Universities are increasingly being asked to take an active role as research collaborators with citizens, public bodies, and community organisations, which, it is claimed, makes them more accountable, creates better research outcomes, and enhances the knowledge base. Yet many of these research collaborators, as well as their funders and institutions, have not yet developed the methods to ‘account for’ collaborative research, or to help collaborators in challenging their assumptions about the quality of this work.
This book, part of the Connected Communities series, highlights the benefits of universities collaborating with outside bodies on research and addresses the key challenge of articulating the value of collaborative research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Edited by two well respected academics, it includes voices and perspectives from researchers and practitioners in a wide range of disciplines.
Together, they explore tensions in the evaluation and assessment of research in general, and the debates generated by collaborative research between universities and communities to enable greater understanding of collaborative research, and to provide a much-needed account of key theorists in the field of interdisciplinary collaborative research.
This book articulates what it is to do collaborative interdisciplinary research drawing on projects from the UK based Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Connected Communities programme. This book tells stories of the value of collaborative research between universities and communities. It offers a set of resources for people who are interested in doing interdisciplinary research across universities and communities. It provides a lexicon of key ideas that researchers might find useful when approaching this kind of work. The book aims to enhance ways of doing collaborative research in order to improve the ways in which that kind of research is practiced and understood. Nine chapters, based on particular projects, articulate this value in different ways drawing on different research paradigms. Chapters include discussions of tangible and intangible value, an articulation of performing and animation as forms of knowing, explorations of such initiatives as community evaluation, a project on the role of artists in collaborative projects and ways in which tools such as community evaluation, mapping and co-inquiry can aid communities and universities to work together. Chapters also focus on the translation of such research across borders and the legacy of such research within universities and communities. The book ends by mapping the future directions of such research.
This book articulates what it is to do collaborative interdisciplinary research drawing on projects from the UK based Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Connected Communities programme. This book tells stories of the value of collaborative research between universities and communities. It offers a set of resources for people who are interested in doing interdisciplinary research across universities and communities. It provides a lexicon of key ideas that researchers might find useful when approaching this kind of work. The book aims to enhance ways of doing collaborative research in order to improve the ways in which that kind of research is practiced and understood. Nine chapters, based on particular projects, articulate this value in different ways drawing on different research paradigms. Chapters include discussions of tangible and intangible value, an articulation of performing and animation as forms of knowing, explorations of such initiatives as community evaluation, a project on the role of artists in collaborative projects and ways in which tools such as community evaluation, mapping and co-inquiry can aid communities and universities to work together. Chapters also focus on the translation of such research across borders and the legacy of such research within universities and communities. The book ends by mapping the future directions of such research.
This book articulates what it is to do collaborative interdisciplinary research drawing on projects from the UK based Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Connected Communities programme. This book tells stories of the value of collaborative research between universities and communities. It offers a set of resources for people who are interested in doing interdisciplinary research across universities and communities. It provides a lexicon of key ideas that researchers might find useful when approaching this kind of work. The book aims to enhance ways of doing collaborative research in order to improve the ways in which that kind of research is practiced and understood. Nine chapters, based on particular projects, articulate this value in different ways drawing on different research paradigms. Chapters include discussions of tangible and intangible value, an articulation of performing and animation as forms of knowing, explorations of such initiatives as community evaluation, a project on the role of artists in collaborative projects and ways in which tools such as community evaluation, mapping and co-inquiry can aid communities and universities to work together. Chapters also focus on the translation of such research across borders and the legacy of such research within universities and communities. The book ends by mapping the future directions of such research.
‘Arts approaches can open a door for people such that, once they go through it, you know they’re on a pathway which they can continue on. It’s very, very transformative in a way that other things might not be. And it’s kind of on the community’s level. It’s non-judgemental. So, you can go at your own pace and it’s non-elitist, but it’s just so valuable I think, because you’re creating community through the activities that you’re doing anyway because you’re bringing all these people together.’ (Belona Greenwood, 2022, Focus Group) Introduction The
The liberal arts approach to higher education is a growing trend globally. We are told that the mental dexterity and independent, questioning spirit cultivated by such interdisciplinary degrees are the best preparation for the as-yet unknown executive jobs of tomorrow.
This book explores the significant recent growth of these degrees in England, in order to address an enduring problem for higher education: the relationship between meritocracy and elitism.
Against the view that the former is a myth providing rhetorical cover for the latter, it argues that these are two entangled, but discrete, value systems. Sociology must now pay attention to how students and academics attempt to disentangle them.
In this chapter, we will examine three different ways that liberal arts students’ identities are constructed on institutions’ promotional websites, by academics of different stripes and by students themselves. The first is as good citizens: the idea that the liberal arts approach to education creates politically engaged and critical (but respectful) individuals with a concern for social justice. The second, connected student identity is the cosmopolitan: the well-travelled, and therefore open-minded, citizen of the world. Finally, we turn to the idea of the
. Around the world, including in England, liberal arts approaches are ‘percolating not proliferating’ ( Godwin, 2015b : 3): they remain marginal in every national system outside North America; they do not seem to follow straightforward economic or political patterns (emerging, for instance, in both countries with a growing middle class and countries where the middle class is shrinking); and they even work counter to simultaneous global moves towards advanced vocational education. Yet, there’s clearly something going on. As one promotional website for a liberal arts
On the one hand, and as its advocates often claim, there seems to be a particular timeliness to the liberal arts approach that would explain its increasing popularity, both in England and globally. On the other hand, we might just as well expect to see a move towards more technical and specialist education ( Boyle, 2019 ), and indeed we do see that move at the same time; for instance, in the long-touted T level technical qualifications. I have tried to argue that the liberal arts do not present some inevitable direction of travel for English higher education
sense, to focus on breadth at degree level is, in clear contrast to the US system, to go backward from school, which has encouraged students to specialise quite far by the age of 18. Some academics talked about the liberal arts as a kind of unlearning from school, rather than a progression. Meanwhile, those with personal experience of broader school and university curricula did not think that some features of certain liberal arts approaches in the US, like a common core of general education for all students, would ever be possible within the English system. Indeed
