It can be difficult to design public engagement activities to be truly interactive and inclusive. You may sense that some people go away disappointed without knowing quite why. This workshop will help by giving you strategies to work out:

What you want from the engagement
Who your participants should be, where they’ll be coming from and what they’ll want from the experience
What kind of process is appropriate for your aims and your participants
How to enable everyone to be fully involved and to build understanding
How to ensure that the engagement does meet your aims and that everyone comes away with something useful.

The core principles covered in this workshop are relevant for anyone planning a public engagement process that involves having conversations with other groups. Whether it is a short interactive event at a science festival or a longer workshop or an ongoing collaboration with stakeholders, this course is for you.

This course complements ‘The Workshop Workshop’, which is specifically about science communication. The course is delivered by two experienced dialogue and deliberation practitioners who work in public engagement across a range of sectors: Dr Wendy Faulkner and Dr Oliver Escobar.

Cost

There is no fee to attend this workshop if you are staff or a research student at a university in Edinburgh. This is a trial arrangement which may be stopped if non-attendance is high!

Indivdiuals from other organisations (or none) are asked to cover the cost of their place, which is £80.50 for the day (includes lunch and refreshments). This can be paid using ePay here.

Eligibility

This course is open to all, but it does focus on public engagement with academic research.

It is helpful but not essential if you have some previous training in dialogue (e.g. another of the dialogue training sessions run by Beltane).

Preparation

You will be required to do a couple of hours of reading in advance of the course. Details will be sent after registration.

Catering

Refreshments and lunch are provided. We will do out very best to accommodate special diets, but our caterers may not be able to adequately support complex requests - we will let you know if this applies in our case.

Your trainers

Wendy Faulkner is passionate about people participating in decisions that affect them, and about the benefits of dialogue. New understandings and possibilities can emerge when people think and work together in a spirit of deep listening and learning, and where difference is respected. A former academic, she now works freelance designing and facilitating collaborative conversations, be they exploratory or deliberative, single events or staged processes.  Her experience covers public engagement in research, community engagement, and collaboration with stakeholders.  She has trained some 300 people in these areas, largely with Oliver Escobar, for the Edinburgh Beltane Network and other community and third sector bodies. Wendy has an enduring love of Scottish tweeds – hence her trading name Talking Tweed.

Email: wendyfaulkner34@btinternet.com

Oliver Escobar is Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh, and Co-Director of What Works Scotland, a large research programme to improve public services and policy innovation. His areas of research, teaching and practice are democracy, politics, policy, participation and collaboration. He is on the Board of Democratic Audit UK, Beltane Public Engagement Fellow, member of the Scottish Government’s Participatory Budgeting Reference Group, Director of ClimateXChange’s Citizens’ Juries, non-executive member of the Scottish Government’s Digital Communications Board, and advisor to DRILL –the world’s largest research programme led by disable people. He coordinates the Citizen Participation Network, has trained and worked with hundreds of public engagement practitioners, and is involved in developing democratic innovations across various policy arenas in Scotland and beyond. He has led or co-led over a dozen research projects. His most recent research focuses on the interface between citizen participation and social inequalities (e.g. http://www.healthinequalities.net).

What Works Scotland: http://whatworksscotland.ac.uk

Oliver’s blog: https://oliversdialogue.wordpress.com

Twitter: @OliverEscobar

How to Design a Public Engagement Process