Lightning presentations in celebration of #YearOfOpen

Engaging with postgraduate research: from training to practice

Eleni Wood, The Open University

The Engaging Research training I completed in March 2017 didn’t feel like work, but the fact that the week was fun doesn’t mean that the skills and discussions we had during the training weren’t really valuable and important.

Over recent years, the change in weighting of required research outputs has given much greater importance to engaging end-users outside of our academic spheres with our science.

A lack of wider engagement can even impact on whether your research gets funded. As PhD students at the beginning of our academic careers we are at a advantageous point where we can decide if we want to incorporate engagement activities into our work and really embrace this movement from the outset.

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Moving school-university engagement beyond the role of recruiting sergeant

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Michael Francis.

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Photo: Michael Francis.

“The science faculty in your local university needs you!” could have been the headline on the recent Guardian article about the RCUK-funded School-University Partnership Initiative (SUPI).

There is much to commend in the article and in the activities fellow SUPIs have developed, delivered and assessed over the previous four years.

Is there a problem with the article?

I argue that this article is part of a wider discourse that limits how school-university engagement with research is planned for, enacted, represented and, ultimately, valued. But why should we care?

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Engaging Research: from trainee to trainer

Lucy Garrett, University of Birmingham and Dr Kate Baker, University of Exeter

As participants of the first set of NERC-funded workshops on engaging research in 2015, we were delighted to hear that Richard Holliman and Clare Warren were repeating the workshops at the Open University and wanted us to return as trainers.

It was back in 2015 that we attended the course, learning how to communicate our research more effectively and how to engage stakeholders with our research. This included spending time experimenting with language and using metaphors to explain what our research was about and who could use it in outside of academia.

It was the first time that many of us spent quality time thinking about how our research could be engaged with other researchers, NGOs and industry; an exchange of knowledge that would improve our research quality and increase the impact of our work.

Week 1: l-r, Melanie Stone, Kate Newton, Eleni Wood, Richard Holliman, Rosalinde Nicholls, David Pettifer, Stacy Phillips, Clare Warren, Jasmine Wareham, Slawomir Michniewski, Lucy Garrett, Kate Baker, Janet Sumner, Gerard Giorgi-Coll and Chris Nedza. Photo: Gareth Davies.

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Developing mathematical resilience in teachers

Dr Clare Lee, The Open University.

During the academic year 2015-16 I worked with a group of 22 teachers from 12 different schools (primary and secondary) across the Enigma Maths Hub. I’ve recently published a report about this work (Lee, 2016).

The purpose of the programme was to support teachers in applying some of the ideas from research about Maths resilience to their practice and therefore to improve the classroom experiences of children learning Maths.

The teachers took part in a year-long action research project to introduce mathematical resilience into their classrooms. The teachers worked in pairs in their schools supporting and challenging each other to work differently and to make a difference.

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Developing productive partnerships with end-users

Richard Holliman and Clare Warren, The Open University. Photo: Michael Francis.

We’ve just published an open access paper in a new journal called Research for all: Universities and Society. (Scroll down for further details about the new journal.)

In the paper, we discuss how we supported future scholars of engaged research through a training programme that included some preparatory and follow-up activities, combined with a week-long residential element (Holliman and Warren, 2017).

In the paper we acknowledge that researchers in the UK are taking on new roles and responsibilities to meet the requirements of an expanded agenda for generating and evidencing social and economic impacts from research.

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The Dragons’ Den of School Partnership Sustainability

The Dragons Den workshop facilitators at Engage 2016

A few weeks before Christmas we facilitated a workshop to discuss the benefits and sustainability of collaborative partnerships at the annual NCCPE Engage Conference in Bristol.

The workshop was developed and delivered by staff from the OU, working alongside colleagues from the School-University Partnerships Initiative (SUPI) based at the University of Bristol, University of Southampton and Lancaster University.

This post explains the planning, preparation and performance of the workshop, and includes a few reflective comments on what worked and what could be done differently next time.

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Mountains under the microscope

Eleni Wood, The Open University

Unlocking the secrets of the Himalaya

I’ve always been a bit of a mountain addict, so when I began my studies in Earth Sciences, I was overjoyed to find that I suddenly had a legitimate reason for being a bit mountain mad. I discovered that, in detail, the geological processes responsible for the formation and evolution of mountain belts are fascinatingly complex. I also found that there are likeminded people, who are, like detectives, conducting research that aims to uncover the million year old mysteries of the mountains.

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Give PEACE a chance

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Michael Francis.

With apologies to John Lennon, PEACE in this instance refers to the Public Engagement: Attitudes, Culture and Ethos report, which has recently been published by STFC (the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council).

You can download a copy of the report from: Public Engagement: Attitudes, Culture and Ethos.

PEACE in our time
The PEACE report is timely. It is welcome because it reminds us of the considerable body of culture change work in engagement over a period of nearly ten years.

But it does much more than that. It also adds to this existing evidence-base, offering findings from newly-commissioned research that investigates engagement practices in the physical sciences, combining these findings with consultative work with the STFC research community, and expert advice.

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Been there, Dunedin that

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Michael Francis.

It has been a very productive couple of weeks in New Zealand. Thanks to my wonderful host Nancy Longnecker (and family) I’ve had a chance to explore the local environment. New Zealand is clearly a very beautiful place, interwoven with many cultures.

I’ve had opportunities to meet with staff and students from the Centre for Science Communication during my stay in Dunedin, and more widely from the University of Otago as we’ve explored aspects of culture change in relation to engaged research.

We have discussed aspects of New Zealand’s National Science Challenges, at a time when these islands and their citizens have been facing the very immediate challenge of responding to a series of earthquakes.

Collectively, these challenges require us, as science communicators, to re-double our efforts to create a reflective culture of evidence-based practices as we connect scientists, citizens and other stakeholders in ways that are meaningful and relevant.

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