Riff-ing on the REF Consultation

The appeal of online citizen science

Dr Vickie Curtis, University of Glasgow

Can projects increase the inclusivity of scientific research?

Citizen science is a collective term for projects that engage both professional scientists and non-specialists in the process of gathering, evaluating or computing scientific data.

The number and scope of citizen science projects has increased dramatically over the past two decades – much of this is a direct result of developments in information and communication technology (ICT) and the Internet.

Some citizen science projects are now conducted entirely via the Internet and participants help to analyse large sets of data that have been provided by scientists.

How and why people participate in such projects are the subjects of my new book Online Citizen Science and the Widening of Academia.

Some projects have attracted thousands of registered participants, leading some to claim that they open up scientific research and ‘democratise’ science. But how inclusive are they in reality?

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Making art out of fragments

Dr Laura Swift, The Open University.

Recently funded by the British Academy, the aim of The Art of Fragments project is to explore creative responses to fragments and fragmentation, by bringing together academics and creative practitioners from a range of fields.

The Art of Fragments is a project about lost and fragmented texts. Many texts from the ancient world were damaged or lost, and survive only in small fragments. These are the works that didn’t survive the process of history that led to the ‘classics’ we know today being preserved intact.

Some of these works have been partly rediscovered, through papyrus fragments from an ancient rubbish dump, and through the random luck that made other authors decide to quote lines from them.

The papyrus pictured (left) preserves the Tithonus poem (fragment 58); the potsherd (right) preserves fragment 2. By Masur – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2648372

The fragments may be a whole speech or self-contained passage, but they can also be as small as a single word, or as random as having only the right hand edge of a piece of text.

Traditionally, Classical scholars have tried to make sense of these fragments by painstakingly analysing and reconstructing them, filling in gaps or trying to work out where they come from. But things that only survive in pieces are also intrinsically compelling, and take on a beauty of their own.

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Can citizen inquiry be inclusive?

Jessica Carr, The Open University.

Are people with learning disabilities regularly excluded from decision-making processes which may have a direct impact on them?

I’ve recently published research that explores this important issue (Carr, 2018), with the aim of contributing to wider discussions about how we build capacity to ensure that citizens have access to, and agency within, research (Holliman, 2017).

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My Body, My Life

Dr Victoria Newton and Dr Lesley Hoggart, The Open University.

Challenging abortion stigma through story-telling

MyBody MyLife is an award-winning, multi-media travelling exhibition and website. Together, the exhibition and website aim to break open silences by using real-life stories of abortion. The stories in the exhibition show how easily an unplanned pregnancy can become part of women’s lives, how different women have taken their decision to have an abortion, and what the process was like for them.

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Learning from Engaging Opportunities

Engaging Opportunities (Holliman et al. 2018)

We have recently published the final report for ‘Engaging Opportunities’ (Holliman et al. 2018).

Funded as one of 12 by RCUK, our project involved a School-University Partnership (SUPI) between the Open University and the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance.

Informed by action research, our partnership was designed to create structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable mechanisms for effective school-university engagement with research.

Over four years our project team created engaging opportunities for 11 schools and more than 6,577 people within Milton Keynes. Students and teachers engaged with authentic practices of contemporary and inspiring research in a range of academic disciplines.

Through this work we offering opportunities to participate in mutual learning and develop relevant and useful skills and competencies in how to access, assess, analyse and respond to contemporary research.

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Is the elephant in the room working or volunteering?

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University.

A recent report, published by an independent consultancy firm, discusses what they describe as the “hidden economic value of public engagement and knowledge exchange in UK universities” (Viewforth Consulting, 2018).

The quoted figures are certainly eye-catching. Based on extrapolating the data from 1093 university staff from three UK universities the authors of the report argue that, “UK university staff delivered 40 million hours of pro-bono public engagement and knowledge exchange in 2015-16”.

Boom!

Putting the calculation of the figures aside for one moment, the report invites a crucial question around the following sentence (my emphasis):

This evidence indicates that university staff, with the approval and encouragement of their host institutions, provide a large and economically significant volume of public service and knowledge exchange to UK society on a voluntary basis.
(Viewforth Consulting, 2018: 2)

On the face of it, this appears to be a contradiction. Can you work in a voluntary capacity with the approval and encouragement of your employer? And what does approval versus encouragement mean in this context? They’re clearly not the same thing.

Further, how much of this activity was funded, directly or indirectly through HEIF (and equivalent schemes in the nations), Pathways to Impact funding, or through QR funding as a result of REF 2014? How much of the support for Widening Participation has contributed to teaching income and/or the TEF?

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The need for engaged research leadership

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University.

“Evidencing impact is hard. Doing public engagement is hard.”

How many times have I heard versions over these phrases over recent years? “Too many”, came the weary reply.

It’s an obvious thing to say, but anything is likely to be a challenge to do well for the first time if you don’t plan ahead. Given that this seems so obvious, what’s surprised me is how often I’ve heard versions of these negative takes on the impact and public engagement agenda in recent months.

I’ve attended a range of events in association with preparations for REF 2021. I’ve heard these types of statements there.

I’ve been working with funders to explore how grants are planned for, assessed, monitored and reported. I’ve heard statements like these made by an unhealthy proportion of researchers during the course of this work.

And I’ve reviewed a good number of proposals over recent months that seek to generate and evidence impact. Guess what? Yes, you’re right. These arguments surface in discussions with some (not all) of these researchers.

Did I mention that it is eight years (yes, eight years!) since pathways to impact planning was introduced by RCUK? It is four years since REF 2014. It is three years since the completion of the RCUK-funded Public Engagement with Research Catalysts (Duncan and Manners, 2016).

So why are we still having the same arguments about the need to produce high-quality planning for the generation and evidencing of research impact?

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Perspectives on school-university partnership working

Sophie Duncan, NCCPE (https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk)

School students in East Anglia publish a research paper in a peer reviewed academic journal. English teachers in Bristol are inspired and equipped to teach on the Romantics at GCSE. Young people in Milton Keynes support the production of free resources to help them (and others) Manage their Money. Researchers in Manchester gain new skills as they support school students doing extended project qualifications.

These sentences hint at some of things that have been happening as part of School-University Partnerships Initiative (SUPI), an experiment to see whether it was beneficial for schools and universities to partner together to bring cutting edge research into the classroom.

Funded by Research Councils UK, SUPI involved 12 projects, each involving partnerships between schools and universities keen to build effective ways to work together.

One of the SUPI PoP Tool Character Cards.

With such rich learning, we hope the project inspires others to think hard about the opportunities presented by school-university partnerships, and how they can be realised. To support this we have created two resources:

SUPI Lessons: a booklet summarising the key lessons learnt from the programme, illustrated by taster case studies.
SUPI Perspectives on Partnership (PoP): a brilliant resource to help schools and universities consider how they might like to work together. We know that schools and universities want different things from working together – the resource illustrates the experiences of teachers, school students, researchers, and university brokers for different types of partnerships – and is a great tool to talk about what everyone is hoping to achieve.

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Engaged research as a route to epistemic justice

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University.

I’ve recently had a paper published as part of a collection that explores professionalisation in science communication (Trench, 2017). In the paper, I review the purposes, definitions and criteria designed to embed ‘engaged research’ as a strategic priority with universities, and explores some of the challenges of implementation (Holliman, 2017).

I argue that surveys of academics have shown various understandings of, and attitudes to, the practices of engaged research, but also impediments to realising the aspirations it expresses.

Drawing on my experience as the academic lead for engaged research at the Open University, I go on to explore questions of professionalisation, for example, through training, support mechanisms and measures of recognition for engaged research.

I conclude the paper by arguing that, if done well, engaged research can promote epistemic justice. So what is epistemic justice, and how can engaged research deliver what Medvecky (2017) calls ‘fairness in knowing’.

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Engaging Research

An Open Research University: Embedding public engagement within the research culture of the OU

Riff-ing on the REF Consultation

The appeal of online citizen science

Making art out of fragments

Can citizen inquiry be inclusive?

My Body, My Life

Learning from Engaging Opportunities

Is the elephant in the room working or volunteering?

The need for engaged research leadership

Perspectives on school-university partnership working

Engaged research as a route to epistemic justice