This is a short blog post to recount my experience of running a workshop on the Change Agents’ Network at the sparqs national conference in Edinburgh on Friday 29 May in conjunction with Simon Walker (University of Greenwich) and Mark Kerrigan (Anglia Ruskin University). Interestingly, we heard that sparqs (student participation in quality Scotland) is changing its name – replacing “participation” with “partnership” – reflecting a growing focus on the importance of partnership approaches for driving change in institutions across the UK.
Our workshop focused on the following:
Our CAN networking activities – including our monthly webinar series (recordings available at http://ly/1L0Lv4t) and face-to-face networking events (e.g. our last event in March in Birmingham).
- Our case studies of student-staff partnerships
- The student partnership toolkit (designed to support institutions in setting up and implementing student-staff partnerships)
- The recently launched Journal of educational innovation, partnership and change
- The Jisc institutional change leader award, accredited by SEDA.
Students involved in CAN were represented (via video) by Elgan Hughes and Tracey Watkins from Birmingham City University – see https://vimeo.com/128132017
There was considerable interest in our various activities and resources and participants were keen to identify actions they would take to engage with our network and its resources.
We were also joined by Margaret McKay and Lynn McHugh from Jisc Scotland who will be working to promote the CAN network across Scotland.
Our workshop was chaired by Phil McGuinness (development advisor at sparqs) who has recently joined the CAN steering group and we look forward to this facilitating greater collaboration between sparqs and CAN and extending CAN ideas and initiatives into Scotland.