Summary
The development of a full approach for Universities
that want to practice Citizen Enablement, hopefully leading to a full Empowerment, in an enterprise context. Developed by the PASCAL International
Observatory for Life-Long-Learning with video extoling its virtues by Chris Shepherd, bottom left
Major Learning point for Citizen Enablement
A powerful approach has been developed, tried and tested in a regional context, which can be used by Universities and their Academics to effectively work with Citizens and Communities enable them to produce self-sustainable and wealth creating futures. The approach has been developed using high standard digital processes to enable remote learn, however, it appears that Universities do not seem inclined to use its capabilities, preferring to remain undertaking their more traditional teaching, learning and research role; perhaps the Covid 19 pandemic might encourage them to think again.
The Case
James developed the notion of ‘Universities for a Modern Renaissance’, with funding from the EU Socrates programme and the European Universities Association, alongside Board Members of the PASCAL International Observatory for place management, social capital and learning regions. Its aim wastofocus their developing strategy for university engagement with the citizens and communities across the world’s city-regions. It is now known as the PASCAL Universities for a Modern Renaissance programme or PUMR. The programme concerns the roles and responsibilities of universities to engage creatively and with maximum impact for their local city-regions. It also deals with the ‘knock-on’ issues raised in those university’s who try to ensure proper collaboration will occur on worthy problems where co-design and co-productions of sensitive and sustainable solutions are needed. It is James view that this will truly help revive city-regions, thus enabling them to flourish, particularly in these times of economic and societal crisis.
PASCAL’s PUMR program helps improve the effectiveness of regional partnerships by creating a learning network among college and university peers. Regional engagement is still a new art within higher education. Many of our own institutions still struggle to achieve widespread commitment to the goals. We have much to learn from the experiences of our peers, and we have a responsibility to the profession to document our learning and disseminate it broadly.
PUMRs learning networks begin with their clear knowledge about successful university engagement. By using this knowledge as a starting point, PUMR attempts to go beyond simply reaching out to society. It is it is a programme for constructive action, fueled by knowledge, skills and facilities offered by colleges and universities. PUMR participants pledge to develop new models for regional transformation and modern renaissance, and new ways of working for the co-identification of problems felt worthy by society. The current knowledge base includes the following key factors:
- University partnerships need to be socially inclusive in order to achieve sustainable success. This includes engaging all communities within their region, and all communities within their own colleges and universities to help transform their lives and enable citizens to flourish;
- Regional engagements build value through co-creation. Value comes from working together with partners to co-identify problems, co-design solutions, and co-produce outcomes that address important problems;
- At these particular times, this is particularly important as we try to help the drive for socially inclusive economic prosperity and wealth creation in the richest sense of the phrase wealth;
- Engagements co-create many different types of value. Even though today’s economic climate may place greater emphasis on co-creating economic value, any truly modern regional renaissance co-produces many different types of value;
- The concept of “eco-versity” is one helpful way to provide a more “balanced scorecard” for our engagements. Its “triple bottom line” of environmental, economic, and social sustainability is key to everything we do, but we need better metrics;
- Enterprising academics must reach out aggressively to add value because its partners often don’t know how to start sustainable relationships with higher education institutions;
- Co-creating real value with partners in regions also co-creates high quality research and learning opportunities for faculty and students because real solutions blend interdisciplinary points of view with the full complexity of social, cultural, and economic settings.
A Visual Summary showing the Reach-out range of PUMR
A Visual Summary showing the Reach-out range of PUMR
The PUMR approach shows that, with fairly straightforward changes in attitude and behaviour, university academics can develop real, lasting and sensible improvements in their support for citizens and small communities that will enable them to flourish for themselves. This requires more creative leadership and interdisciplinary team working. It is based on the previously mentioned, tried and tested, UPBEAT evaluatory process, itself using critical Action Learning – this can facilitate improvement processes in academics leading to real impact on Citizens Enablement. PUMRs eventual goal is to create a “virtuous learning circle” that will allow participants to expand this knowledge base on a continuous basis, disseminate it through meetings, workshops, professional exchanges, peer consulting opportunities, and formal publication outlets, by:
- Developing a physical and virtual social network to enable ‘virtuous knowledge sharing’ on community empowerment to enable citizens and professionals to flourish;
- Coaching improved projects and programme delivery in this areas for continuous improvement;
- Advising Senior Academic Leadership on appropriate strategy to ensure the engagement of academics to become more outwardly enterprising and empowering of communities;
- Validating Universities who want to be considered as ‘PASCAL Universities for a Modern Renaissance’;
- Developing Guidance of Enabling Instructions for relevant Academic Cultural Change.
- Enabling them to ceed the authority to enact their developing solution from those traditionally at a high level in the power structures.
Since the 1960’s there has been a call for ‘excellence in diversity’ in our universities. According to van Vught (2008) ‘diversity’ has been identified, in higher education literature, as a major factors associated with positive performance of universities”; this was reiterated by Peter Scott recently (2015) who believes the ‘most effective way of producing sensible university differentiation is for the state to take an active role in driving relevant necessary change’. If this had occurred, we should have by now, not only world-class research universities, but also high quality regionally focused ones, teaching centred establishments, specialist institutions and even private providers of professional training without too many academic frills. Unfortunately, while strong on their rhetoric, most governments and indeed their universities across the globe, seem to ignore this call to diversity preferring to reify what they consider to be the most important academic culture in what they see as the best universities. This typically is based on a rather narrow and traditional way, mostly portraying ‘excellence by research’’ or as Hazelkorn (2012) put it ‘we all want to be like Harvard, don’t we?’ Rather than striving for a broader and more individualised excellence in universities’ distinctive offers, lack of funding has led governments to focus their scarce resources mainly to world-class research universities – modelled after the characteristics of the top 100 globally-ranked establishments. The EU Committee of the Regions (2011) recognized the implications of this when it identified a huge gap between academic research knowledge and real life practice where wealth creating R&D should be critical to all our futures.
Despite calls by Government for an increasing focus towards local requirements, small business needs and the community, those Universities who want to operate in such partnerships must create different and much improved processes, as well as engendering a better regional mood in support of this, but often they believe their funding arrangements drives them towards a more restricted and more traditional route. As a result, in 2015, the ‘Big Tent’ initiative issued a demand (DUKE, 2015) urging “universities around the world to respond to the important global phenomena associated with the emerging citizens’ movements.
PASCAL believed there is a way where networks and partnerships can be made to work between universities and enterprising regional players enabling all ‘to think more creatively’, encouraging novel configurations and new forms of joint venture. That is why it developed PUMR and it has been striving to provide coaching and support since then to enable ‘excellence in diversity’ for modern universities who want to make a difference. As the latest Big Tent communiqué rightly indicates, ‘to survive, universities must take to the heart of their identity our inherited local and global world. All must share a duty of care for the future of millions of young people who have no employment and maybe, despite the natural joys of youth and energy, no hope or sense of belonging to any constructive future’.
PUMR offers universities and colleges with a systemic and systematic framework for necessary change management – written up elsewhere by Powell (2010, 2015) and shown in detail on the PASCAL specific web site http://pumr.pascalobservatory.org. On this site self-management tools and a simple self-evaluatory matrix focuses communities and academics into becoming more creative together. The framework provides an intuitive process which quickly shows academic enterprise developers how they are progressing and what they have to do to improve their leadership and delivery.
Those who use PUMR use it for a number of reasons; see Case Study 2 for a good example of how it was used by a Belgium University College. Most Universities know they need to develop adaptive leadership at all levels in their new regional enterprise developments and learn the operational capabilities PUMR offered to transform their own institutional management, thus reinforcing correct change management approaches . They soon also recognised they would need to work on four domains to properly:
- define an appropriate vision/mission to ensure that enterprise awareness and commitment throughout their organisation;
- set up a system to realise their goals, with an adequate organisation and necessary tools and methods in order to deliver;
- work on the people aspect: inside and outside the organisation, ensuring awareness, training and job descriptions, including lecturers, researchers and students to come up with interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches;
- create an impact through the establishment of sound networks, an eco-system, and a quality culture.
Major Learning point for Citizen Enablement
A powerful approach has been developed, tried and tested in a regional context, which can be used by Universities and their Academics to effectively work with Citizens and Communities enable them to produce self-sustainable and wealth creating futures. The approach has been developed using high standard digital processes to enable remote learning, however, it appears that Universities do not seem inclined to use its capabilities, preferring to remain undertaking their more traditional teaching, learning and research role; perhaps the Covid 19 pandemic might encourage them to think again
The Enabler
James Powell initiated the PUMR process, was the main Citizen Enabler and led the team for Salford University and the Pascal International Observatory. It processes have been incorporated into the basic offer of the Observatory and appears on its main web-site.
