Engage 2011: The Public Engagement Blog Carnival
Engage 2011 has now finished, and I’ll post more about Day 2 later, but one thing we thought would be a nice idea would be to attempt to continue the discussion online through a blog carnival. Each week for the next three weeks I’ll pose a question and then if you wish to respond, you have on week to do so. At the end of that week, I’ll post a summary of the responses.
To respond to a question, simply write a post on your own blog, or a short tweet, or a comment on this blog if you don’t have your own. Please don’t e-mail reponses though as I’d like the responses to be online where they may be read in full. To let me know you’ve responded, simply leave a link to your response as a comment on this blog post.
For the first week I’m going to pose the question (which is drawn from something asked at the last plenary session of Engage 2011), but I’m looking to you to suggest questions for the next two weeks (again, comment here or tweet me @m_law).
You don’t have to have attended the Engage conference to take part in the blog carnival.
This week’s question is: How do you place value on your engagement work?
How do you ensure you’re being inclusive? Is it better to work with some groups than others? Are there, for example, ‘soft targets’ who are more ready and willing to work with universities and is it a bad thing if you limit your engagement to these groups? If you were asked to prove that you’re paying more than lip service to engagement, how would you do so?
Let me know your thoughts by the evening of Thursday, December 8th. If you’re suggesting a new topic for next week please let me know by that date as well.
In my experience, from observing others in the community archaeology world, soft targets are an easy way to tick boxes, make up numbers. Public-funded heritage projects are given targets for inclusion and ‘widening participation’, with heavily evaluated and measured outcomes. If I can quote Perkins (2010, 107) “…organisations often develop and direct community-based projects to fulfil their own prescribed ideas for engagement. Such models can be highly successful but without caution can also result in tokenistic and unsustainable projects which erode the trust of communities and result in lack of support for future initiatives…”
And what I mean by that is, that given the frequent pressure on funding and staff time, and short term nature of funded projects, it is often unrealistic to expect organisations to be able to locate, build and sustain links with “hard-to-reach” communities, that may need radical approaches and heavy investment of time and energy to ensure outcomes are i) useful for those groups ii) relevant for those groups iii) can be sustained and passed on within and beyond those groups. It is far easier to give a lecture to the local archaeology society, than it is to sustain an educational outreach project with (from my professional experience) a group of young people with learning difficulties… The solution is lowering expectations of quantity, and seek quality and sustainability – surely?