engage 2018 – Heidi R. Gardner

Facing the Future – Reflections from Day 2 at Engage 2018

December 12, 2018December 12, 2018Leave a comment

This is the third of four blog posts that cover my attendance and learnings from the Engage conference – they can be read individually, but to get the most out of them I’d recommend reading the previous 2 (here and here) before you return to this one.

I have a lot of thoughts to squeeze into this blog post, hence why it’s taken me a few extra days to get it written and published. This post covers this ‘Facing the future’ session, which included talks from Steve West (University of the West of England), Darren Henley (Arts Council England), and Nike Jonah (Connecting Dots), and it was jam packed with really important points.

Steve West opened the session with some points that I agreed with, and some that I hope he was wrong about. Let me explain…

Points that I agreed with:

The idea of simple checklist of things to think about when doing public engagement
- Place
- People
- Potential of partnerships
- Practical
- Simple
It is important that academics and public engagement professionals build meaningful networks that lead to long-standing partnerships with other organisations and individuals within the wider community (both local and global).
Public engagement needs to be embedded into the culture of universities.

Points that I hope he was wrong about and why:

Steve explained that he thinks that we are heading for a change in the format of public engagement funding, and that funding specifically for engagement will be phased out over the coming years in favour of a model where engagement funds are built into other sources of funding (research grants for example). I really, really hope that this is not the case. I attended Engage as a researcher, and I was going there specifically to learn how to become a research that can more effectively engage with the stakeholders that surround my work. I learned a lot at Engage, and I think that’s because it’s a conference that’s designed as a place for public engagement experts to exchange ideas, learn from each other and discuss topics that might change the way they work in the future. Researchers need people that do public engagement to guide us, we need them to teach us what they know and help us to gain the skills needed to engage the public with our research. Engaging the public with our research is not the only thing that public engagement professionals do though; the scope of their talents is bigger than that, and in my opinion it’s important that we do what we can to ensure that engagement professionals are funded to do engagement – whether that’s with research or with the process and structures involved in university life more widely.

Next up was Darren Henley from the Arts Council England. Ignorantly, I didn’t think this talk would be for me – I assumed that Darren was going to talk about engagement with the type of projects that the Arts Council would fund – creative stuff that is in no way related to science. I’m happy to report I was absolutely wrong, and this was a fantastic talk that left me inspired and energised to infuse less obvious types of creativity into the science engagement that I do.

Darren encouraged us to think creatively, no matter what subject area we worked in. He explained that “a world without creativity would see no original ideas; no new inventions or advances in science or medicine; no new products or services; no new music or art; no solutions to new problems”. Whilst Darren’s talk was obviously from a perspective of someone who works in the creative industries (he’s current Chief Exec of the Arts Council, but he led Classical FM for 15 years and has a tonne of really impressive experience that is detailed in various books that have been published over the last 10 years), he did make a really good case for creativity in engagement more broadly.

I ordered his latest book, ‘Creativity: Why it Matters’ on my phone during his talk. I’m about a quarter of the way through it and so far I’m finding it fascinating – I think this will become a resource that I go back to year after year.

This session ended on a real high. My personal highlight of the entire conference was a talk by Nike Jonah from partnership enterprise Connecting Dots. Nike explained the idea of standpoint theory, which in very basic terms can encompassed by three overarching points:

Knowledge is socially situated.
Marginalised groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalised.
Researcher, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalised.

The way she described standpoint theory encouraged the audience to work hard to see from the perspectives of others in society to ensure that engagement activities are open and accessible to all. She talked about making engagement events accessible for those with disabilities, those who don’t speak English fluently, and those that are visually or hearing impaired.

She was asked a question by an audience member about what we can do to increase diversity in the public engagement world bearing in mind that we were sat in a room full of mostly white middle class women. Nike’s response was brilliant. She made it clear that diversity does not just encompass race, or skin colour, or gender – it refers to a million different things that include all of the various characteristics and skills that we have. She gave examples of the languages that we know, the countries that we have visited, the musical instruments that we can play, and the hobbies that we have, making it clear that each of us is a product of our experiences and therefore the diversity in the room was likely much higher than you might think at first glance.

I went to speak (read: fangirl) to Nike after the conference and she was so wonderfully humble. I’m excited to do some more research into standpoint theory, and how I can embed accessibility into the engagement, and research, that I do over the coming years, and I’m really excited to see where Nike goes from here. She’s an incredibly intelligent person with a very clear set of morals that shine through all of the work that she does – definitely someone I can see myself learning from over the course of my career!

Navigating the Changing Landscape of Public Engagement – Reflections from Day 1 at Engage 2018

December 6, 2018December 11, 20181 Comment

Hello, hello, I’m back with more chat about the Engage conference. Just a warning, this will be ongoing for the next few blog posts. After that I’m taking a break for Christmas, and then I’ll be back to blogging as I’ll be firmly in the process of traveling adventures for my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellowship. Anyway, Engage. This blog post focusses on the second session from the first day of the conference; a plenary titled ‘Navigating change’, and a plenary workshop titled ‘stories of change’. The discussion here definitely followed on from the topics covered in the session before it, so head to my previous post about the Engage conference if you’d like to catch up.

Public engagement is not a new thing; for decades scientists and researchers have worked to engage the public with their work. That said, the way that we do public engagement, and the environment in which we are doing it is definitely changing. This session reflected that, with talks from Nancy Rothwell from the University of Manchester, and Jennifer Wallace from Carnegie UK Trust. Just a side note – typing ‘Nancy Rothwell’ made me realise then that the Engage conference schedule did not have titles on it, Prof Dame Nancy Rothwell is President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Manchester and a non-executive director of AstraZeneca – in summary, she’s kind of a big deal. It’s nice that Engage don’t put titles on the conference schedule though, it puts people on more of an even playing field.

Nancy’s talk looked at public engagement in sceptical times. Looking at the events of the past few years it’s pretty easy to see why we are in sceptical times; Trump, Brexit, Michael Gove declaring that ‘the people of Great Britain have had enough of experts’, and a whole host of other things that make 2016-2018 look like a particularly terrifying episode of Black Mirror.

This part of the ‘navigating change’ session left me feeling determined. Nancy explained that “it is more important now, than ever, for universities to engage widely”, what I enjoyed most about her talk though, was that she gave practical advice on how to do engagement. For many of the attendees that were public engagement professionals, this might have been old news, but as an enthusiastic researcher I found this part really useful. She discussed the need for public engagement to be thoroughly embedded into the work that we do, and then gave examples of the fantastic work that’s being done at the University of Manchester (UoM were awarded with a gold Engage Watermark at the conference too – a brilliant achievement!). I thought it was great for Engage to have a speaker from University leadership; as I said in my previous blog post, there may be some perception of a ‘them vs us’ culture with regards to public engagement and social responsibilities of higher education, and it was heartening to see Nancy talk with such passion. She reinforced the need for public engagement to be evaluated with the same level of rigour as we expect from research and teaching, and explained that Professor Brian Cox’s public engagement work earned him a 4 star REF impact case study!

Following Nancy’s talk, we heard from Jennifer Wallace – a self-proclaimed ‘non’. Jennifer is non-academic, non-government and non- many other things; one thing she is, is brilliant. She lies outside of where the power lies, and encourages the ‘blending’ of areas of expertise. I loved this idea; in health services research we talk about having multidisciplinary teams, but the word ‘blending’ seems much more cohesive, and also suggests that individuals can be bringing more than one perspective and area of expertise to a project rather than needing to have a different person for each skill or knowledge area. I found that comforting, and thought of Dr Heather Morgan as my very own role model for blended researchers – if you don’t know or follow Heather, then you are seriously missing out. She is a force to be reckoned with for all the right reasons, and I’m pretty sure that’s because of her expert blend of skills and interests.

Anyway, back to Jennifer… The thing that really stood out to me during her talk were the results of a study that had been carried out by the Carnegie UK Trust (a think tank aiming to improve the lives and wellbeing of people throughout the UK). The study found that trust in academic evidence is relatively high (63% of respondents), and 90% of people say that they evidence influences their decisions. The problem is that use of academic evidence is low (35% of respondents). This is a solvable problem, and it’s up to us (I’m speaking as an academic here) to do something about it. The process of accessing academic evidence is too convoluted right now; we need to make it easier for people to find and use the work that we are doing.

After the plenary we split up into tables to find out about stories of change.

Eileen Martin from The Science Shop, which is a joint project between Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University, was sat at our table, and she gave us a whistle-stopped tour of the life of The Science Shop since it was established in 1998. I found her experiences fascinating and wanted to share a bit about The Science Shop here too.

The Science Shop is essentially a broker that brings research needs of the local community into the university, and matches up students (usually taught MSc students) with research projects in response to those needs. The Science Shop is an international initiative, with branches all over Europe, and Eileen told us about the challenges she’d experience to get the project established in Belfast. After this session ended I had a look to see if there are any Science Shops near me, but it doesn’t look like there are any in Scotland just yet – I will definitely be keeping an eye out for new ones cropping up as they sound like fantastic ways to integrate and embed the needs of the community with what’s going on inside universities.

Changing the Way We View Public Engagement – Reflections from Day 1 at Engage 2018

December 5, 20181 Comment

This UK’s National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE)’s Engage conference is now in its 8^th year, this year it took place on Thursday 29^th and Friday 30^th November. The conference has previously taken place in NCCPE’s home city of Bristol, but this year the team ventured north, inviting an incredible line up of researchers, public engagement professionals, funders, and leaders from universities, third sector organisations and industry, from around the world to Edinburgh to discuss topics related to the theme ‘facing the future’.

Luckily for me, Edinburgh is a lot closer to home (and cheaper to get to!) than Bristol, so this year I got to go to Engage for the first time. I always find that during conferences I take lots of notes; usually coming home with pages of barely coherent scribbles linked by arrows, highlighted with stars and emphasised by varying degrees of underlining. In order to preserve at least some of the thoughts I’ve had, I like to translate those scribbles into blog posts. Selfishly, this provides my scribbles with a more structured home, meaning that I can return to them in the future, but given the topic, I figured that this time my thoughts might actually be of use to other people.

I only managed to attend the first half of day 1 and the second half of day 2 (I was rushing about flying to London and back for the Times Higher Education Awards in between), but hopefully my thoughts can still be of use to people that did not make it to Engage themselves, or people that were at the conference and fancy hearing another perspective.

This post is going to cover the first plenary of the conference, which was titled ‘Challenge to change’ – later in the week I’ll be publishing follow up posts from the conference that cover topics such as ‘navigating change’, ‘facing the future’ and ‘transforming engagement’. Normally I wouldn’t go into so much detail about specific sessions, but this conference really fits with the topic of my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship, so I need to make sure I have a decent record of what happened!

The conference opened with a thought-provoking plenary featuring talks from Ruth Gill and Xerxes Mazda from the National Museums of Scotland, and Rajesh Tandon, chair of Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), and co-UNESCO Chair for Community-based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education.

The trio of talks challenged conference attendees to think differently about engagement, with Ruth Gill and Xerxes Mazda explaining that the need to learn is no longer biological, but philosophical; ‘we learn when we feel it is relevant to us’. That feeling might be as stark as learning something that physically forces the air out of you, or it could be something that makes you smile as it triggers a memory – the semantics of the feeling are important, it’s simply about making people feel something; it’s about meaning-making.

As public engagement practitioners, it’s important that we focus our attention on tapping into emotional responses and creating a level of escapism for audiences. As a researcher, until now that has only been on the periphery of my aims for effective engagement; usually I’m all about trying to create a fun environment where people can learn, but after the plenary I realised that as a member of the public attending events, the ones I remember made me feel something. It’s weird that when I’m in researcher mode I seem to cease thinking like a normal member of the public. Glad to be made aware of that though, and hopefully keeping the emotional response in mind will help me to diversify the engagement activities I am involved with – ‘fun’ and ‘educational’ events definitely do have their place, but I’d like to create engagement opportunities that are more complex. Trials are a complex area with lots of different perspectives and challenges, and I’d like to engage people by mirroring that in my activities and events.

Rajesh Tandon then gave an inspirational and motivating talk about his experience working with PRIA to empower excluded members of the community through capacity building, knowledge building and policy advocacy. I didn’t leave Rajesh’s talk with practical tips on how to improve the way that I engage with the public; that wasn’t the purpose of the talk. I left with a refreshed sense of purpose. He made a clear link between engagement and social justice; highlighting that universities and other higher education institutions have a moral obligation to ‘step up to the plate’ to support their local communities and tackle the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. He explained that there are nearly 1 million higher education institutes globally, with 10 million teachers in them teaching 220 million full time students; and highlighted the need for us to ‘speak truth to power’.

This was a bit of a weird session for me – incredibly thought-provoking, engaging and interesting, but I am still left unsure of my own thoughts on whether I agree with what he was saying. I agree that universities and higher education institutes have a moral duty to the public; the institutions (and researchers) that are funded by public taxes should be working to engage the public with what they are going, and I think it’s important that the culture of research changes to embed public engagement (and involvement, but that’s another conversation) into every aspect of the institution. That said, I’m uncertain about the accusatory language used. This may be as a result of my inexperience and naivety, but I think that higher education institutions are generally trying to do good. Of course there are barriers and issues that may prevent things from doing good all the time, but I don’t picture there being two distinct sides at play here; one full of ‘the goodies’ – enthusiastic and engaging people wanting to invest in communities and the other full of ‘the baddies’ – leaders, people just out to make money and tear society apart in the process. Fundamentally, I think it’s very easy for those of us not in high powered leadership positions to think that universities could do more; but we can never know the whole story, and I would like to think that there are people at universities (at least in Aberdeen!) that are pushing to engage with local communities to share the important work that is being done within them.

On that rather serious note, I’m going to leave things here. My head is still buzzing with ideas from Engage, and I’ll be back later this week with details of brilliant public engagement practices where people are navigating change like experts, and sharing their experience to help the rest of us do the same.