Engage 2010: The Engaged University - Embracing Change

Held on the 7&8 December 2010, our first National Conference brought over 300 people together to discuss, debate and share ideas about why and how universities should engage with the public. Delegates explored how public engagement can transform the ways universities behave and how they are perceived and valued, discussed why engaging with the public is a critical survival strategy for the 21st century university, and discovered how different institutions are rising to the challenge.

 

conference plenary

What happened?

We will be posting up information from the event over the coming weeks - including the presentations from the workshops, summaries of discussions, audio recordings of some of the presentations, and case studies shared in our taster case study sessions. If you want to keep up to date with the content being posted then you can follow up on Twitter @engage_2010. We will also post a news item onto the site, once all the content is live.

Information

Aimed at anyone with an interest in university public engagement including senior managers, academic staff and researchers, volunteering staff, support staff, policy makers, students and community partners. Content included

  • The launch of our Public Engagement Manifesto and associated resources - distilling the learning from the beacons initiative, and created to inspire and support universities to embrace engagement in their work;

  • High profile speakers exploring the place of public engagement in the 21st Century university system;

  • Workshops to share the stories of the beacons and others - honest, practical accounts of ways they've sought to make their universities more 'engagement friendly' - everything from creating an engagement strategy to changing reward structures in their institutions

  • Engagement in practice: front line experiences from practitioners who've developed effective ways of engaging with the public - from co-produced research projects to student volunteering including case studies from our vinspired student project

  • The launch of resources from our vinspired students project, including our research into student volunteering.

Programme

You can download the conference programme, workshops and taster case study lists here.

Download the Conference programme

Download the Workshop and Taster Case Study Lists (904kB)