 |
 |
OK, I am aware that I am writing to a diverse range of people with clearly different emphases on public engagement so what I am going to present are some of the arguments for doing public engagement that we use with researchers here in Wales. Because I am coming with a range of comments, some may appear to indivuduals as patronising, but please remember that they are used in very context specific ways and feel free to comment. * Public engagement helps you to understand your subject better - there is nothing like talking to people who do not share the disciplinary asssumptions for identifying holes in your arguments that you do not even see are there. The classic version of this is a child asking "but why?" then when you give an answer "but why?" and so on until you until you come to a point where you cannot give an answer straight away but actually have to think about it. *Public engagement gets your research and you as a researcher in front of people who can actually use your ideas and so generate the commercial spin-offs or impact. Alan Hughes at Cambridge Business School undertook an evaluation of the HEFCE Third Mission funding which included talking to businesses about how successful interactions had started. They concluded that Community based interactions "represent in many cases the most fruitful way that universities can foster the development, through informal and people exchange activities, of a rich set of interactions which may lead to further and deeper patterns of collaborative research and teaching based activity" (http://www.cbr.cam.ac.uk/pdf/AcademicSurveyReport.pdf, p22). In fact, in a graph he used at a presentation but which he has not published yet, the research showed that twice as many successful interactions started from informal relationships between the business and the university than through the technology transfer offices. *The nature of the student population is changing rapidly and so interacting with the public can help ensure that teaching materials remain appropriate and contemporary *For many subjects talking with "the wider world" can open up new research problems for which funding can be obtained *Talking to others about your subject can often remind you just how much fun your work actually is which can be very useful during periods of intense work in labs/libraries. On the argument about compelling individual academics to undertkae public engagement, I agree that no-one should be forced to do it and that there should be suitable reward/recognition for doing it but: i) Many academics are already doing public engagement and not telling their employers about this ii) Many more academics could be doing more (some!) public engagement. This does not have to be 'formal' activities but actually working out how to answer the cabbie question "So what do you do?" in a way that opens up the conversation rather than shuts it down, or to be able to explain to your parents/aunts/children in a way that they can tell others. If every academic in Wales communicates in this way to just 10 people per year, they will reach 3% of Wales population iii) there should be a compulsion at an institutional and departmental level. I mentioned in a earlier post about more strategic approaches to PE. If departments looked at their research areas, identified the different potential audeinces and then matched the appropriate (interested) staff to these, they would be able to do more engagement in total without affecting the research output of the department as more individuals would be doing 1 or 2 activities per year. We can all think of people who we wouldn't want talking to school children, but they might be able to do a fantastic after dinner talk to a business club, or attend a charity event to talk about their research (where that is relevant to the charity). Bruce ********************************************************************** 1. To suspend yourself from the list, whilst on leave, for example, send an email to mailto:[log in to unmask] with the following message: set psci-com nomail -- [include hyphens] 2. To resume email from the list, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message: set psci-com mail -- [include hyphens] 3. To leave psci-com, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message: leave psci-com -- [include hyphens] 4. Further information about the psci-com discussion list, including list archive, can be found at the list web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/psci-com.html 5. The psci-com gateway to internet resources on science communication and science and society can be found at http://psci-com.ac.uk 6. To contact the Psci-com list owner, please send an email to mailto:[log in to unmask] **********************************************************************