Learning from Engaging Opportunities

Posted on Friday, 20 April 2018 by Richard Holliman

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

Posted on Wednesday, 20 September 2017 by Richard Holliman

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

Posted on Thursday, 15 December 2016 by Richard Holliman

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

Posted on Monday, 8 February 2016 by Elizabeth Chappell

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

Posted on Monday, 1 February 2016 by Helen Brown

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

Posted on Monday, 4 January 2016 by Ellie Dommett

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

Posted on Thursday, 3 December 2015 by Richard Holliman

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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Towards a scholarship of engagement

Posted on Wednesday, 11 November 2015 by Richard Holliman

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

Ideas about a scholarship of engagement are increasingly generating interest among academics, across the higher education sector, and within stakeholder groups and user communities. New challenges and opportunities are being addressed as academics work with peers, and sometimes also with user communities, to envisage, theorise and instantiate new places, spaces and methods for public engagement.

In so doing, scholars are connecting with the engagement agenda as they work to identify, and increasingly to assess, more effective ways of generating, representing, circulating and debating knowledge in the public sphere.

In exploring this changing culture colleagues and I at the Open University organised an Engaging Research seminar series (for further details, see below). You can view the archived recordings of the 12 seminars in this series at the following location: http://weblab.open.ac.uk/catalyst/per-seminars

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Science communication for development

Posted on Wednesday, 21 October 2015 by Clare Kemp

Clare Kemp, The Open University.

I joined the Open University in October 2015 as a postgraduate researcher. Based in The Institute of Educational Technology my doctoral research is supervised by Richard Holliman, Eileen Scanlon and Patricia Murphy. My aim is to specialize in science communications for development.

To this end, I have been a science communications consultant across Africa and Asia, North America and the UK for many years, developing knowledge, skills and expertise that I’m planning to integrate into my postgraduate research.

Clare Kemp (far left), with a film crew, working with a scientist, extension workers and farmers.

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The battle for engaged research

Posted on Monday, 7 September 2015 by Richard Holliman

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

I’ve long admired the work of my colleague Professor Martin Weller. Studies conducted in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), in particular research exploring the practices of digital scholarship, were central to the development of the Open University’s proposal to RCUK to become one of eight Public Engagement with Research Catalyst universities. Since that earlier work Martin has further explored ideas about openness in higher education, culminating in his latest book, The battle for open: How Openness Won and Why it Doesn’t Feel Like Victory.

We’ve recently completed the work of the OU’s RCUK-funded Public Engagement with Research (PER) Catalyst, An Open Research University, publishing our final report (Holliman, et al. 2015). As such, members of the OU’s PER Catalyst project team and I have spent recent months consolidating the learning from our project with the aim of sharing lessons learned and resources with other universities, including the RCUK Catalyst Seed Funded universities.

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Engaging Research

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

Category Archives: Projects

Learning from Engaging Opportunities

Creative ways of working; a gift that keeps on giving

Give PEACE a chance

The Last Survivors of Hiroshima, an interdisciplinary PhD

Engaging schools with research opportunities

Engaging with neuropharmacology research

Continuity and change with engaged research

Towards a scholarship of engagement

Science communication for development

The battle for engaged research