Abstract

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a high-stakes driver for publicly funded research in UK Universities. Half of its assessment criteria are in relation to people, culture and environment, engagement & impact. In teaching-intensive universities, the aim is to foster a culture of research which is inclusive and impactful. This can be challenging in disciplines such as teaching, social work and nursing, where academics identify primarily as practitioners and may still be novice in their skills as researchers. The ARTs project, funded by UKRI aimed to increase capacity for research engagement through the development of bespoke research skills for practitioner-researchers. The training programme was adapted from the work of Deacon (2023) to meet the needs of existing live research projects within the faculty. The primary objectives of the project were to ensure ‘outputs’, which would demonstrate research impact, were achieved and that they were achieved in a collaborative and supportive way. We wanted to challenge the accepted, neo-liberal view that ‘outputs’ from research were the valued measure and recognise, as Dismore et al (2024) did, that knowledge is a socially constructed process and personal in its meaning. The process of research and knowledge exchange was just as important to us as the outputs were.
The reality of the ARTs project over 12 months has been more profound in its evaluation than we could have initially imagined. There were 4 ‘Agile Research Teams’ who worked together for a sustained length of time, on a set of shared goals. This presentation will discuss the findings from the thematic analysis of qualitative data such as ART meeting transcripts, researcher activity logs, researcher narrative accounts and practitioner-researcher focus groups. The focus was upon their engagement in the research process and used Edwards & Meagher’s (2019) framework for measuring research impact. Our findings highlight the efficacy of the ARTs in fostering learning through relational engagement within communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). They also illuminate the social, experiential and often unspoken, tacit dimensions of knowledge exchange Polyani (1966).
The wider implications of the study illustrate the challenges in cultivating a sustainable and inclusive research culture which recognises that knowledge grows out of human relationships and interactions rather than in isolation. It highlights the benefits to the discipline where research is inclusive and dynamic and socially embedded. The study also sets the foundations for the re-framing of what is defined as impact of research within the REF and ultimately which research activity is valued in teaching-intensive universities.