Viewpoint: April McMahon

April McMahon joined Aberystwyth University as Vice-Chancellor in August 2011.  Previously, she was Vice-Principal and Head of the College of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh, where she also held the Forbes Chair of English Language.  Before returning to Edinburgh (where she was previously a student) in 2005, she was Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, and Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield. 

April's research interests include how and why languages change; the use of computational methods to group languages into families; the evolution of language; and the history of varieties of English and Scots, and she has written or edited 9 books and more than 40 articles and chapters.  She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Academy, and currently serves on the Councils of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  April has a strong interest in training and development, especially relating to research funding, and regularly gives talks and workshops in this area.

What is public engagement and why does it matter to HEIs?

When I am advising colleagues about writing research grant proposals, I always suggest they think about three key questions: 

1. What is it that you want to find out?
2. How will you go about doing that?
3. Who else might want to know what you discover? 

The quality of a proposal depends, to a considerable extent, on the attractiveness of the first answer, and the robustness and thoroughness of the second - as peer-reviewers, we tend to be interested in whether a novel question is being asked, and in how up-to-date the writer is with the theoretical or methodological context.  The third question, however, is the one where public engagement starts to become relevant; and part of the issue is whether we ask it at all.

It's easy to assume that we'll find it easy to answer question three because it's so obvious:  other researchers just like me, in my subfield, will want to know what I discover.  There's nothing wrong with wanting to communicate our results and ideas to like-minded scholars who will help refine our thinking and take the discipline forward; and there's nothing wrong with choosing traditional outlets like specialist academic monographs and discipline-specific journals to publish in.  But if that is all we do, then we might well be losing out.  For one thing, we often only really come to understand a key concept, or identify a nagging problem, through teaching or supervising students - and crystallising our research for a general audience can have exactly the same beneficial effect.  Not only does engagement with more diverse audiences communicate our ideas and solutions more widely, it also sharpens our understanding and improves our communication, regardless of the audience.

To my mind, a whole range of improvements flow from answering question 3 in as broad a way as possible.  If academics are used to thinking about communicating clearly and straightforwardly, it's much more likely that our ideas will get out there and become influential.  After all, we have to condense our thinking for non-specialists in a whole range of domains - and that is true for research grant proposals, just as much as in media interviews, or talks to schoolchildren or at science festivals.  If we're used to talking accessibly, our first contacts with prospective students, through open days and introductory events, are likely to be more successful, which helps universities' own priorities.  Research-led teaching becomes more of a reality too - no wonder that teaching and research sometimes appear to be at odds with one another, if we seem destined to try to make the former as simple, and the latter as complex as possible! 

Presenting ideas clearly also makes it easier to work in interdisciplinary teams, which are the current powerhouses of progress in much academic research.  You might think that the increasing specialisation of academic subfields, and of the journals where their practitioners publish, means we are scarcely able to keep up with our own area, let alone diversify into others; but while that makes it hard to be an interdisciplinary individual, interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary teams are entirely feasible, and are held together by good communication among their members.  Increasingly, there are also funding sources for collaborative work between universities and businesses, creative practitioners, and other educators, and to take full advantage of these, researchers need to believe in genuine two-way exchange of ideas, and universities must present themselves as accessible and open for business.  This should not be an add-on, but an integral part of what we do, on the basis that a willingness to engage, to understand what broader audiences want and need, and to share knowledge, are all a necessary part of what universities are for. 

Of course, the quality of the research we are doing is vitally important - all the other benefits here have to start from that assumption of high quality.  But increasingly, public engagement is bound together with the research we do.  Applications for funding now ask us to reflect on the impact of our work and on likely beneficiaries - in other words, they ask us to answer question three.