Many individuals across the university have undertaken successful public engagement work within their particular disciplines for many years. However, they often did so unaware of the work of others across the university, and as such there was no mechanism by which our public engagement work could be more than the sum of its individual parts. The Warwick Institute of Engagement offers a pan-university forum in which academics, professional services staff and students who are passionate about public engagement can come together as Fellows of the Institute to share best practice and discuss and collaborate on joint projects and ideas. As a result, the Institute provides a mechanism whereby the collective experience and knowledge of our university’s public engagers, in conjunction with that of the WIE Core team, can be focussed both in response to the increasing number of ways in which this university has chosen to embed public and community engagement at the heart of what it does, as well as in response to the increasing number of ways in which the UK and International Higher Education environment is shifting to prioritise public engagement and the wider ‘Knowledge Exchange’ agenda. Below you can read more about our Institute Fellows and our different categories of Fellowship, as well as about some of their exceptional individual achievements (and a complete list of our Fellows is available at the end of this report). Together, our Fellows work across 14 Learning Circles. Each Learning Circle is dedicated to a particular aspect of the Institute’s public engagement work, is chaired by a senior Institute Fellow and has an Institute Core team member assigned as its ‘link officer’. The Learning Circles work and meet in different ways in response to their particular areas of focus, and you can read more about the work and achievements of each Learning Circle to date below. The Institute Core team supports across the Learning Circles and works particularly closely with them to ensure that the outcomes of the Learning Circles are then presented and embedded within the university’s practices.
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A key example of this is the review by Learning Circle 9 (on public engagement and Promotion) of the university’s promotions criteria related to Impact, Outreach and Engagement, which has now already been accepted by the university and has gone live as part of the current 21-22 Promotions cycle, with the Learning Circle now supporting applicants to make their promotions case as effectively as possible through a series of workshops and 1-1 support.
Another great example is Learning Circle 5, which brings together a wide range of public engagement with research experience from across the university and now acts as a peer review group for research grant applications which require details plans for public engagement. In so doing, this Learning Circle is now supporting the Faculties of Arts, Social Sciences and Science, Engineering and Medicine to improve grant capture. The Institute is also working closely with the university’s STEM Grand Challenge, leading the development of a dedicated STEM Public Engagement hub within the new Science Precinct, which, when operational, will also be run by the Institute. The development of the plans for the hub, its financing and associated fundraising, is achieved again through a collaboration between a dedicated Institute Learning Circle and Core team members, working in conjunction with the wider STEM Grand Challenge team – and there is more on this particular project below in the report of Learning Circle 14. Most recently, the Institute has also moved to appoint a series of Regional Fellows: people embedded in our region and communities with considerable experience of, and enthusiasm for, the sharing of knowledge, culture, and opportunity. They work across a wide range of fields (you can find out more below) and are united by their desire to work more closely with the university as a key player within the region. As Regional Fellows, they will be able to work with the Institute and contribute to the development of its thinking, strategies, and events programmes so that crucially the voice of our region will be at the heart of the development of our plans for working with the region. As such, the Institute acts as a powerful enabler not only for the university’s 2030 strategic goals and Grand Challenges, but also supports the university to respond proactively to the Government’s increasingly important Knowledge Exchange agenda as seen through the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) and the new Knowledge Exchange Concordat (KEConcordat). In the first iteration of the KEF, Warwick ranked in the top 10% of Universities for Public and Community Engagement, and the Institute is an important part of the university’s submitted action plan going forward in response to the KE-Concordat.
WIE Report November 2020 – February 2022 | www.warwick.ac.uk/wie
