Today I’m at the University of Edinburgh Moray House Making Research Visible event, where I’m delighted to have been asked to give the opening keynote this morning. Once that’s done I’ll be liveblogging the day (with all the usual caveats – do send me any corrections, edits, additions, etc.).
Welcome (Do Coyle)
I’d like to welcome you to this morning’s event which I think is really exciting. When I looked at the programme I saw “what happens if you Google yourself?”, so I did… And there was a photo with the most ugly necklace! It’s levitous but these are things we need to think about…
I want to thank Jen Ross for all her work today. She emphasised that it was as much about celebrating what we do – which is so important – as it is thinking about what we should or could do.
I’m Do Coyle and I’m director of Research Knowledge Exchange in Moray House. I’m relatively new here, but I’m surrounded by amazing people and teams. And by chance we have a brand new RKO office, led by Simon with Greg and Lilleth supported by Roz and David. New office, new times, and a huge thank you for Jen as she comes to the end of her
Nicola Osborne – ‘Curating an Effective Digital Research Footprint’
Slides to follow.
Holly Linklater – ‘Making Inclusion Visible: We Make a Film to Show How We Make a School’
I’m going to talk to you about a project we’ve been doing over the last year, funded by an ESRC Impact grant. It was to bring together conversations between my work on inclusion and agency and my colleague Natasha’s work in agency and inclusion, as well as school perspectives. And we particularly wanted to think about “hard to reach families”. The school is a large school in Cambridge, it’s in the city and very diverse and international (47 languages) and socioeconomically diverse student population. And the school was aware that the way that they do things is not necessarily how you’d expect schools to do things, your expectations from the culture or country or context you are coming from. We wanted to do a project that connected up all these different forms of knowledge.
We decided we wanted to make a film as we wanted to create something sharable, and to really engage with parents who so often are looking at their phones in the playground – to get them to look up! But we also wanted to engage trainee teachers, those engaging in CPD around learning. So it needed to be a short film. We had a survey and interviews, workshops in the school, to really make sure we were working in partnership with the schools.
We started with thinking about “What is it that I know?” – using the knowledge already there, and bringing the research and clarity of research to that. The school knew that the way I concluded my arguements was genuinely from the work with that school – there was trust, and they recognised themselves in that work. The head said “I’d never have said that in that way, but I recognise what we do in that work”. By delightful coincidence – and it was a coincidence – a parent in the school is a director who makes CBeebies Hettie Feather, we totally couldn’t afford her… We massively underestimated what was involved. Then I made friends with Neil at ECA to find out what materials I could borrow for free for this (lots!), and Chloe, our director, found students in Anglia Ruskin who were up for film making and mainly had advertising focus but were keen to do other things, and wanted to work for Chloe. So they got some CPD, and we got great people involved.
We were aware of the sensitivities of not everyone wanting to be in the video, and privacy sensitivities, so we focused on what it is to make a mini cardboard school – to animate children’s stories from interviews to collect core data. But in fact what happened was that everyone wanted to be in the film, really wanted to be in the film. We had four 12 hour days of filming! But we stuck to our guns of a 10 minute film, and it’s been really exciting and engagement in the school, the children have a real sense of ownership. The film is called “We Make a School”.
We asked teachers, students and parents about trust, relationships and support, to draw out themes and then we show that and link that across the film in quite a light touch way, and in the words of the people from the school.
I want to finish with an email that came in today from the Deputy Head of the School – the school board are delighted and excited to know what’s next – including CPD programmes for teachers to look at working together to make an inclusive school community.
Ailsa Niven & Shaun Phillips – ‘Using Animation to Make Research Visible: Can Academics do this Easily and Effectively?’
Ailsa: We want to talk about how we might use animation in a way that is accessible, easy and effective and we were funded by a CAS grant to do this. We are all very mindful of our pathways to Impact, and find Morton (2015) approach of Uptake>Use>Impact very useful. And we wanted to find effective ways for our audience to find and uptake our research, and we wanted creative ways to do this.
We know the adage that a picture paints a thousand words: a 5000 word article won’t be read and engaged with by many of our key stakeholders. But we were well aware that web videos were great to reach stakeholders. Shaun and I attended the 2D Animation course from the IAD and I’m shamelessly borrowing their stats: online videos will be 80% of web traffic by 2020; 8 billion videos are viewed every day on Facebook; and videos have to be short or they won’t be watched.
And publishers are engaging. Taylor & Francis now promote video abstracts. And the video “How to get kids moving”, in my research area, got lots of attention. And just last week JOVE offered to make us a video of our research for $2800. But we thought we could do this ourselves, with the key aim of making our research on race running accessible and effective.
Shaun: Race running is particularly useful for neurological impairment, including cerebral palsy. It uses a kind of bike that you’ll see in the video to provide balance and support. So, to communicate that we had our research associate look at available softwares – some easy to use and free, some complex or overspecc’d, some less flexible and some more, some not as appropriate for academic use. We looked at pros and cons and decided on Powtoon. Why? It was a reasonable price (~$500), it’s professional and modern looking, it’s relatively easy to use – you can storyboard to make production easier. That storyboarding is really important to being efficient with your time and getting your message across. It is voice-over enabled. Can import own images and can embed videos.
So, we recruited an RA to lead creation. We clarified the focus and target audience – we wanted to raise awareness of race running and also disseminate existing research finding on the activity as well. It was two aims but we wanted to keep the video short – that was challenging. We storyboarded the story. That preparation makes the video much more easy and productive to make. Then we revised again and again and again – more than we expected for such a short video! We are now at that stage, the next step is stakeholder feedback – and then more revision. Then we’ll finalise and disseminate.
Best thing to do is to show you a short section of the animation. (It looks really good!)
So reflections here… It is possible to develop the skills required to create animations with some time investment – more than we thought – and some pre-existing skills.
Ailsa: Links with creative teaching and assessment methods – we are reusing the skills and resources in teaching, students really enjoy it.
Shaun: Further evaluation of our animation is needed to determine effectiveness. And we are moving forward with either up-skilling and use of these resources.
Shari Sabeti – ‘Embedding the Visual Arts Throughout the Research Process’
This project, the Mashallese Arts Project was exploring forced displacement of children and families from the Marshall Islands, working in the Marshall Islands and Hawaii. So, as background, the US undertook extensive cold war era nuclear testing on Bikini ad Enewetak; fall out of Utirik and Rongelap. The people were evacuated from Bikini, told that the testing was good of mankind, and was much more powerful than expected, three times more than Hiroshima. And the fall out effected islands that had not been evacuated, with some locations rendered uninhabited for 30,000 years. There is still use of Kwajalein as a ballistic missile testing base. That was agreed to under a Compact of Free Association (1986) – giving free migration rights to the US as exchange/compensation for giving up land rights and claims against the US. At the same time the Marshall Islands are also at risk of disappearance due to climate change.
The Marshallese culture was based on parcels of land, so we were interested to understand how that changes when people are displaced. We also wanted to look at the potential of indigenous art movements/artists to encourage senses of confidence and pride in heritage. This was also about the impact of textbooks, materials from the US and Asia, and scope for Marshallese materials given that there are now 9000 Marshallese people in Hawaii.
Our method was to nest art educators in the project based in schools. We had three participatory workshops on performance poetry, mural painting and photography. These were also research activities, about belonging, displacement, and things that matter to them in their lives. The outputs generated materials for the community and for understanding these experiences. The children wrote poems, and then the murals were based on the poetry. We worked in various areas including Ejit, where direct descendants of Bikini islanders live – in fact the school t-shirt shows the mushroom cloud and the Bible – reflecting that sense of having been told that their island was being given up for the good of mankind. In Honolulu the murals looked different – the teacher didn’t want writing/graffiti – so the artist created outlines and the children contributed.
So, the research connecting to what is visible… This mural designed by the artist talks about Aloha as “hello” but really “you are in the presence of another’s breath (another living creature or consciousness)”; IAKWE – a Marshallese greeting meaning “You are beautiful, like a rainbow”. So the continuous faces and the brow becomes a rainbow – “a kind of collective orgasm”.
We did get press coverage – we “had things to take photos of as research” so it was a press friendly thing. We have shared the texts, a map of materials, and we have a graphic adaptation from one of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner. And we now want to take things forward – we have a CAS impact grant to follow this more and develop this on. The college knowledge exchange grant is about making sure people actually use these things – not just to have things be usable, but make sure they are useful. I am limited by funding because the flight from Edinburgh to Honolulu is £800, but from Honolulu to the Marshall Islands is £1200. So we are going out to Hawaii to work with schools to make sure this is used, and to ensure this feeds into the curriculum in the region.
Just thinking about your talk and social media earlier Nicola, in the pacific everyone uses Facebook for everyone. Even in the Ministry of Education – no answer to email, but send them a Facebook message and instant response. It is the space to engage. It was the opposite of my normal practice. But if you gave them a USB stick they wouldn’t use it. But I know the government has increased the tariffs on wifi and mobile data so that raises new problems about engaging and access. That use of social media in the global south can be so problematic.
Michael Sean Gallagher – ‘Near Future Teaching and Shaping Education Futures: Social Media as Communication and Data Collection’
Divya Sivaramakrishnan – ‘What I Learnt from Organising a Yoga Knowledge Exchange Event’
James Lamb – ‘The Manifesto for Teaching Online’
Lucy Hunter Blackburn – ‘Combining Old and New Media’
Group discussion & summary feedback