Deep dives into university research practices around the world, including supervision, community engagement, funding and publication.

Research excellence

Universities, as civic institutions, have a moral duty to support their communities of place, interest, identity or experience – locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. One way they can do this is through public engagement. It can seem difficult to prioritise public engagement when there are so many other calls on your time, but there are two key points to bear in mind:Public engagement is more important than you might think.&nbsp;Public engagement is easier than you might think.Public engagement is important because propagating and democratising knowledge confers so many benefits on wider society. It improves health and well-being by nurturing hobbies and interests, offering new experiences&nbsp;and changing behaviour. It supports personal resilience by diversifying life experience, widening horizons and helping achieve personal goals. It boosts economic resilience by instilling knowledge, skills and ways of thinking, providing volunteering opportunities and raising aspirations. It builds social capital by extending community-university networks and increasing appetites for learning, and it strengthens civil society by developing skills in discussion and debate, supporting informed decision-making and giving people the opportunity to devise and participate in research themselves.Public engagement benefits researchers and universities by extending research networks and providing different perspectives. It develops transferable skills in researchers, boosts self-esteem and enhances the public reputation of the university. Public engagement contributes to the research excellence framework&nbsp;(REF) and knowledge exchange framework&nbsp;(KEF), which contribute to universities’ reputations and their income, and supports student recruitment.Whether your primary role is research, teaching&nbsp;or supporting public engagers, here are key tips based on my experience with PEARL&nbsp;(Public Engagement for All with Research at Lincoln), which we set up with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funding to enhance public engagement across the university. These actions can be applied at every level, from individuals to institutions.Get&nbsp;startedEstablish in your own mind what you want your public engagement to achieve and why. This helps plan and evaluate more effectively.&nbsp;Get help – sign up for any public engagement training at your university and check out the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) website.&nbsp;Don’t be afraid to start small. Even talking to friends about one aspect of your work practises public engagement as it builds fluency. Taking part in on-campus research festivals saves you finding your own audience, while contributing an activity to a national initiative such as Pint of Science or Being Human will come with ready-made PR.Think&nbsp;about your audienceConsider what your audience is likely to want or expect. Thinking about who will participate will help you refine your ideas and pitch your activity.&nbsp;Enjoy your audience and pay attention to them. They will value the authenticity of connecting with people who really are the experts and will offer you different and new perspectives. Asking for a show of hands in response to a couple of opening questions gets your audience engaging with you right from the start.Look for new audiences. These might be groups with interests in your subject (such as&nbsp;environmental groups, history societies etc) or organisations like U3A (University of the Third Age), which has local groups nationwide with a remarkably eclectic range of interests. Making a virtue of recent necessity, online engagement is now easy and widely accepted.Build&nbsp;support networksConnect with others – it’s insightful, inspiring and encouraging to share ideas and experiences with others involved in public engagement.&nbsp;Work across disciplinary boundaries – there’s huge potential in, for example, life scientists collaborating with performing artists to come up with exciting new ways of sharing knowledge.Involve people from different career stages and tracks. Students can contribute newly minted freshness and enthusiasm, senior researchers can provide confidence underpinned by decades of accumulated knowledge, staff heavily involved in teaching have honed communication skills.As you gain experienceTry new approaches, especially anything that turns one-way dissemination into two-way conversation or sustainable participation – from including polls in an online talk to asking people to co-produce research.&nbsp;Remember that public engagement can take place anywhere – indoors, outdoors, on campus, in the high street or in the back of beyond, on air or online. Think creatively.Be open-minded about taking up offers of help. The most important asset is enthusiasm – everything else can be learned!Capture the impactRecord the outcomes of your engagement. This will show whether you achieved your aims and help identify any improvements needed. It will also show others what you have achieved, which is hugely important for you and for the university. Any information, even a simple headcount, is useful, but it’s even better if supplemented by qualitative quotes from visitors’ books or quantitative statistics from feedback forms. Responses collected before and after the activity can show the difference it’s made, but such intensive data collection can be counterproductive – no one likes feeling like a lab rat when they are enjoying indulging their curiosity. Whatever approach you use, think what you want to be able to say about your activity’s outcomes, and draft your questions accordingly.&nbsp;Formally recognise and reward public engagement – include public engagement categories in workloading, staff merit programmes and student awards.Celebrate your public engagement successes within and beyond the university – in departmental meetings, in annual reports, online and in media communications – and even in research articles. It’s good news for everyone and will inspire others – completing a virtuous circle.Carenza Lewis is&nbsp;professor for the public understanding of research at the University of Lincoln.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Carenza Lewis shares a step-by-step guide for embedding public engagement into your institution’s research and teaching 

How to embed public engagement into your teaching and research activities 

All universities have a responsibility to engage with and support the communities in which they are located. This can be done in many ways but a key tool in any university’s repertoire is its research.So, how can universities shape research projects to ensure benefits are felt by local communities? One way is by inviting community participation in research projects that&nbsp;seek to address key issues or challenges faced by local people and groups.These will vary according to the institution’s&nbsp;remit and its locality. So, the starting point for any university or academic looking to develop such a project must be a thorough understanding of local issues or major challenges faced by local people.Shaping research to community needsUse existing networks: When initiating new community-university research partnerships it can be helpful to draw upon existing research networks that have connections to targeted groups within the community. The Our Health programme, which aims to reduce health inequalities through community-based participatory research, has built upon relationships that have emerged out of associated clinical research grants. Doing this not only reduces the initial workload in terms of seeking out community partners but it almost always leads to a “natural fit”&nbsp;around shared research interests and long-term goals.Clarify the research focus:&nbsp;To effectively&nbsp;shape&nbsp;your&nbsp;research to respond to community needs, it is important to be clear about what, and how, you are seeking to investigate. The Our Health team focuses on research related to health and well-being. We work in partnership with socio-economically disadvantaged communities to improve health literacy through participatory research and empower patient and community groups to take greater control of their own health. By establishing the overall aim of the community engagement and understanding the research methods involved in achieving that aim, you will be better placed to keep the community engagement on track and participants working as a cohesive, strong and motivated research team.Use existing resources: A valuable starting point for any academic or practitioner who seeks to understand community needs around health and well-being would be resources such as the James Lind Alliance (JLA), which has&nbsp;useful guidelines for forming and working in research priority-setting partnerships. The Our Health team were guided by the evidence base the JLA had compiled of health-related research questions posed by the wider public, as well as conducting our own focus groups with local community groups to hear directly what research needs they felt were important and would want to participate in.Make it interdisciplinaryWe have shown through a qualitative case study of the Our Health programme that interdisciplinarity enhances community-based participatory research processes by providing flexibility and more research solutions and options through the range of disciplinary knowledge. When interdisciplinarity crossed a wide range of disciplines from the sciences and social sciences the shared learning environment provided was particularly rich. We would encourage others who are interested in setting up their own community-based participatory research programmes to harness the power of interdisciplinary collaboration. It is possible to facilitate meaningful local change by bringing together teams of researchers and mixed-level students from across the university to work on university-community research partnerships.Embed community research into curriculaStudents participate in these projects because they want rich experiential learning and skills training. They want to make a difference in the communities in which they live and study. We have found that students report gaining&nbsp;confidence in conducting research, in working outside their disciplines and engaging with professionals and the wider public. To offer these experiences to a wide and diverse student body and maximise impact, these opportunities should be embedded within the curriculum with sufficient financial and staffing support. Think long termDeveloping community-university research partnerships takes time. If you want to reap the many benefits that these partnerships offer, you need to think and plan for the long term. The research relationships need to be fostered and respected and this means that all participants need to commit their time and energy to ensuring the relationships remain healthy and productive.The real-world research questions presented by community-based research&nbsp;are complex and often problematic. Unpacking questions of this complexity may take several years but doing so&nbsp;provides potent, long-term learning experiences for community partners and students. The length of time it takes to answer community-posed questions and the length of university programmes means that students come and go from teams. This can be a challenge in terms of building&nbsp;relationships  between community partners and students. To mitigate this, try to ensure there is a constant, core team of academic staff.&nbsp;This will allow a natural student and community partner turnover to occur without disrupting the overall programme.Helen Szoor-McEIhinney is Our Health programme lead, Alette Willis is senior lecturer in health in social science, and Liam Gilchrist is Our Health research associate, all at the University of Edinburgh.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.&nbsp;

 How can academics shape their research around key community needs and encourage participation from multidisciplinary faculty, students and local people? Helen Szoor-McElhinney and colleagues offer insight 

Directing research to engage and support local communities  

Helen Wolfenden from Macquarie University presents a podcast offering advice on publishing or communicating research in new formats beyond the scope of traditional academic journals

Making practice publishable: a journal article-cum-podcast

Deep dives into university research practices around the world, including supervision, community engagement, funding and publication

Research excellence

How to embed public engagement into your teaching and research activities

Directing research to engage and support local communities

Making practice publishable: a journal article-cum-podcast

Discover

More from THE

Sign up

Collaborate with THE

About

Legal stuff