Planning for school-university engagement

Upstream planning for school-university engagement with research requires careful, structured thinking involving teachers, researchers and (where relevant and possible) students, supported by effective downstream project management. And yet through the early stages of our partnership we noted a lack of suitable planning tools that work for researchers, teachers and students.

Planning for school-university engagement with research: preparedness, politics, people, purposes, processes and performance.

We developed a flexible and adaptable planning tool that can be used to support the development, enactment, and evaluation of school-university activities.

The framework is supported by a ‘SUPI metric@ to make explicit the level of engagement required and to support stakeholders.

The framework and SUPI metric are available in a number of forms:

As an activity proforma: The activity proforma has been designed to support researchers make initial contact with schools in Milton Keynes. Feel free to adapt the proforma for use in your local context.
As a blog post: Holliman, R. (2016). ‘Planning for a principled approach to engaged research.’ Digitally Agile Researcher Blog. 13 December.
As a training pamphlet: Holliman, R., Davies, G., Pearson, V., Collins, T., Sheridan, S., Brown, H., Hallam, J. and Russell, M. (2016). ‘Planning for school-university engagement with research.’ Engaging Research Blog. The Open University, Milton Keynes.
As a fully worked example: Holliman, R., Davies, G., Pearson, V., Collins, T., Sheridan, S., Brown, H., Hallam, J. and Russell, M. (2017, in press). ‘Planning for engaged research: a collaborative ‘Labcast’’, in Kucirkova, N. and Oliver Quinlan, O. (eds.) The Digitally Agile Researcher. (pp. 88-106.)Open University Press, Maidenhead. Available from: http://oro.open.ac.uk/50411
As a paper: Holliman, R. and Davies, G. (2015). Moving beyond the seductive siren of reach: planning for the social and economic impacts emerging from school-university engagement with research. JCOM 14(03), C06, pp. 1-10.