How do we support research engagement?
17 September 2019 Leave a comment
Joann Cattlin is project manager on the Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change project, an ARC Linkage project at the University of Melbourne.
Building engagement is central to her role in coordinating the team of 20 researchers and 17 partners across four countries. The project has achieved significant collaboration with partners and has generated international interest from other researchers, industry and community.
She has worked as a researcher and project manager for the last 10 years and was previously an academic librarian. Joann received a Universitas 21 scholarship to undertake this study tour and is conducting ongoing research on the link between project management approaches and engagement. Joann is presenting case studies from her trip at the ARMS conference in Adelaide. You can find her on Twitter at @jocattlin.
Shape Lab at MoMA, by Michael Nagle and MoMAlearning on Flickr.
Research engagement is a government priority in many countries. While the requirements differ, there is a growing body of research and practice that can help inform how we respond.
In June 2019, I visited eight universities in Canada and the USA and met with 65 managers and academics to find out what how research engagement was supported in North America.
North American context
In Canada and the USA, the drivers for research engagement are a combination of funder requirements, mission-driven community engagement and growth of research partnerships. In Canada, research engagement – or knowledge mobilisation – has been a requirement of major government grants for over 10 years. In the USA, the National Science Foundation is the only funder requiring engagement or broader impacts.
Universities have developed a range of responses to support researchers and there are also networks and communities of practice like Research Impact Canada and the National Alliance for Broader Impacts.
I met with research managers and academics within central research offices, faculties and research centres across a range of disciplines, which provided me with a detailed snapshot of what engagement looks like in practice. I was interested in the way universities structured support within both centralised and devolved structures, and how they addressed the common challenge of connecting researchers and professionals across complex and often siloed organisation.
Four key areas emerged: Read more of this post
I send versions of this bio to conferences and academic journals and reproduce it in thousands of conversations. It follows a pretty defined formula, beginning with my name (often also given with pre-noms), my position in a hierarchy and my employing institution. It then proceeds to mobilise my publications in order to establish my authority and field of expertise, complete with the sanction of academic publishers and grant-making bodies. At the end come more references to credentialising institutions that stand as further markers of status and serve as evidence of my international formation and legibility. 
