Afternoon Panel: What's Next for Public Engagement?

By Jasmin Skelly

In this panel experts on public engagement gave their own personal insights into the field. The panellists were Dr Anita Shaw who is deputy CEO of Techniquest the Science Centre in Cardiff Bay, Dr Richard Watermeyer a researcher on public engagement, Wendy Sadler who runs the successful science outreach company Science Made Simple and Professor Hamish Fyfe who is Director of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at Glamorgan University. They were each asked why University Engagement is important to them.

Anita replied that the key ingredient of Techniquest’s 25 years of success is their collaboration with other partners, whilst Wendy noted that Science Made Simple is run as a business, which serves as a great motivator for success. This is because clients who are not happy with their work will use other companies. Wendy has run Science Made simple for many years, and she has noticed a distinct attitude change in the researchers she trains, who seem keener to engage with communities now then they have been in the past.

Richard Watermeyer highlighted the fact that we live in a Global Knowledge Economy where information is power, and academics need to be accountable. Public engagement therefore can be seen as a necessary part of a researchers work, as it enhances their legitimacy. Hamish Fyfe elaborated on the nature of public engagement saying that it is too often seen as a way of helping the public to learn about research, in a top down one way flow of information. In his experience it is the researcher that often encounters the biggest learning curve and therefore we should throw away the deficit model of engagement and ask ourselves what we can learn from our surrounding communities.

The panel then invited questions from the audience. One such question was ‘How can we measure the impact of public engagement’?

Anita highlighted the fact that the development of the Generic Learning Outcomes (GLOs) marked an important move away from the traditional emphasis on cognitive learning, and helped museums to measure their impact and success more accurately.

Hamish said that organisations want to measure success by looking at the numbers of people involved, but this is a mistake as evaluation is about value, and quantitative measurements of numbers of people tell you nothing about this. You need to hear the stories of real people affected by public engagement to understand the true value of a project, and this is best done through case studies.

The final and perhaps most salient question put to the panel was ‘What role will universities in Wales have in the next 10 years?’

Anita answered that we have moved a long way in the last 10 years, as public engagement is now seen as a more important element of a researcher’s work than it was in the past. Hopefully, she remarked, this trend will continue into the next 10 years. A key part of this will be to evolve a less top down approach to public engagement where universities are engaging because they want to, rather than just because they feel they need to.

A member of the audience, Richard Knapp from Swansea Metropolitan University and leader of the Teen Talkback Beacon project added to this by saying that universities need to engage with their communities as equal partners, which is a problem as universities typically have more power in the relationship.

Hamish Fyfe summed up these ideas by saying that if two people are going to get engaged, both have to have an equal desire and need for it, otherwise it simply just won’t work.