On Tuesday the 24^th of May experts on public engagement from across the UK converged on the National Museum of Wales, ready and willing to share their experiences and modes of best practise.

Members from all six of the national Beacons teams attended, along with representatives of the national coordinating centre for public engagement, and other professionals from universities and museums.

The aspirations of the day were high, as everyone set to work brainstorming ideas on how best to go about changing the culture in universities so that they support, recognise, reward and build capacity for public engagement. Ideas were needed on how best to continue with public engagement in the future, whilst meeting the challenges of today and facing uncertainties in future funding.

With these goals in mind, Ceri Black, head of education at the National Museum of Wales, describing herself as the ‘warm up act’ started off proceedings. She talked about the extent to which culture change in universities has already happened, quoting Bruce Etherington, the co-ordinator of the Cardiff Beacon as saying:

"It is clear that there has already been a considerable change; instead of having conversations about why we should engage, we are now having conversations about the best way to do it."

She also talked about the need to learn from public engagement experiences, saying:

"I firmly believe in tangential learning and that sometimes our most inspiring, creative thinking comes when we learn abut a situation that is similar enough for us to find a connection, but different enough to spark a creative leap."

One of the clear indicators of a shift in culture in museums came from the development of a shared definition of learning. Ceri said:

"The learning for all framework encouraged self reflection and evaluation and gave us a much broader understanding of all the different types of learning."

However Ceri highlighted the fact that by concentrating on learning from mistakes, you miss out on the opportunities of learning from successes, and so instead of concentrating on problems she suggested the approach of appreciative enquiry. This involves a rigorous approach to what works as well as concentrating on problems, a method she described as a ‘less depressing way of learning.’

With the agenda set for the day, people began to brainstorm and share their ideas about building a culture of public engagement in universities. It was clear that the best results are achieved when people with different skillsets work together. Naomi Jacob works at Manchester Metropolitan University and often works with the Manchester Beacon. She encourages interdisciplinary research within the university by building and strengthening connections between chemistry, informatics, biology, engineering, mathematics and biomedical sciences.

In her opinion public engagement is best achieved through collaborative ventures. She said:

"Interdisciplinary collaboration makes things easier, more practical, cutting edge and exciting.

"There is a lot of engagement in progress at Manchester Met, but it is difficult to bring all the departments together. It’s a large university of 30,000 students and the buildings are spread out across the city.

"My advice is to create spaces and platforms where engagement can take place, for example in science cafes."

Other people emphasized the need to allow risk taking in public engagement initiatives, as well as rewarding innovative thinking and ideas even when projects fail. Everyone agreed that there was a need to create a culture in universities where engagement is a recognised part of quality research and valued in peer review.

There was also a suggestion that to really thrive, public engagement professionals need to take advantage of the Big Society initiative set out by the government, and that some communities have found that cuts in funding have actually encouraged engagement by inspiring people to come together and help out. Whether or not this is true, many people highlighted the importance of being aware of the current government agenda and using it, whilst also recognising that governments lurch from one initiative to another, and any change in culture in universities needs to be long term.

By the afternoon, the groups split up in order to discuss different topics. One interesting discussion was about increasing students’ participation in public engagement, by encouraging them to volunteer in their communities. Dr Richard Knapp is the head of the centre for Performance and Literature at Swansea Metropolitan University, he is concerned that the rises in fees in universities will make students less likely to want to volunteer. He said:

"The fee plan massively impacts the students relationship with their education and their perception towards what they should be doing in classes.

"I think students will become more and more traditional in their views of what education should be like. They will think "I’m paying for this, I want you to stand in front of me and give me my moneys worth. This could have a potentially detrimental effect as universities will say we don’t want you doing things that are a little bit nebulous, we want you doing the traditional teaching and research that we pay you for."

In order to encourage students to engage with their communities it was suggested that volunteering should become embedded in the curriculum, however it was argued that this would devalue the very idea of the altruistic voluntary helping of others by forcing students to ‘volunteer’. Recognising the need for a compromise Dr Richard Knapp summed up the discussion by saying:

"I think there is a balance to be struck by keeping the volunteering altruistic but still putting something in place in the curriculum. A lot of students don’t realise that volunteering is good for them and will help them to get a job, so I think the universities have a responsibility to make them realise this and help them."

Overall the day was extremely fruitful. The insights gleamed from the many discussions and brain storming sessions showed that the relationships and networks that are already in place are overwhelmingly positive – allowing professionals to learn from one another’s experiences, whist making the most of people’s different skills and strengths. However in order to maintain the momentum of public engagement, it became clear that universities will need to work with people at all levels, securing the backing of senior managers, whilst realising that students may have fresh innovative ideas about how best to engage with their communities.