This op-ed appeared in The Hill Times on June 25, 2012.
By Graham Carr
President, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Waiting for a medical appointment can be a stressful experience for a young child, especially if that child has limited mobility and is unable to distract herself by playing with toys or other children. The Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto found an innovative way to solve this problem, with the help of students and faculty from OCAD University.
Together, the hospital and the university created Screenplay, an interactive environment that allows children – regardless of their level of mobility – to create images of plants and flowers on a large screen by standing on a series of pressure-sensitive squares on the floor. The design of Screenplay allows for many children and adults to play at the same time, creating a large virtual garden together.
The OCADU students were tasked with designing the interactive aspects of Screenplay, striving to celebrate differences without reinforcing limitations. They learned about the needs of children with autism, and had an opportunity to apply their studies in a real-world situation that benefitted them, the hospital, its patients and their families.
This is just one of many examples of university-community collaboration going on across the country. These collaborations have an enormous impact on their communities. They are also one way to demonstrate the contribution of research, teaching and training in the humanities, arts and social sciences to improving the lives of Canadians.
The theme of campus-community collaboration was woven throughout the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the largest multidisciplinary academic gathering in Canada, which took place in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario last month.
The eight-day conference kicked off with a major funding announcement by the Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology, at the opening reception.
“By investing in partnerships between academia and the private, public and not-for-profit sectors, we are expanding our knowledge capacity and increasing Canada’s economic advantage,” Minister Goodyear said. He went on to announce $70 million in funding for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to support these types of partnerships.
“The researchers being supported today are among Canada’s leading scholars in the social sciences and humanities, whose talents are contributing to the culture of innovation and excellence that is critical to our nation’s success,” Minister Goodyear added.
The Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, also addressed the issue in his opening Big Thinking lecture. “We must be as good in social innovation as we are in technological innovation,” he told the crowd. Community-campus collaboration helps “ensure that social innovation is a key component of Canada’s innovation landscape,” he added.
The former president of the University of Waterloo’s address was more than a homecoming – it was a call to action, urging further collaboration between universities and the communities in which they live. Both sides are answering the call.
A group of university and community partners, including the United Way of Canada, chose Congress 2012 as the venue at which to launch its Community-Campus Collaboration Initiative, whose goal is to remove institutional barriers between communities and the post-secondary sector, and to identify social problems where such collaborations can have a positive impact.
As an event that draws researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, practitioners and policy-makers from a broad range of disciplines, this annual Congress is the perfect venue to affirm these commitments. The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, which organizes Congress, advocated strongly for cross-sector collaboration in the last budget cycle, and we will continue to do so as these partnerships are critical in a more uncertain and complex world.
The annual Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences will remain an important forum for this initiative, where academics, policy-makers and the community can meet to collectively take the pulse of this multi-faceted collaboration and ensure Canadians across the country can benefit from these partnerships, like the kids and families at Bloorview Hospital.