Are you interested in how universities can play a more active role in stimulating dialogue and debate, and in feeding people’s curiosity and imagination? In learning from how other organisations – like the Eden Project and the BBC – go about this? In exploring tools and techniques for effective engagement, and exploring how such work can best be evaluated and supported?

Engage 2014 tackles all these questions and more – and is a must for anyone who cares about innovative approaches to learning and engagement, with plenary, workshops, and a range of hands on encounters that bring cutting edge public engagement to life.  Keynotes include Madeleine Atkins, Chief Executive of HEFCE – who will be sharing her vision for engagement; Dominic Gray, Projects Director at Opera North, and Michael John Gorman, Director of the Science Gallery in Dublin – two organisations doing quite extraordinary work to engage with the public; and Eleonora Belfiore, Associate Professor of Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick, a leading thinker about the dynamics of engagement and how to value it.  There will be workshops on the REF, digital engagement, School-University partnership working, and many other topics.

You can see a provisional programme of what to expect at Engage 2014 here, and to register for Engage, please click the following link.  Please do pass this onto other staff who you think might be interested.

Engaged Practice Learning Exchange

In addition this year the NCCPE are hosting an Engaged Practice Learning Exchange event in the run up to the Engage conference. The EPLE is on the 2^nd December from 11am, and is an opportunity for those involved in public engagement and other forms of community-university activity to have some time and space to stimulate innovation in what they do. You can find out more here.