Category: knowledge exchange

  • Trust, creativity, and collaboration are what leads to impact in the arts

    Trust, creativity, and collaboration are what leads to impact in the arts

    Impact in the arts is fundamentally different from other fields. It is built on relationships, trust, and long-term engagement with communities, businesses, and cultural institutions.

    Unlike traditional research models, where success is often measured through large-scale returns or policy influence, impact in the creative industries is deeply personal, embedded in real-world collaborations, and evolves over time.

    For specialist arts institutions, impact is not just about knowledge transfer – it’s about experimental knowledge exchange. It emerges from years of conversations, interdisciplinary convergence, and shared ambitions. This process is not transactional; it is about growing networks, fostering trust, and developing meaningful partnerships that bridge creative research with industry and society.

    The AHRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) has provided a vital framework for this work, but to fully unlock the potential of arts-led innovation, it needs to be bigger, bolder, and more flexible. The arts sector thrives on adaptability, yet traditional funding structures often fail to reflect the reality of how embedded impact happens – rarely immediate or linear.

    At the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), we have explored a new model of knowledge exchange—one that moves beyond transactional partnerships to create impact at the convergence of arts, business, culture, and technology.

    From ideas to impact

    At UCA, IAA impact has grown not through top-down frameworks, but through years of relationship-building with creative businesses, independent artists, cultural organisations, and museums. These partnerships are built on trust, long-term engagement, and shared creative exploration, rather than short-term funding cycles.

    Creative industries evolve through conversation, experimentation, and shared risk-taking. Artists, designers, filmmakers, and cultural institutions need time to test ideas, adapt, and develop new ways of working that blend creative practice with commercial and social impact.

    This approach has led to collaborations that demonstrate how arts impact happens in real-time, to name a few:

    • Immersive storytelling and business models – Research in VR and interactive media is expanding the possibilities of digital storytelling, enabling new audience experiences and sustainable commercial frameworks for creative content.
    • Augmented reality and cultural heritage – Digital innovation is enhancing cultural engagement, creating interactive heritage experiences that bridge physical and virtual worlds, reinforcing cultural sustainability.
    • Sustainable design and material innovation – Design-led projects are exploring circular economy approaches in sports, fashion, and product design, shifting industry mindsets toward sustainability and responsible production.
    • Photography and social change – Research in archival and curatorial practice is reshaping how marginalised communities are represented in national collections, influencing curatorial strategies and institutional policies.

    These projects are creative interventions that converge research, industry, and social change. We don’t just measure impact; we create it through action.

    A different model of knowledge exchange

    The AHRC IAA has provided an important platform for arts-led impact, but if we are serious about supporting creative industries as a driver of economic, cultural, and social transformation, we must rethink how impact is funded and measured. Traditional funding models often overlook the long-term, embedded collaborations that define arts impact.

    To make the impact funding more effective, we need to:

    • Recognise that creative impact develops over time, often requiring years of conversation, trust-building, and iterative development.
    • Encourage risk-taking and experimentation, allowing researchers and industry partners the flexibility to develop innovative ideas beyond rigid funding categories.
    • Expand the scale and duration of support to enable long-term transformation, allowing small and specialist universities to cultivate deeper, sustained partnerships.

    In academic teaching and training, knowledge exchange must be reconsidered beyond the REF framework. Rather than focusing solely on individual research outputs, assessment frameworks should value collective impact, long-term partnerships, and iterative creative inquiry. Funding models should support infrastructure that enables researchers to develop skills in knowledge exchange, ensuring it is a fundamental pillar of academic and professional growth.

    By embedding knowledge exchange principles into creative education, we can cultivate a new generation of researchers who are not only scholars but also creative change makers, equipped to collaborate with industry, drive cultural innovation, and shape the future of the creative economy.

    A call for bigger, bolder AHRC impact funding

    UCA’s approach demonstrates how arts institutions are developing a new model of impact—one rooted in collaboration, creativity, and social change. However, for this model to thrive, impact funding must evolve to recognise and support the unique ways in which creative research generates real change.

    To keep pace with the evolving needs of cultural, creative, and technology industries, research funding must acknowledge that impact in the arts is about stories, communities, and the human connections that drive transformation. It’s time to expand our vision of what impact means – and to build a funding model that reflects the true value of the arts in shaping business, culture, and society.

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  • What gets misunderstood in the quest for policy impact

    What gets misunderstood in the quest for policy impact

    Academics are obsessed with impact. We want our research to be read, to be cited by other academics – and particularly in the social sciences and humanities, to have an impact on government policy.

    Partly this is because internationally over the last forty years, governments have increasingly imposed an impact agenda on universities, using financial and other levers to encourage them to focus on the real-world impact of what goes on in the ivory tower. But it’s not just that. Most academics are really passionate about the work they do, see it as important, and want it to make a difference to the public and society.

    Yet it seems that a lot of the time, that desire to have impact is much more of an aspiration than a reality. When I had just started in academia (at another institution), after working in the IT industry and then as a school teacher, I remember going to a meeting about the department’s research strategy. There were lots of speeches from academics about all the amazing work they were doing (or thought they were doing) – and then one brave colleague spoke up and said that research was a waste of time, as it just meant spending lots of energy on something that maybe ten people around the world would read. He was much more interested in teaching, and the real direct impact he could have on his students right there and then. Quite.

    Tracing impact

    Of course research does have impact, although often it’s much easier to see it in the hard sciences and medicine. The revolutionary impact of the work of Samuel Broder at the National Cancer Institute in the US, and his collaborators, in the 1990s that led to the introduction of retroviral treatments for HIV, comes to mind as one example. I worked as a technical analyst on an HIV/AIDS unit in London in the 1990s and I saw the miraculous impact of this on people’s lives.

    But in the social sciences tracing the path of impact is often much less clear. However, often this is not because the potential for impact is not there, but due to other factors, particularly a lack of understanding between government and academia about how research can usefully intercalate with policy development. Because I was interested in the relationship between research and policy, I undertook a secondment in the insights and research team of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), for 15 months up to October 2023.

    Since then, I have been involved in an ongoing series of conversations, initiated by Ofsted, involving academic and government colleagues on the topic of how to facilitate better communications between government and academia about the role and impact of research. Most recently we held a very well attended symposium at the British Educational Research Association conference in Manchester in September 2024, and are planning other publications and events.

    What’s getting misunderstood

    So far, based on these discussions, we have identified a number of factors that tend not be given enough weight in the relationship between government and academia.

    First – and this is something I saw first-hand at Ofsted – it is important to realise that government does value evidence arising from academic research. Although many academics are unaware of this, each government department has members of what is known as the Government Social Research Profession, whose role is to champion social research evidence and support implementation and evaluation of government policy.

    Another thing I came to understand at Ofsted is that the culture is quite different to academia. The role of research in the civil service is to support the aims of democratically elected ministers. Research evidence is valued in government – but it is one factor among others when decisions are made.

    Linked to this, such evidence has to be provided at the right time and in the right way so that it can have an influence on those decisions. This is something that academics often lack awareness of. Typical academic research projects often focus on making sure that their findings are high quality and robust, and only then think about pathways to dissemination, hoping that someone in government will take notice of it. All too often that can mean, as my old colleague said, that it ends up being read only by other academics. Academics need to be scanning the horizon to find pathways to engagement from really much earlier on in their research, for example in the context of public consultations, or political debates.

    Other areas we have identified also include, on occasion, misconceptions and mistrust between academia and government, which is there on both sides. Civil servants often handle competing priorities and demands, which can hinder opening up lines of communication to the research community about how they use research and to engage in honest conversations about political priorities.

    Although things are changing for the better in England in this regard, as evidenced by our collaboration between Ofsted and academic colleagues, there is much more to do. We have adopted the concept of a “third space”, opportunities for engagement where we can find new ways of working across sectors that promote mutual understanding, in the case of Ofsted, to better promote outcomes for children and young people. This is of course the shared aim of both the academic research community and government.

    However, this is something that is needed not just at Ofsted, but across government and across academia. The impact agenda is not going anywhere anytime soon, and perhaps we would be foolish to want it to, but making it work better has got to be a priority.

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  • How online learning can help tackle global injustices

    How online learning can help tackle global injustices

    by Sam Spiegel

    How can online learning programmes help tackle systemic global injustices with creative pedagogies? How can universities build effective educational environments and pedagogies to support critical thinking and vigorously challenge contemporary forms of racism, colonialism and inequity?

    These are some of the questions I have reflected on over the past almost 14 years of teaching at the University of Edinburgh. In 2011, I embarked with colleagues at the School of Social and Political Science to develop our school’s first fully online distance learning MSc postgraduate programmes, partnering with an interdisciplinary team spanning the three Colleges  of the University to co-create and co-teach the MSc in Global Challenges. Addressing global development, health and environmental inequalities, with case studies spanning an array of countries, this programme had students from all over the world. The insights and trajectories of our students have been deeply inspirational – many of our students have gone on to do PhDs, work with United Nations organisations, embassies, non-governmental and humanitarian organisations and work in other kinds of practitioner and research careers. In this blog I reflect on the philosophy of the teaching and learning approach we have nurtured – and associated critical conversations about pedagogy.

    We had support from a Principal’s Teaching Award (PTAS) to explore student learning experiences and reflect on our teaching practices, and in 2016 we published an article: ‘Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections–a case study’. At the time, it was one of the few critical pedagogy studies to think through ‘international development’ teaching and the risks of replicating colonial logics in online learning modalities (and how to try to counter these). It proposed a critical framework for analysis that took into account barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme. It also considered debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacked tensions in tackling intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.

    Some years ago online learning initiatives were treated with suspicion as a technology craze that could not truly build effective communities of critical learners. This is no longer the case, generally speaking. Our online students have carved out sophisticated learning paths while interacting with ambitious courses – sometimes in live discussions and sometimes in asynchronous discussions that built incredible communities of practice. But there are important online learning-specific pedagogic points to keep in mind, as course instructors craft and adapt approaches to support individual and group learning.

    One is the risk of re-entrenching problematic dynamics of imperial knowledge production, even when intentions are to do exactly the opposite. There is a need to ensure that online learning platforms grapple with colonial legacies and tendencies – including biases that are easily replicable in virtual technology platforms. It is increasingly recognised that ‘decolonising’ is not simply a matter of ‘bringing in’ authors from Global South countries in reading lists. It is also a matter of ensuring that the underpinning pedagogies, assignments, and learning strategies themselves tackle systemic biases that have often shaped the field of ‘international development’ – and doing so from the outset. This may mean inviting students into at-times uncomfortable conversations about ways of understanding histories of dispossession, or ways of thinking about and governing societies; and ensuring that early course activities trouble assumptions – including about what ‘development’ is/means to different people and whose values are prioritised or overlooked. Some students might not normally read the writings of those who fought during liberation wars against colonialism, for example, but might find such readings different and transformative. There are a range of other possibilities, too, from changing the way that case studies are framed – for example, starting with stories of heavily oppressed peoples instead of starting with the technocratic logics of United Nations and government reports.

    Despite global talk of ‘decolonisation,’ there has been a tendency for globally renowned development academics from wealthy countries to dominate reading lists. We have tried in our courses to challenge this – and ensure that activity-focused coursework and online case studies challenge hegemonic assumptions in mainstream policy literature and development discourse. Some of the reflections on our pedagogy were also discussed in a wider influential review article by Shahjahan et al (2022) entitled ‘”Decolonizing” curriculum and pedagogy: A comparative review across disciplines and global higher education contexts’, which notes that ‘decolonization’ has been very differently treated by different educators. Our pedagogy work has also been part of a wider conversation in the scholarly literature on how “precautions need to be taken when incorporating non-Western knowledges into Western universities to avoid mishearing, misrepresenting, exploiting, and decontextualizing them” (Lau and Mendes, 2024; see also Spiegel et al, 2024).

    Relatedly, there is a need to be cautious of ideas about “transfer of knowledge” and instead to embrace values built on reciprocal sharing of knowledge in educational practices (see also Parmentier, 2023). Furthermore, attempts at decolonising development education requires attention to the link between learning strategy and wider institutional practices, including heeding inequities in admissions processes and language barriers in higher education. Our work in developing new online learning pedagogies is just part of the story; we have also been interacting closely with university admissions offices on strengthening approaches to make admissions more inclusive. This has included greater recognition of practitioner qualifications and also, significantly, some modifications in how English language testing requirements were addressed in some of the countries affected. This was especially important in contexts where applicants had demonstrable English language proof, from institutional and/or university experiences, but lived far from test centres and could not afford testing.

    Our article ‘Decolonising Online Development Studies?’ had a question mark in the title, alluding to the ambiguity of interpretation and the uncertainties that may play out over time. It was cited in other PTAS-awarded studies led by other staff members at UoE, supporting further analysis of specific techniques for building online learning communities (see Wood et al, 2021) How these ideas are to be taken forward is an ethically important conversation that relates to the very core of what education seeks to do, requiring ongoing attention to the interplay of values, philosophies, curricula and teaching techniques.

    Dr Sam Spiegel is the director of the Global Challenges MSc programme at the University of Edinburgh, where he serves as the Deputy Director of Research for Knowledge Exchange and Impact at the School of Social and Political Science. He is also a senior lecturer at the Centre of African Studies and has published extensively with colleagues in Zimbabwe and in other regions of the world on migration, displacement, borders, critical pedagogy and social change.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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