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Public education systems are often large, diverse, fragmented, and historically very hard to change. While previous reforms targeted primarily school staff, large-scale policies now include a broader audience including non-system organizations (e.g., knowledge brokering organizations) that may influence directly or indirectly policy implementation. Arguing that knowledge brokering organizations can contribute to policy implementation by bridging equity policy and research and practice at the local level, we put forward that their networks and relationships with districts, schools, and community organizations can bring about substantial changes to the organization and practices of schools on equity issues, even though they may face obstacles in implementing change due to particular contexts. We aim to better understand the role of knowledge brokering networks and of the university partners who act as knowledge brokers to bridge Ontario Ministry of Education policy goals with equity research and practice. As knowledge brokers working in a bilingual province-wide equity knowledge brokering network, we use our experiences as a particular case of a non-system role in system-wide reforms. We build on these experiences to question and self-reflect on our role as knowledge brokers who accompanied practitioners and community coalition leaders towards equity and inclusion over a 2-year period. By analyzing knowledge brokering functions, we show the challenges and opportunities we faced as knowledge brokers in guiding local equity and inclusion initiatives: (1) the roles we carried out during interactions and practices that could take on different meanings as knowledge producers and mobilizers; (2) we point out how and why these knowledge brokering functions and our roles within a bilingual province-wide network needed to adapt to local realities by providing for a more flexible planning process that allowed for sufficient time to identify local needs and to produce, if necessary, the knowledge that incorporated cultural context considerations or particularities.

In the present study, we manipulated different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined how deaf readers make use of the parafoveal information. Results clearly indicate that although the reading-level matched hearing readers make greater use of orthographic information in the parafovea, parafoveal semantic information is obtained earlier among the deaf readers. In addition, a phonological preview benefit effect was found for the better deaf readers (relative to less-skilled deaf readers), although we also provide an alternative explanation for this effect. Providing evidence that Chinese deaf readers have higher efficiency when processing parafoveal semantics, the study indicates flexibility across individuals in the mechanisms underlying word recognition adapting to the inputs available in the linguistic environment.

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