EVALUATE, REFLECT AND CHANGE - Do not solely focus on outputs and beaconisation
Our experience: beaconisation is a term we debated at length during one of our reflexive sessions. We had seen other projects with a similar remit to ours producing fantastic interactive websites about their work, and excellent branded marketing materials about their key successes and we wondered if we were missing something. But we felt that ours was not a project like that. We had many successes – sustaining working relationships with a participating community for over four years, impacting upon their energy vision, being the catalyst to changes to the energy provision of local community buildings being just a few of them, but we always felt that our project was more than just this. It was more than the successes we could shout about in a few key sentences.
Why?
Beaconisation is a current buzz word within academia – closely related to REF and the drive for impactful research. It basically means to market and publicise the key successes and messages of your project. Alongside a current drive in beaconising research, is the perpetual focus on academic outputs. In other words, publications and to a lesser extent presentations: those things which enhance academic reputations and are seen to be the final ‘products’ of research.
But whilst shouting about research successes is an invaluable part of the research process what about the slow-burning, more messy elements of a project? Where do they go? How are they publicised, shouted about and accounted for? What about elements of the project which appear to be failings?
How?
As Donaldson et al. (2010 – see further reading) discuss, it is this ‘mess’ of a project which is crucial to understanding and evaluating interdisciplinarity. Whilst interdisciplinarity may be talked about through grand narratives of project ‘success’ or ‘failure’, through evidence of disciplines working together to solve problems, actually interdisciplinarity is best identified through the mess of a project: the tributaries, the cracks, the slippages where knowledge and skills are diffused slowly between disciplines, in a trickle down hardly noticeable manner. These must be accounted for if interdisciplinarity within a project is to be understood.
So whilst outputs are a key part of any project, and indeed the one thing that keeps the academic world turning, the mess alongside possible project failures cannot be ignored. Focusing on these elements, the project’s ‘mess’ can help to evaluate interdisicplinarity.