Starting in June, CUE East celebrated with annual awards in Norwich. What I loved about this event, and what for me sums up the power of the Beacons initiative, is that you couldn’t tell who was an academic and who was a community member – everyone felt welcome and everyone’s contributions and expertise were valued.

Edinburgh Beltane held their summit in September and Beacon for Wales just recently in October (all the tweets are captured here). What is clear is that there is an appetite UK-wide for public engagement and now, people (researchers, support staff, community groups, students) aren’t just talking about it, they are doing it. Hopefully they are also beginning to recognise that the real value, the actual reward comes from taking part, encouraging contributions, applying skills, sharing knowledge and encouraging learning.

I hope people will join the Manchester and North-East network as we celebrate public engagement in November, in Manchester and across the North. I’m sure there’s something for everyone, from a talk about the Chinese Bond Markets to a seminar evaluating the impacts of Public Engagement to a workshop exploring the role of science globally to a Cafe Politique event on Chavs and the demonization of the working class, a BBC Learning UK-wide engagement event to capture everyday life of Britain in a Day to a workshop exploring the Transition Movement and an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) seminar exploring the policy and politics of the Third Mission much much more.

At our Manchester summit, we’ll be celebrating, recognising and supporting the work of mutually beneficially Community-University Partnerships through our Recognition Awards. It is here that strong relationships, trust and creativity combine to generate wide social benefits. We have a great panel lined up to help us recognise these partnerships for the difference they make to Greater Manchester. Awardees will receive upto £1500 and support to help them thrive. I hope that other universities, including those successful in the Research Council UK’s (RCUK) Catalyst call might innovate and make use of this approach that values the contribution of partners, not just universities.

Again, community-university partnerships has been at the heart of much of the Beacons’ work and is, in my humble opinion, the key to a sustainable legacy in the future. The national conversation is hopefully catching up with regional ones where we no longer talk about the value of universities doing public engagement, per se, but the purpose of public engagement and the difference it makes to communities around the world. There are many, many more community-university networks out there who are talking about mutual benefit, and working in partnerships to tackle social, economic and health injustices. Here the reward is the social impact that is achieved. And, of course, policy wise, capturing the impact of this approach plays right into the Research Excellence Framework and RCUK’s Pathways to Impact.

By working with the NCCPE, the Beacons are helping to move the National conversation on a little further at subsequent conferences, including a session on Knowledge Brokerage on 7th December 2011 and Making Knowledge Count hosted by AURIL (Association for Research and Industry Links) in February 2012.

A very refreshing approach to embed public engagement at the heart of a research call is evident in the ESRC and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) joint Connected Communities call. For me, this call encapsulates many of the beacons ethos and achievements – promoting interdisciplinarity, involving and building capacity for communities, considering principles and the ethics of engagement and using engagement to enhance impact. The exciting and attractive thing about this call is that it is also encouraging international collaborations – it is here that UK universities and communities can, not only join the international conversation, but contribute, learn and make a difference to society too.

Here’s a list of relevant networks, concordats and principles for engagement, that I have learned much from already… please feel free to add in the comments if we’ve missed any!

[1] Beacons for Public Engagement: www.publicengagement.ac.uk

[2] South East Coastal Communities: http://www.coastalcommunities.org.uk/

[3] Urban Regeneration Making a Difference: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/central/rbi/stratpro/urbanreg/

[4] Connected Communities: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/connectedcommunities.aspx

[5] Research Council UK Concordat for engaging the public in research: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/per/Pages/Concordat.aspx

[6] NCCPE Manifesto for Public Engagement: http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/why-does-it-matter/manifesto

[7] Talloires Network: http://www.tufts.edu/talloiresnetwork/

[8] Community University Partnerships Network: http://cuppcop.ning.com/

[9] Enhancing North-South Cooperation in Community-University Engagement: http://pascalobservatory.org/pascalnow/pascal-activities/news/enhancing-north-south-cooperation-community-university-engagement-c

[10] The Pascal Observatory: http://pascalobservatory.org/ 

[11] Community Campus Partnerships for Health: http://www.ccph.info/

• It is important to think strategically about public engagement at all levels from the formal overarching University strategy, through Faculty/School level right down to research teams. I have lost count of the number of times I have talked with academics who manage teams and watched them go through a set of logic that leads them  to the conclusion that “If I treat engagement in the same way that I treat research and teaching and spread it amongst the most appropriate people in the team, we can get more done with less negative impacts on the group.”
• Accept that public engagement is loosely defined and let it be as broad as possible to encompass the different disciplinary issues and individual preferences, e.g. working with infants, preferring to blog rather than interact face to face.
• Actively generate multiple opportunities for people to try different types of engagement. The chances of someone finding a method that they are good at and comfortable with on their first go is quite slim. It’s OK not to like it, try again with a different method or a different audience – but don’t give up on the first go.
• Try to remove ‘excuses’ – there are common reasons why people say that they do not do public engagement, including a lack of perceived career reward, the fact that new ways of working with public can be risky so it is quite easy for team heads to fund what they know works. For example, the Beacon for Wales has funded a number of projects to try new ways of working for that unit. Many of these have already been taken on by the unit as part of their activities and funded from within that unit.
• Provide network opportunities for people interested in engagement to meet each other and to meet interested people from outside the university. Our two networks provided these unstructured spaces to allow people to discuss plans and potential projects. About 1/6^th of network members say that they have developed new collaborative projects as a result of attending these network meetings.
• Aim for everyone to do some form of public engagement – I feel that this encourages teams to think a bit more broadly about what they can do in order to get Dr Y involved. Often the conversation would then start “I wouldn’t want to put Dr Y in front of the public because…” but it soon turns to other ways of communicating and engaging that may be more suited to Dr Y’s skills and character. As much as engagement is about including more of the public in what universities do, it is about including more academics in what we do.

I am fully aware that this posting does not cover all the issues, and that there are many contentious and even controversial aspects underlying these, but feel that these are the main aspects to the work that we have done and to how we have changed the culture at Cardiff and Glamorgan to be more supportive of the fantastic engagement work that their staff and students have been doing.  I would be happy to chat these through with people.

Update: Friday 19th August - NERC have published their latest guidelines with a similar approach to public engagement

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has published its new guidelines for research and research training grants and have made some changes when it come to public engagement:

It has removed “specific references to ‘public engagement’ which by now should be embedded in all applications.” On the face of it, this could be a bad thing as it could be interpreted as one of the Research Councils reducing the emphasis on public engagement further after its decision to review the Partnerships for Public Engagement. However, the new guidelines make clear that public engagement is still expected by the researchers that the Council funds.

“Investigators are expected to participate in activities that seek to engage the public with engineering and science.” (p34)

It also clearly states that “Funding for public engagement activities connected with a project can be sought in a grant application and explained under Pathways to Impact.” (p34)

In addition, there are proposed changes to the terms and conditions of research grants, the first of which places obligations on the Research Organisation itself. They are expected to adopt the “principles, standards and good practice” set out in the Concordat for Public Engagement and to create the “environment in which public engagement is valued, recognised and supported.”

This obligation to “actively communicate the research to the public at local and national level” is also clearly placed on the Grant Holder and the Co-Investigators in a  Grant Condition dedicated to public engagement.

Finally, and perhaps most usefully, there is a new Condition relating to the EPSRC research training grants. This condition expects the Research Organisation and the Supervisors to actively communicate. So if you have PhD students, it will be your role to communicate the research that they are working on, or better still to help them engage with the public on their own.

Cultural Change

Initiatives that have influenced the culture of the museum include the arrival of the Inspiring Learning for All Framework and then through the creation of ‘Learning Spaces’. In this case cultural change was driven through the creation of a good example; once one good learning space had been established it seemed easier to improve things elsewhere.

One of the most powerful ways of changing the culture of an organisation is to send its staff to other places where they can experience other ways of doing things and reflect on their practice. Different networks can work in very different ways; some are more collaborative with one partner really leading the way and setting the pace for others to follow, and yet others are more bottom up affairs. They all have different strengths and the Beacons could learn from this, finding the best ways to allow good tried and tested ideas to travel across from one network to another.

Reflecting on our Practices and Achievements

I am firmly convinced of the power of tangential learning. I believe strongly that some of our most inspiring, creative thinking happens when we hear or learn about a situation that is similar enough for us to find connection, but different enough to spark some creative leap! By concentrating on learning from mistakes, you miss out on the opportunities of learning from successes, and so instead of concentrating on problems, you can instead use the approach of appreciative enquiry. At the museum we haven’t ignored problems, but we have found a less depressing and much more energising way of thinking about them. We’ve had some great conversations about what we’ve done well, what’s succeeded and the directions we want to move towards in the future… The rest of the morning is going to be about doing some really focused thinking about what are the ingredients of success…what are the critical success factors…what do we need to do more of?

This post is a summary of Ceri’s talk which can be found in full here (Word document) Ceri Black Talk

In short, the Welsh public view universities in Wales extremely positively with over 80% of people thinking that they make a valuable contribution to Welsh culture and that they should be proud of the high standard of education provided by Welsh universities (although the survey was done long before the University of Wales story was a big as it has become). Perhaps most importantly from our point of view is that over 60% of people think that universities in Wales are more open than they were a few years ago. These positive attitudes are generally consistent across the “standard” groupings of age, gender, and socioeconomic status.

As with all surveys, the really interesting stuff happens on a smaller scale than the overall findings. Our sample of just over 800 is big enough to be representative for Wales over all and for sensible comparisons between two or three internal groupings, e.g. gender or age but not for geographical location.For the same reason, we did not collect data on ethnicity/nationality background as Wales is more than 95% white (2009 figures) and we were not collecting a large enough sample to make this statistically significant.

There are areas where universities can do much better including getting poorer socioeconomic groups to participate in events. 1 in 3 ABC1s had taken part in an event in the previous 12 months compared to 1 in 5 of C2DEs.It is not clear why this is the case as the main barriers to engagement were the same across the socioeconomic status. These were: not interested (19%); not enough time (18%); campus is too far away or to difficult to get to (13%); and not knowing what is going on (12%). The first two are more challenging to address, but the for last two there are simple actions that the universities can take: putting on more events away from campus and becoming better and more coordinated at marketing their activities.

The area that surprised me most (with my background in teaching U3A and other community groups) was the large number of people who felt that they were too old to engage with universities. 10% of people who had not attended an event in the last 12 months gave age as an unprompted reason as to why they do not engage more. I realise that too old can cover a multitude of other reasons (mobility, not wanting to go to events at night) but it seems to me to be an area where we can proactively work to increase the links between universities and older people.

It would be great to hear what others have to say about these findings and how they might relate to other surveys such as Public Attitudes to Science so please leave your comments here or email me at beacon@cardiff.ac.uk

The morning looked at the issues and solutions that the Beacons have experienced over the last four years and what ‘advice’ they would want to pass on to other institutions to prevent them repeating the same unnecessary mistakes that we have. This was achieved through pair and small group work.

The main emergent themes from these activities were:

• the importance of partnerships and networks;
• the role of critical friends which could be internal or external;
• importance of working at all levels at the same time to generate culture change – not just top down or bottom up;
• working with existing culture at the same time as moving it to a new one;
• flexibility in approach.

In the plenary session to close the morning, participants were asked to consider what advice we could give other universities who wish to build their public engagement work. Important points made were:

• Resources need to be respected by academics and so need to be clear on their provenance (literature, expertise etc);
• Managers need to understand the business case for PE;
• External champions/critical friends can provide safe space for institutions to discuss engagement;
• Students (undergraduate and postgraduate) can be key practitioners;
• Allow risk taking and support learning from failure.

The afternoon used the open space method to allow important challenges that were raised in the morning and new ideas to be developed in small groups that were intended to create key actions on an individual, group and sector level, although for the last these were more recommendations for funders of universities. The main topics covered, with the main proposed action/insight, if agreed, were:

• Post Beacon networking – to specifically open up as Beacons and to invite other regional HEIs to events and training
• How to continue the move to public dialogue – need new understanding of expertise
• Measurement of PE and REF – Best engagement projects are multi-layered and have a diversity of partnerships but also are the hardest to measure
• How do we connect student volunteering and PE? – will the increase in fees make people more or less engaged?
• Developing learning in PE – explore the idea of chartered status or a quality mark for training
• How do you make engagement culture change work without becoming too internally focussed? – Culture change team focus inwards as academics and support team can and should face outwards.
• How to exchange and capitalise on knowledge generated by the Beacons – Create opportunities for people to meet for purposeful events where informal networking can lead to new projects and partnerships

The full report will be on the websites of the Beacon for Wales and the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement

All the beacons at the Manchester Gathering 2010

The beacons started their work in 2008 and are four-year programmes.  The past three years has seen much activity in developing resources, networks and capacity. In our final year we are looking to share what we have learned and our aspirations for the future of public engagement in the UK research and higher education sector with as many people as possible.

The posts in this blog will be by a variety of authors, who have been involved in the programme to date. The posts will bring you updates about our current activities, comments on the value of public engagement and general insights about how to achieve culture change, among other things.

Please feel free to comment on the posts in a constructive manner. If you have something you’d like to contribute as a post email us at beaconsforpublicengagement@gmail.com.

We hope you find our musings interesting, thought provoking and useful!