Engaging Opportunities: Connecting young people with contemporary research and researchers

Holliman, Richard; Davies, Gareth; Ford, Diane; Russell, Mark; Steed, Anthony; Brown, Helen; Pearson, Victoria; Collins, Trevor; Stutchbury, Kris; Squires, Andrew; Scanlon, Eileen; Whitelegg, Liz; Ansine, Janice; Braithwaite, N St.J; Swithenby, Stephen; Dommett, Ellie; Sumner, Janet; Lee, Clare; Kendall, Joe; Green, Penny; Sharp, Damien; Bullivant, Mike; Devine, Peter and Hawthorne, Val (2018). Engaging Opportunities: Connecting young people with contemporary research and researchers. The Open University and the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance, Milton Keynes.

URL: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/per

Abstract

This is the final report for ‘Engaging Opportunities’, an RCUK-funded School-University Partnership between the Open University and the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance. Informed by action research, this four-year project was designed to create structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable mechanisms for effective school-university engagement with research. The report describes an evidence-based strategy designed to embed school-university engagement with research within the University’s strategic planning for research and the operational practices of researchers. Through the early stages of our partnership we noted a lack of suitable planning tools that work for researchers, teachers and students. We therefore introduced a flexible and adaptable framework of four types of activity—open lectures, open dialogues, open inquiry and open creativity—combined with an upstream approach to planning based on a set of six principles. A sub-set of these activities were evaluated through a combination of surveys, interviews and interventions. In conclusion, we argue that institutional and professional cultures can be resistant to the prospect of fully embedding school-university engagement with research in a structured, strategic and sustainable manner, and offer suggestions for how this context could and should be changed.

Viewing alternatives

Look up in Google Scholar

Download history

Item Actions

Export

About

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)

Recommendations