About the project.
From its inception, SMaRteN has placed students at the heart of our research. We strive to engage students in all our work. We know that engaging diverse groups of students can be challenging. Recruitment and retention for this work can be difficult. We want to try to help make it easier for Early Career Researchers engage in student co-creation.
We are offering researchers the opportunity to work with a small group of students across three structured sessions to gain their input into your research. SMaRteN will support you to recruit and engage the students and will provide small awards of up to £300 to facilitate this activity – this will be paid directly to the students participating in your co-creation activities.
Applications for researchers have now closed, but please follow our newsletter and social media for updates on the project and information about upcoming presentations and workshops for students.
We are offering researchers the opportunity to work with a small group of students across three structured sessions to gain their input into your research. SMaRteN will support you to recruit and engage the students and will provide small awards of up to £300 to facilitate this activity – this will be paid directly to the students participating in your co-creation activities.
Applications for researchers have now closed, but please follow our newsletter and social media for updates on the project and information about upcoming presentations and workshops for students.
How to get involved.
Starting October 2021, SMaRteN will support a different researcher each month, to connect with students and complete a set of online co-creation activities.
Further Details.
To kick start your month, we will invite you to present an overview to your work at an initial discussion session. Your presentation should be accessible to a lay audience, keeping in mind that we want to engage students from a diverse range of academic backgrounds. Your presentation should be no longer than 20 minutes, with the objective of kick-starting vibrant discussion for the remaining 30 minutes of the session. This opening presentation will be used to let students know more about your work and encourage them to apply to join your co-creation workshops – so you want to think of this as your “sales pitch.”
For SMaRteN it is really important that we maximise all engagement with students, ensuring that we are using student time effectively and that students feel they are being listened to in a meaningful way. As such, in applying we will ask you to specify the following:
- The topic of your current work;
- A broad abstract for your introductory presentation;
- A plan for how you’ll use the three co-creation sessions;
- Specification for some skills development. We would ask that you use one of your co-creation sessions to build student’s skills in an area relevant to your work. We recommend that you use this in a way that will help the students better engage in the other co-creation activities that you want input in.
Please note, these will all be virtual sessions and will scheduled through Microsoft Teams by the SMaRteN Network Coordinator.
To help market this opportunity to students effectively, we are looking to put together a full schedule of sessions across the year BEFORE the academic year starts. So, if you are interested, but think that you would rather make use of this opportunity later in the academic year, please apply now, we are not planning on opening this opportunity up again later in the year. You are very welcome to request a session later in the academic year.