The role of engaged learning

In the past couple of years a major buzzword in public engagement, at least in the academic environment, has been engagement with research.  This is not entirely surprising given the requirement of Pathways to Impact to link public engagement activities to the research in the grant.  It’s even less surprising given the current demands for impact in the forthcoming national REF exercise, which again makes the connection between engagement and the underpinning research.  So it was heartening to hear a different form of engagement being discussed at the NCCPE’s Engage 2011 conference: engaged students.

Students doing public engagement as part of their degree was the topic of two sessions I attended on the second day of the conference.  The first session focused on postgraduates at a University of Bath Doctoral Training Centre, which contains a module on public engagement.  The second session (which just happened to be run by us at the Centre for Public Engagement!) considered case studies of engaged learning for undergraduates.  These case studies ranged from sociology at the University of Cambridge through to American students learning language and culture in Siena, Italy (where they talk about it as service learning, but the UK and the US have never been consistent in terminology).  And of course there was our own example of engaged learning in the form of our community-based learning project for 3^rd and 4^th year civil engineering students.  Admittedly, postgraduate students and, to some extent, undergraduate students carry out research so these activities could be considered a facet of engagement with research.  But realistically, many of these projects are just as, if not more, interested in the value of the skills and experiences that the activities offer to the students – particularly in terms of employability.

Engaged learning raises some interesting questions.  Should such engagement be compulsory and, if so, will that lessen the quality of the engagement?  Will it mean that certain students do not pursue a particular degree course because of the public engagement obligations?  Will public engagement become a box-ticking exercise for students rather than something they deliberately invest time and effort in?  Feedback from the projects discussed at Engage does not seem to reflect this rather gloomy outlook.  The students are genuinely motivated to do public engagement and are excited by the opportunities presented to them.  But these are certainly questions to be considered by those of us looking to embed public engagement in the student experience.