CREATEd – Collaboration, Research, Equity, and Action Together in Education – aims to improve equitable national educational opportunities and outcomes nationally by leveraging knowledge in the research and practice communities in ways that promote stronger, more equitable relationships among the two communities and ultimately improve the education system’s capacity for evidence-informed improvement.
CREATEd encourages and supports the use of knowledge from research and practice communities as a tool for evidence-informed and equity-centered change within education systems. We achieve this by preparing knowledge brokers to support evidence-informed decision-making, facilitating a diverse network of knowledge brokers who are committed to educational equity, and providing opportunities for diverse constituencies to connect and partner to co-create evidence-informed and equity-centered resources.
Our Goals
We believe that education research is an important part of the educational process, and that rigorous evidence, whether qualitative or quantitative, can foster better opportunities and outcomes for children. Further, we believe that research is an important form of evidence, but not the only one. Practitioner experience, community insight, and lived expertise are equally critical to understanding challenges and co-creating solutions that improve educational opportunities and outcomes.
However, differences in researchers’ and practitioners’ values, goals, structures, and incentives pose challenges for working together and achieving shared goals for improving educational opportunities and outcomes. Through knowledge brokering and co-design, we create opportunities that bridge those gaps. These collaborative opportunities support greater understanding and appreciation across research and practice boundaries and improve capacity for future collaboration.
Our vision for a more equitable school system links research with local data and rethinks how to connect research and practice. Traditional approaches to educational accountability and evidence-based decision-making are characterized by top-down approaches to improvement. These top-down approaches sustain systems that marginalize sources and forms of knowledge. Further, both research and practice communities exist within cultures, systems, and structures that have marginalized many members of our communities and historically maintained power hierarchies and accepted social inequities. To produce a more informed, democratic educational system, we envision empowering diverse stakeholders in the construction and use of evidence and the disruption of systemic inequity.
Knowledge brokers support equity-centered change by building trust, connecting communities, surfacing local needs, and promoting the exchange and use of evidence. Their work helps dismantle barriers to research use and fosters more reciprocal, inclusive, and impactful relationships between research and practice. Yet there has been little systemic effort to identify and support them and few opportunities exist for professional learning. We actively build capacity across the system by fostering networks and communities of practice that reduce professional silos and improve collaboration. Simultaneously, we generate, share, and use evidence about educational knowledge brokering processes and outcomes to support continuous improvement and contribute to larger bodies of practical and academic literature.
Our Work
CREATEd is proud to offer professional learning designed for and by knowledge brokers to support the development of knowledge and skills related to building capacity for research use and production of relevant and useful research, working with diverse education stakeholders to address issues of equity and social justice, transforming research to support education policy and practice. This online, asynchronous program earns a digital badge for those who seek to strengthen relationships between practice and research.
Prior to the development of this publicly available program, the CREATEd Fellowship was a year-long program, paid opportunity for knowledge brokers to come together to learn, share, and design, with a common goal to link research and practice in ways that advance educational equity. Learn more about the Fellowship and Fellows here.
The Education Knowledge Broker Network is a professional community for knowledge brokers, the result of more than three years of work by a coalition committed to promoting stronger connections between research, practice, and policy. Initiated by CREATEd and launched in 2024, EKBN provides professional learning opportunities for emerging and experienced knowledge brokers. Virtual programs and events offer spaces to learn from experts, engage in collaborative conversations on problems of practice, and create a community that elevates the identities of knowledge brokers working across the education system.
Co-design is an innovative approach to creating more usable research products and also for democratizing research use through more equitable and inclusive processes. CREATEd developed a free, publicly available co-design toolkit that engages a diverse team of researchers, practitioners, designers and other stakeholders in the creation of research-informed equity-centered resources. See what what CREATEd Fellows and EKBN Members have co-designed with these tools here.
Publications and Presentations
- Shewchuk, S., & Vilceus, S. (2025). Examining equity in (education) collaborations: a conceptual framework. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 10, p. 1677571). doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1677571
- Shewchuk, S., Wallace, J., & Seibold, M. (2023). Evaluations of training programs to improve capacity in K*: A systematic scoping review of methods applied and outcomes assessed. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02403-5 Infographic version
- Shewchuk, S., Farley-Ripple, E., & Hammerschmidt, C. (2025, April). CREATEd Knowledge Broker Fellowship & Professional Learning Program Presentation at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting.
- Hammerschmidt, C. (2023). Building an Equity-Centered Professional Learning Program for Education Knowledge Brokers. Poster presented at the UK Knowledge Mobilization Forum.
Support for this work is provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the University of Delaware. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and should not be attributed to the foundation.