Evaluating Impacts of Public Engagement and Non-Formal Learning 'Core Issues and Debates'

Description

Aimed at bringing together engagement, learning and communication practitioners, evaluators and academic researchers, this first seminar in the series will debate and discuss core questions such as:

How can we understand ‘impact’ within public engagement and non-formal contexts aimed at fostering learning?
How much ‘impact’ can be achieved through relatively brief interventions in the lives of visiting publics?
How should the scope of ‘impact’ be understood? (e.g. is it possible to capture evidence of secondary and tertiary impacts?)
How much is it possible to know through robust evidence about the social, cultural and economic impacts of such engagement or learning?
What are the quality standards that separate ‘good’ from ‘poor’ evaluation and visitor research?
Which models of research can be employed? (e.g. action research, case study, etc.?)
The seminar will include the following speakers:

Paul Manners (Director, National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement)
Tom Ziessen (Public Engagement Adviser, Wellcome Trust)
Dr Helen Featherstone (Chair, Visitor Studies Group, Content & Visitor Researcher at At-Bristol science centre and a Research Fellow at the Science Communication Unit at the University of the West of England, Bristol)
Nicola Buckley (Head of Public Engagement, University of Cambridge)
Emma Pegram (Head of Learning Evaluation and Research, Natural History Museum)
Emily Dawson (Doctoral Researcher, King’s College London)
Dr Eric Jensen (Assistant Professor, University of Warwick, Associate Education Fellow, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Zoology, ZSL/University of Cambridge)