Get out more

09 July 2010

By Sarah Davies

What do having a cup of tea with an elderly resident of your local community, carrying out focus groups with users of your research, and giving a talk in a school have in common? Well, they all give you a brief respite from your lab, office, or day to day grind, for a start. And, secondly, they all might be considered public engagement.

Depending on who you ask, PE can be understood as pretty much anything that involves non-academics with you or your research. The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement’s current definition is that:

Public engagement describes the myriad ways in which the activity and benefits of higher education can be shared with the public. Engagement is by definition a two way process involving interaction and listening, with the goal of generating mutual benefit.

This text is deliberately fairly broad: different universities will include everything from staff volunteer programmes to research that shapes government policy within it. Which means that, whatever your area of research or personal interests, there are probably ways in which you do – or could – carry out engagement.

You can find out more about public engagement and research staff, and join a conversation about its pros, cons and practicalities, at Vitae’s new public engagement mini-site, which also showcases some new resources for researchers in doing PE.