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| Dharavi Slum in Mumbai, India (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Impact in recent years has become the most dreaded and controversial concept that has taken over both the Research Excellence Framework (REF) - how university funding and the fate of academic careers is measured - as well as Research Council funding.
The most crucial element of this criteria is not just that our research has an impact, but that we can prove it.
The latter part is what makes academics cringe - how do you prove impact when you deal with ideas and concepts?
There have been a number of debates around this question and the challenges of measuring the intangible nature of impact. My experience tells me that fieldtrips make an important impact and should be counted as such.
It was a busy year for me in 2013, not least because of the number of research, writing, and lecturing invitations I took up, but also because I took on the conceptualisation, planning and organisation of a six-day field trip for our students with another colleague.
This inaugural fieldtrip, offered for the first time to level 3 students in BA human geography, was on the theme of global cities, with Mumbai as its destination.
A city like Mumbai presents a rich laboratory for exploring any of the themes on citizenship, identity, migration, belonging, transnationalism, social justice, bourgeois environmentalism, everyday urban politics and so on - seen in the number of student fieldtrips (in geography and other social science disciplines) that are currently visiting the city both from UK and internationally.
Fieldtrips are a measure of intellectual dialogue and development not just for the faculty and students but also for wider society.
You can say that all teaching has impact, but I think the fieldtrip deseres special mention. The impacts are both long and short-term, but they are also quite distinct from generic teaching.
In the LSE Impact Blog, Peter Wade, professor of social anthropology at the University of Manchester, notes that the REF's narrow definition of impact rules out the historical role of teaching in relation to the social role of the university.
Also writing for the blog, John Parkinson, associate professor of public policy at the University of Warwick, says the current impact agenda should consider the impact of inspirational teaching.
Most importantly, perhaps, is the 56 indicators of impact as alternatives for the REF exercise prepared by the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity, which provide a compelling argument for considering this as an important space for impact generation.
Here are six ways that I think fieldtrips make an impact and should be counted and rewarded by the REF or any other form of banal measuring system that decides the winners and losers in the academic (increasingly neoliberal) marketplace.
Research-led teaching
This is self-explanatory. For me, organising the Mumbai fieldtrip was a direct impact of my research into pedagogy. I enjoyed taking lectures for this module which prepared the students for what they would encounter in Mumbai, as well as taking them to a city that I love, both professionally and personally.
Intellectual dialogue and development
Taking students to my own research field helped me see my work in a different light. Students asked me questions about things they saw, which to me were routine, and when I found answers to them it helped me reflect upon my own biases and insider/ outsider paradoxes. This is an ongoing process, which has continued since our return and beyond.
Developing student skills
Many students who become interested in particular themes of sites during fieldwork pick up these topics for a PhD or become interested in employment in issues dealing with debates covered in fieldtrips.
Internationalisation as impact
In an era where several universities are either closing down their fieldtrip provisions or reducing them to UK/EU destinations, the Mumbai fieldtrip bodes well for the aspirations of university internationalisation. This is a different kind of impact from the international courses on the global south that most universities offer - the impact is evident in the actual learning-by-doing nature of fieldtrips that raise the profile of universities and departments which offer them.
Creative outcomes
Often fieldtrip reflective logs are used in pedagogic research, but I think the potential could be exploited further to include outcomes that have wider societal impact. This year students are making a visual essay as part of their assessment, and these will be screened at a special event in the department. Not only will the best essays be showcased during open days and potentially on our homepage, but as online visual pieces, they will be open access and hence their impact will be on a completely different scale than conventional academic journal articles. So watch this space.
Media mentions
Our visit to an Urdu school in Mumbai was reported in Sahara, India's leading Urdu newspaper. This is the stuff that REF celebrates as impact, and although it is not about conventional research, I see our presence in the media as an important transgression of pedagogy into the realm of local language media and arguably higher mpact than English language based Anglo-American open access journals.
This is an edited version of a blog first published on the City Inside Out blog
Ayona Datta is senior lecturer in the school of geography at the University of Leeds - follow her on Twitter @AyonaDatta
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