Introducing Public Engagement

sophie — 1 June 2009 - 2:33pm

Kathy Sykes: My role here at the university of Bristol is to champion public engagement, encouraging our staff and students to get out there and talk with and also listen to the public. It’s also the job for the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement and the beacons, aiming for an environment where universities from across the whole of the UK see it as a core part of their mission to think with the public. Here’s what public engagement means just to some of the staff at the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England.

Chris Curling: Public engagement is all about adding value to society at large by making direct and tangible use of the knowledge base in the higher education establishment for the benefit and the prosperity of society as a whole.

Diana Jeater: For me public engagement is putting the university at the heart of the community.

Tom Sperlinger: It’s not just bringing people into the university, but creating a permanent interchange between the university and the outside world.

Steve Poole: It reminds us that we are not just talking to one another in an enclosed academic cloister, but that that, we play a part in it, and we play a part in the world and it only works if it interacts.

Kathy Sykes: Michael Naughton has set up the Innocence Project where students work on possible miscarriages of justice.

Michael Naughton: Were engaged with our local community. We are working on cases which are local and national, the students actually do legal research for local community groups, we go into schools, we do talks with church groups. So you know I don’t spend a lot of my time thinking ‘oh, I wonder what public engagement is’, I’m just actually doing work which is publicly engaged.

Kathy Sykes: There are lots of benefits of public engagement. For universities it can help us to do better research and better teaching, and it can be hugely motivating for staff and students.

Tom Sperlinger: One of the things I’d say is that it’s not separate from all of the other things the university thinks it’s there for. Public engagement is partly about making sure that research really is relevant to people in the wider world, and making sure that teaching is relevant to, and informed by, the wider world.

Ron Ritchie: For the university at a strategic level there are a number of benefits, not least its reputation enhancing.

Yusuf Ahmad: It establishes the university as actually having a proper civic role.

Kathy Sykes: There are also benefits for the organisations that work with universities. The Single Parent Action Network works with both UWE and the University of Bristol.

Tove Samzelius: If you are actually conducting research together with a university it’s actually strengthening capacity of the organisation, its actually strengthening our expertise and knowledge. When we try to influence policies as well it’s giving us a kind of strength behind our arguments because policy makers you know like the type of evidence that can be generated through research.

Kathy Sykes: And of course another important benefit for members of the public is access to learning, which can be life changing.

Sue West: If you failed your eleven plus, you felt a failure for the rest of your life. At my age, 68, to actually get to university it’s been quite a revelation. I can’t quite believe even after a year that I am actually a university student, but I am, I’ve got a card that says so.

Kath Sykes: And finally, for the individuals that work and study at the university the benefits of public engagement are huge.

Yusuf Ahmad: One of the things about public engagement is that it creates a sense of purpose to what one is doing and therefore greater job satisfaction.

Michael Naughton: Practical applied research is perhaps seen lower down the hierarchy of academic work but I think my submission to the RAE this time was one of the highest in the department, and you know, I’m finding no problem whatsoever in attracting the leading journals to the work that I am doing which is entire engaged.

Diana Jeater: You can never get stale when you are dealing with the general public and I find that so exciting. I love it.