Category Archives: Projects

Posts about projects involving Public Engagement with Research

Fairness in knowing: How should we engage with the sciences?

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University.

This year, The Open University celebrates its 50th anniversary. Happy birthday to us!

As part of this celebration, the university is hosting an exciting programme of events and activities.

Yesterday I watched my colleague Martin Weller discuss the ongoing (and increasing influence) of openness in education. (You can access a recording of Martin’s lecture from the link in the previous sentence. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to watch the recording.)

It seems fitting, given the complementary nature of our work, that I was scheduled to deliver my inaugural lecture in this programme shortly after Martin.

Watching the lecture
If you’d like to attend the lecture on 12th March (6-7pm GMT) in person, select How to register. (It’s free to attend, but you need a ticket.)

From 5pm on the day, colleagues will be demonstrating various examples of engagement outside the lecture theatre.

To watch the lecture online, select Watch the webinar. The link will become live shortly before the start of the event. You can submit questions via email or Twitter from the same page.

The lecture will be recorded and made freely available after 12 March.

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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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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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Creative ways of working; a gift that keeps on giving

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

Over the past four years (2013-2016) researchers at the Open University have been working in partnership with the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance in Milton Keynes.

Through our project, Engaging Opportunities, we sought to work collaboratively and cooperatively coordinating direct engagement between students, teachers, and university researchers in ways that were meaningful to participating stakeholders.

Anthony Steed from Denbigh School and I are putting together a version of the activity that’s described in more detail below for an NCCPE-coordinated event in London. Select SUPI Sharing Workshop if you’d like to download a copy of our slides from this event.

At this event the SUPIs will meet together with anyone interested in school-university engagement with research to share the learning from their respective partnerships with other schools and universities.

If you’d like more details about this event, select: Reimagining School-University Partnerships.

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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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The Last Survivors of Hiroshima, an interdisciplinary PhD

Elizabeth Chappell and two Japanese female interviewees

Elizabeth Chappell and interviewees

In a recent talk at the British Sociological Association Conference at the British Library in December 2015, I outlined how I developed a research methodology which allows for the voices of survivors of Hiroshima, known as ‘hibakusha’, to be heard, and their subsequent written-up texts to be analysed within the framework of ‘coercion and consent’.

The discussion resulted in an forthcoming article tentatively titled ‘Telling the narratives of Hiroshima’ in the Auto/biography Yearbook for the British Sociological Association for June 2016.

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Engaging schools with research opportunities

Helen Brown, Director of Denbigh Teaching School, Milton Keynes

Through my role in leading Denbigh Teaching School Alliance, I’ve been overseeing the school end of the Engaging Opportunities Project. Through the teaching school, we’ve tried to engage as many schools and students as possible from across Milton Keynes in activities working alongside Open University researchers.

We want to increase knowledge and understanding of a range of research, but also of the researcher’s working experience. We want to create opportunities for young people to be inspired by research so that one day in the future, they may look back and think, “I took part in Activity X or Y with a real researcher and that made me want to….” In education, impact is often measured by results and short-term gains, but for us, the aim of this project is to plant seeds in young peoples’ minds.

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Engaging with neuropharmacology research

Dr Ellie Dommett

The Science Matters talk towards the end of last year (2015) was important for me to do for two reasons. Firstly, it was the first ‘TED-style’ talk I’d be asked to. I spend a lot of time giving talks to schools but these are often much longer so I have more time and slides to explain tricky concepts.

This was just a handful of slides to explain neuropharmacology. I had been on a course earlier in the year on presentation skills and have been trying to put this in to practice all year in my undergraduate lectures but this felt like a good opportunity to test out the same skills to a new audience (not in the unpopular 9am lecture slot).

Dr Ellie Dommett, Kings College London and the Open University. Photo: Dr Kate Bradshaw.

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Continuity and change with engaged research

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

Embedding strategy, celebrating excellence, transforming practice
In July 2013, colleagues and I at the Open University (OU), UK started this blog and called it Engaging Research. As the University’s Champion for Public Engagement with Research at that time it fell to me to write the first post. I named this after the multi-disciplinary project the small team and I were working on, ‘An open research university’.

In that post I posed a ‘tongue in cheek’ question, “If you’re the University’s Champion for Public Engagement with Research can you tell me how many people it takes to change a university’s research culture?” My answer was a play on an old joke, “I don’t know at the moment, but I do know that those involved really have to want to change.” More than two years on from that first blog post, I can give you a more serious answer to the same question.

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