CUE East Addtional Information
CUE East Corporate Connection
Our pilot is designed to foster an informed climate within which we are all better able to improve quality of life, support social and economic regeneration regionally and inculcate civic values. We aim to transform the culture of UEA, a research-intensive university with an excellent track record in public and community engagement. We recognise that cultural change is driven by and demonstrated through, both structural and informal mechanisms and can take a generation to achieve. A significant early development for our Beacon is a new UEA Corporate Plan objective, to 'expand our contribution to public policy and public engagement'. The strategy is to, 'Make CUE East an effective Beacon for Public Engagement, contributing to the public understanding of major issues and building on our existing work with teachers, parents and pupils'. This puts us at the heart of UEA's mission. Under the theme of 'Resourcing the Vision: People', the Plan refers to an opportunity for staff to contribute to the University's enterprise and engagement agenda, '...especially our work as a Beacon for Public Engagement.' A dedicated performance indicator, 'The number of academics contributing to CUE East', gives us that all important corporate connection with those individual academics whom we will train, motivate and reward for their engagement activities over the next four years.
BBC Making History Workshop: 'The Value of Research?'
CUE East commissioned the BBC Making History Team to work with UEA to explore life experience as part of a project looking at 'The Value of Research'. The Making History Team (an author, a counsellor and a BBC journalist) worked with ten individuals, five members of the public and five postgraduate researchers, over a period of four weeks exploring a range of questions such as,
- What use is research?
- Do the public feel that university research is relevant to them? If so, how?
- How can the public contribute/take away from the process of research? What are their needs?
- How do academics feel about public engagement? What are the issues? What do they need to help with engagement?
- In what ways can the university engage with the community? And visa-versa.
The Making History Workshop, developed in recent years as part of a collaboration between UEA and BBC Voices, had already worked with a range of vulnerable groups in the community including severely physically disabled people and offenders but never with researchers. CUE East decided, as part of the Beacon 'experiment' to use this format to explore the role of research in society. The brief and the workshop invitation were deliberately non-prescriptive, 'a course with UEA exploring life experience...to talk about the value of research'. Whilst this created some uncertainty for the participants at the beginning of the sessions, it gave the group the opportunity to develop their own objectives around the central subject and has provided CUE East with the basis for further developing this format and working with a wider range of groups and communities.
'This is a very rewarding course which opens your eyes to the role the university plays in the community, how research affects and is affected by broader society. Also, it is very thought provoking in terms of reminding you of the most formative differences on who you are'
Audio files were also made as a part of this Workshop; readings of by the participants of their own writing, looking at 'how do we make the public value tricky areas of research (how should it, or even should it be conveyed to non-experts?)', and 'how do we break down boundaries between University and Community at large?'
