One summer, I spent a month in Northern Ireland and Eire, birthplaces of my maternal grandparents. Every day or so, I'd write a page or two of a letter that I'd mail home. My mother kept the letters, and I still have them as a record of what I'd seen and experienced during that trip. On later trips, I e-mailed home from internet cafes. Now, when I am away, I phone. There are many ways to share a journey, and more than one way to share our research. You can start thinking about how to share learnings from your research when you begin your research journey.

Typically, sharing research in practice has meant writing a comprehensive report and publishing it in hard copy and/or online. This makes the reports quite accessible to others in the field. Writing is also a way to clarify your thinking and move it along.

Research can also be shared orally. As discussed earlier, in-progress workshops are a way to collect more data, invite feedback, or move the analysis along. You also might do workshops, presentations or poster sessions about your completed work. You could record the presentation or photograph the posters for further sharing. Face-to-face or online study groups are another way to share.

Research can be reported and shared in other ways too, including through stories, poetry, drama, videos or multimedia presentations. For example, Under the Line is a play about living with welfare, created by women literacy students. The women shared their experiences of living with welfare and did research about related questions. Public presentations of the play were followed by question and answer periods (Norton, 1992).

Nadine Sookermany (2008) created a video about her research about the impacts of violence on learning, on program participants and on their children. In her research about the body and learning, Judy Murphy (2008) created a multi-media report that included video clips, photographs, voice, music and excerpts from her written report.^{Footnote 10} Judy commented:

Taking a multimedia approach served two purposes for me. One, the need (a strong internal motivator for me) to share my research in a way that integrated more fully all its varied pieces-same idea of "bringing the whole person"-it seemed I wanted to say was through a multimedia approach.... The process of putting the arts-based plus text pieces together has deepened my understanding of my topic and has fostered new insights along the way. Two, from the perspective of reporting, it offered me another alternative to invite people into the work and a way to connect with others who may also value other (i.e. non-text based) ways of expressing. (personal communication, January 2008)

Skip footnote section