Dissemination in Action: Inventive Ways to Share Research

During his keynote at EECERA 2023, Luis Ribeiro provoked the audience to consider how their research was having meaningful impact on practice to improve the lives of children. Luis spoke of multiple ways in which his organisation, APEI, identified and curated the latest research from around the world and brought it in through the doors of early years settings across Portugal via such means as webinars, conferences, practitioner magazines and newsletters, translated articles and books.

Reaching a broader community with your ideas and work is an important component of being a researcher and, for our CoCos and SIGs part of their responsibility to the EECERA community.  While it can be challenging to come up with innovative ways to circulate research, especially when it comes to reaching beyond the borders of your home country, there are organizations using varied and creative means which might give you some inspiration.

Recently, Early Childhood Ireland, (who were well represented at our Lisbon conference), used their podcast and blog as mediums to disseminate their current research and share their insights into EECERA 2023. Policy Officer Greg Merrin used a blog post to write about his experience at the conference, outlining the range and rigour of the research presented, while Early Childhood Specialist, Fiona Kelleher used a podcast to share views on the value of attending EECERA and the topics she and colleagues presented on. She also shared how the learning and inspiration gained by attending the conference is being shared more widely with her organisations’ membership.

Another way of updating people about your work is to publish news items through your website which is exactly what the Children’s Participation in Schools Project did, informing their audience what they presented on at EECERA 2023 and explaining how this had benefitted their work moving forwards.

But it is not only organisations who have blog posts – PhD candidate Cathy Kilburn uses her own blog to share her experience of attending and presenting at an international conference with some helpful advice for other PhD students who might be considering attending in future.

While these are just a few fantastic examples of what can be done to extend learning to a wider community through in-country sector blogs and podcasts, we would like to remind you that you can also utilise the EECERA blog as your platform for sharing what is happening in the early years research community within your country.  We think that a blog is a good way to produce comprehensive, evidence-based, and interesting posts that teach our readers something new or share an idea from within the wide-ranging world of early years. Our blog is an excellent platform for you to call attention to the work taking place within your home country, with the added benefit of high visibility to EECERA members and the international ECE community.

The EECERA CoCo home page has lots of resources that are available to help develop a blog post and even use social media to promote recent publications.  If you are looking for other ways to get your research recognised, you can consider submitting an article to EECERJ (read Lynn McNair et al.’s recent EECERJ article for an example of sharing practitioner research) or an abstract to our upcoming conference.  Hopefully, you will discover a new way to play a more active role in raising awareness of the ways your country is working to advance its early years agenda.

Remember, dissemination is vital to the health and stability of our sector.  Without the sharing of new ideas and discoveries, practice becomes stale, progress stalls and we run the risk of isolating ourselves from the conversations that open us up to innovation.  We look forward to learning more about how you are contributing through your research, projects and initiatives to the global ECEC discussion. If you have written a blog about your attendance at EECERA Conference or of being an EECERA published author please do let us know so we can help share your story through our platforms.

For more information and guidelines about writing for the EECERA blog, visit us here.