Conference Agenda
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Workshop 4 / Track B: Mutual Learning and Institutionalisation Across Universities
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SPACE Upside Down, Shallow-Deep: A Mutual Learning Exercise on Methods and Praxis for Institutionalising Engaged Research-Based Teaching and Learning Across Four Universities 1University College Cork, Ireland (UCC); 2Universitat de Girona, Spain; 3Institute for the Development of Education, Croatia; 4Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; 5University of Rijeka, Croatia The SPACE Erasmus+ project (2023-2026) tests what comes after the strategic moment of declaring institutional commitment to community engagement (CE). WP4 came to the work with a scaling logic: deep into culture, wide across programmes, across to peer institutions, up into policy (extending Moore, Riddell, & Vocisano, 2015). The work surfaced something messier. The four directions invert under pressure. Deep stays shallow when the institutional substrate cannot hold it. Wide spreads thin. The "up" vector becomes a ceiling. Across leaves partner sites in parallel non-contact. This workshop is a live Mutual Learning Exercise (MLE) on the methods and praxis of institutionalising engaged research-based teaching and learning across the SPACE consortium: four EU universities (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, University College Cork, University of Rijeka, Universitat de Girona) and the Institute for the Development of Education in Zagreb, a non-profit think tank that coordinates WP4. Universities operate as loosely coupled systems (Weick, 1976). Reform from the centre rarely reaches doctoral supervision, programme committees, or hiring criteria. The scaling vocabulary names where the work has to land. The MLE names where it inverts. WP4 runs an Acceleration Programme at each site in four iterative phases: - Explore. The MLE surfaces what each site already does and where it gets stuck. - Co-design. Local stakeholders inside and outside the institution decide which barrier to take on. - Implement. Each site builds a context-specific action plan with mentoring, partner-to-partner twinning, and a transnational community of practice. - Evaluate. Collective reflection feeds the next iteration. The workshop reads four cases through the four scaling directions, with privacy-respectful detail. UCC scales deep: rebuilding doctoral supervision around community-engaged research, supported by the ENGAGE Living Knowledge Commons. UdG scales wide: connecting curriculum design across programmes to community needs in the Living Knowledge tradition (Hall & Tandon, 2017). VUB scales across: leading peer learning and translating practice. UNIRI scales up: anchoring CE inside academic career structures at the policy layer. IDE Zagreb threads the four together as coordinator. Participants then run a live MLE on their own institutions, mapping where their CE work goes upside down and where deep stays shallow. Our argument: deep, wide, across, up are four vectors with their own grammars. They do not collapse into a single arc. Each can invert. Institutionalisation needs all four running, and the honesty to name which is inverting. Democratic culture in universities grows from peer-supported, self-critical work of this kind. | |