Impact 'agenda' or impact 'phantom'?

Responding to an emerging debate around the changing nature of the impact agenda in the UK, Richard Watermeyer, argues that the current moment presents a point of change; an opportunity to exorcise the ghosts of previous regimes of incentivising and assessing impact, and step towards a more meaningful social compact

Blocked and thwarted – public engagement professionals in higher education deserve greater recognition.

Professional service staff specialising in public engagement in higher education institutions often occupy precarious and poorly defined positions. Drawing on a largescale qualitative study of public engagement professionals (PEPs), Richard Watermeyer and Gene Rowe discuss persistent issues described by PEPs in developing effective cultures of public engagement within higher education institutions and the ways in which the important boundary spanning roles they fulfil are often marginalised by university administrative structures

Selling impact: how is impact peer reviewed and what does this mean for the future of impact in universities?

Despite a wealth of guidance from HEFCE, impact evaluation in the run-up to REF2014 was a relatively new experience for universities. How it was undertaken remains largely opaque. Richard Watermeyer and Adam Hedgecoe share their findings from a small but intensive ethnographic study of impact peer-review undertaken in one institution. Observations palpably confirmed a sense of a voyage into the unknown. Due to the confusion and uncertainty, there was a tendency to prioritise hard (or more immediately certain) impacts over those deemed more soft (or nebulous)

Public dialogue with science and development for teachers of STEM: linking public dialogue with pedagogic praxis

Despite evidence of quality teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subject domains and insistence on the part of many national governments on the economic value of STEM, education, recruitment and retention into STEM subject fields and occupations is said to be continually blighted by a ‘leaky pipeline’. In the UK context, schools are seen to benefit from a multitude of external STEM engagement and enrichment providers and initiatives. However, despite evidence of the positive impacts of STEM engagement on learners, there exists a dearth of understanding related to how principles of STEM engagement can facilitate STEM teachers in becoming more pedagogically innovative and relevant and, therefore, engaging of their learners in the classroom context. In this article, we employ a secondary data analysis of two prominent cases of public engagement in science and technology (PEST) in the UK to elicit combined lessons for STEM engagement and the pedagogical development of teachers. We consider the successes of science dialogue in establishing principles of best practice that might be transposed to the development of teachers as more able and effective in the engagement of learners in STEM