRC partnerships program is relatively new.

“This is the second year grants have been made, and U of T was fortunate to have three funded last year. Together with this year’s successful applicants, we have five collaborative projects underway that are helping ask and answer questions critical to our collective welfare.”

In addition to the two partnership grants, U of T had five projects funded by SSHRC’s partnership development grants program. These smaller awards, which range from $60,000 to $200,000, allow researchers to foster, design and test new partnerships. The winners are:

• Mark Cheetham of the Department of Art, “Canadian art commons for history of art education and training.”
• Elizabeth Dhuey of the Department of Management at UTSC, “Cumulative impact of community and education interventions on the well-being of urban children and youth.”
• Sara Grimes, Faculty of Information, “Children’s do-it-yourself media: mapping trends, policy, implications and best practices around children’s increased participation in creative cultural production online.” 
• Yoon Jung Kang, Centre for French and Linguistics, UTSC, A corpora-based study of Korean dialects: Microvariation and language universals.”
• Cara Krmpotich, Faculty of Information, “Memory, meaning-making and collections.”

The grants were announced May 31 by Gary Goodyear, Canada’s minister of state for science and technology, in a speech at the 2013 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, in Victoria, B.C.

Jenny Hall is a writer with the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation