PCER Culture Change Fund

About this scheme

• Introduction
• What we’re looking for
• Possible activities

Introduction

The University’s public and community engagement with research (PCER) team takes a broad view of ‘public engagement’ as any activity that connects or involves non-academic audiences with our research. This could variously be described as engagement, outreach, participation, involvement, co-production and more. Public engagement encompasses a broad spectrum, often with similar methods and similar, albeit differently nuanced, goals to make research more transparent, available, and accessible for those who want to be involved or participate in different ways.

Many people have preconceptions about what public engagement is. Most simply, public engagement should be work that engages (occupies or attracts someone's interest or attention) the public (ordinary people in general; the community) with research. Thus, you can be creative in how you interpret ‘public’ and ‘engagement’. Don’t let the combination of those words and the baggage that can be associated with them put you off.

‘Good’ public engagement means different things to different people. However, it tends to involve meaningfully listening to and involving public audiences in a way that improves research. For some forms of research, it might even be unethical not to engage with the public, for example, particular medical research projects.

The nature of an engagement activity will depend on how close a research question is to affecting the public. Basic research in the physical and life sciences probably won’t lend itself to a citizen’s jury. Nonetheless, it can be important to explain it to the public, setting out the anticipated benefits and, maybe, hearing their thoughts. The process of explaining your work and discussing it with public audiences can help to sharpen your own thinking and rationale for your work. Further, engagement allows complicated ideas to be conveyed in a range of formats, reaching more diverse audiences, and creating space for discussion.

Virtually all research seeks to better understand the world such that we can improve it and our lives within it. To do so means that the learning from or outputs of research ultimately must be made available to and adopted by the public. They should therefore be involved in research that affects them. However, often, PCER is done as something extra (‘on the side’) by motivated researchers. We would like to see it more integrated into researchers’ work – part of the fabric of research culture. Research staff should not have to do public engagement as overtime or volunteering. For example, if someone spends a weekend staffing a stand at a festival, there efforts should be recognised – departmental leaders should say ‘thank you’ and they should be able to claim that time back as time off in lieu (TOIL), should they choose to.

We do not expect all researchers to go and do public engagement activities. We recognise that the combination of the subject matter, time pressure and skillsets might make engagement excessively challenging. However:

1. There should be capacity within a division, department and group for someone – and, ideally, multiple people – to do high-quality public engagement with research, with dedicated support for engagement activity available if needed; and
2. As set out above, public engagement can encompass a huge range of activities. If you wouldn’t enjoy or see the value in being on stage or standing behind a table at a festival, consider working with school leaders to support teacher professional development in your area, or contributing to a community group that has an issue connected to your research area.

Finally, culture change is hard. An organisation as large as the University of Oxford will have myriad cultures across and within divisions and departments. Some departments will be supportive of public and community engagement with research, others will be more circumspect. We would like research staff and research students, regardless of their department, to have similar opportunities to lead and be involved in PCER activities and have similar reward and recognition for when they do PCER. A culture change project will be relatively blunt in the actions that it can take. Ultimately, it is people’s behaviours that will form culture. Imagine a group head who says ‘thank you’ to their researchers who’ve spent the weekend doing public engagement activities at a festival and encourages them to leave a little earlier on Friday. This isn’t an activity you can create or budget for, yet it would be an indicator of a department with a good culture of public engagement.

What we’re looking for

We will support projects that do one or more of the following

1. build research staff and/or research student capacity in PCER;
2. contribute to ongoing departmental support for PCER;
3. build, where appropriate, partnerships (informal or formal) with other departments, divisions, multidisciplinary teams and external professionals that will improve your department’s ability and capacity to do PCER.

This could be via a new programme of work, or it could enhance an existing departmental culture change project, including follow-on funding to a previously funded project.

You will need to complete an EDGE assessment as part of your application. This is an easy-to-use tool was created by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement to help HEIs assess their public engagement culture. It that looks at how public engagement with research is considered in terms of an organisation’s (whether university or department) purpose, processes and people.

1. Purpose
   1. Mission – how is PCER reflected in your department’s mission?
   2. Leadership – is PCER championed?
   3. Communication – does your department talk about PCER?
2. Process
   1. Support – how is PCER supported?
   2. Learning – what scope is there for professional development in PCER?
   3. Recognition – does PCER form part of your department’s reward and recognition criteria?
3. People
   1. Staff – can all staff be involved?
   2. Research students – what roles are there for students in PCER?
   3. Public – how to the public contribute to your work?

Having done this assessment to identify your department’s strengths and weaknesses in PCER, think about how you can address the weaknesses and build on the strengths. You might like to consider using a logic model or theory of change for this. A detailed course on creating logic models is available from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; simpler guides are also available (these guides are often oriented around a specific context, such as healthcare or education, but the principles and processes should be straightforward to apply for your setting).

The EDGE tool is focused on identifying whether public engagement happens and is supported. However, simply doing public engagement should never be the goal in itself – the engagement should always have a purpose (this is broadly reflected in the ‘mission’ dimension of EDGE). One cultural aspect of engagement is to ensure that it is purposeful and clear as to the differences that it aims to make, whether those differences are driven by departmental aims, team ambitions, or global targets (e.g., the Sustainable Development Goals).

Possible activities

The activities that you choose should enable you to achieve the changes you need to address the relative weaknesses discovered in your EDGE analysis. Culture change projects do not need to be public facing; the audience can be solely your research staff and/or students.

The example activities here are associated with different dimensions of the EDGE tool:

• Mission: Use a design-led approach to refresh your department’s PCER strategy and, if possible, its overall strategy to ensure that your approach to PCER is appropriate.
• Leadership: Support professional development of key individuals in PCER, either through training or secondments into PCER roles.
• Communication: Create assets (posters, videos) that will be visible for members of your department, highlight the opportunities for PCER .
• Support: Create an oversight/steering group for PCER drawing from PCER champions in your department and, maybe, elsewhere in the University.
• Learning: Develop a suite of resources to enable your colleagues to find out more about PCER, this could include training videos, budget to attend training courses, etc.
• Recognition: Create means to formally recognise and reward PCER, for example through certificating good PCER projects, an annual awards ceremony, or include doing PCER within your department’s reward and recognition structures.
• Staff: Provide opportunities for all staff to be involved, for example by attending a relevant festival.
• Students: Potentially like activities you might do with staff but being mindful of students’ experience and the additional/different support that they might need to contribute. Students might also have different motivations to staff for wanting to be involved, so you should check that your offer meets these expectations.
• Public: Identify routes for the public to contribute to your work; this could be at the strategic level or project level – consider convening a public advisory group with a clear Terms of Reference. If working/collaborating with the public, you must consider what they get in return – you should not ask them to do work for you for free.

Other activities that could generally support your department’s PCER culture and that could be considered as part of a wider portfolio of work (as constructed in a logic model) might include:

1. Developing and delivering PCER activities, events and resources for staff to participate in
2. PCER seminar series
3. Provision of PCER seed funding

Whatever you do should continue to have an impact after the funding period has finished. You should create resources, infrastructure and ways of working which mean that PCER is embedded, supported, recognised and rewarded within your department.

How to apply

1. Download and complete the Case for support template and the EDGE analysis tool
2. Combine and save the two documents as one PDF.
3. Use the University’s Internal Research Award Management System (IRAMS) to complete the online application form by
   1. completing the project details section;
   2. giving a financial breakdown:
      1. you must describe the costs being requested in the ‘description’ field for each budget line with a justification, if appropriate;
      2. more lines will become available once the purpose for three of them has been filled in;
   3. uploading the PDF version of your completed case for support and EDGE analysis.

Your application will be automatically submitted to your Department or Faculty. Subject to departmental approval, it will be reviewed by an internal panel of Oxford researchers and academics, and public engagement professionals, who will make the funding recommendations.