“But how can I help?”: values-driven practice in the global research community 

By Dr Rachel Lyon, Researcher Development Administrator (outgoing) and Researcher Development Specialist for PGRs with English as an Additional Language (from 11^th November) 

This post covers my ideas for how we can leverage our expertise in researcher development and research culture for the global research community. As regular readers of this blog might know, the Research Culture & Researcher Development Team at UofG are both a values-driven, and a really reflective team. We think about not just what we do, but how we do it, and we return to those conversations regularly.  

Regular review allows us to really interrogate what those values mean to us, making sure they still reflect how we understand and work toward our shared vision; and to hold ourselves accountable to how we shape and describe that values-driven practice, to ourselves, to each other and to the wider sector. For example, recently our colleague former PGR Intern Gabriela Gerganova, shared her reflections on what those values have meant for her and her practice as part of our team. 

Contextualising our values 

At the same time, we put ourselves, our work, and our shared value system in conversation with strategic work at our own institution, and with what’s happening sector-wide. This allows us extra layers of reflection and self-interrogation, and extra opportunities to make sure that our practice reflects who we want to be and the contribution we want to make to our community here at UofG, throughout the sector nationally, and internationally, with our colleagues in the global research community. 

For us, this includes examining our values against things like: the University’s commitment to UN Sustainable Development Goals through which it aims to become ‘a force for good, and enact sustainable social impact’, making ‘a tangible difference to society’; the institution’s commitment to inclusion, equity of opportunity, and supporting forced migrants from around the world through which we have become a recognised University of Sanctuary; the recent launch of Glasgow Changing Futures representing ‘the University’s commitment to integrating research, innovation, education, partnerships and influence to advance solutions to local, national and global societal challenges’; and the recent reflection on our institutional commitment to the Strategic Pillars of Collaboration, Creativity and Careers in the Research Strategy Progress Report in August 2024.  

Glasgow is not an island: these conversations about the role of institutions like ours globally are happening across the sector. While we may have frameworks for understanding what this means for us in our own job roles within our institutions, lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to really live our values as part of our wider research community. How do we navigate this, and who do we become when we shift focus and look outwards?  

Living our values as part of our wider research community 

It’s a deep privilege that within our roles we are able to support and develop innovative, creative and empathetic research leaders who have the energy, passion and drive to change the world for the better. I’d argue that we ourselves as research professionals also have the necessary skills, position and agency to make meaningful contributions to our global research community through ensuring our own local, national and international collaborations reflect how we want our practice to resonate. 

This past summer I had the opportunity to participate in a project called LINES for Palestine, through which I was able to bring the expertise I hold as Researcher Developer to colleagues living and working in Gaza. The project, led by Dr Maria Grazia Imperiale in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow in collaboration with HopeHub in Gaza, ran a workshop programme with a rich variety of sessions on different aspects of academic, and discipline specific practice. I designed sessions on Research Proposal Writing, and Abstract Writing, that I delivered for researchers in Palestine. 

This was my first experience of teaching remotely in a conflict zone, and my first time working with colleagues who had current experience of living through active conflict. While I tried to prepare as best I could for what that might be like, there was lots I didn’t expect, such as: complex conflict-related logistical challenges that affected the teaching space (for example, air strikes, damage to cables and solar panels, and unreliable internet signals); and my own emotional reaction to connecting with colleagues living through this.  

So, what did I do to make sure I was still able to make a meaningful contribution? I remembered how my values and my Team’s values guide my practice, and I leant on that to enable me to find the core of what I had to communicate, and how my skillset could be valuable to my colleagues in Gaza. 

Defining my values-led teaching principles: 

1. Think carefully about what your shared knowledge is.  

Think about what you share with your audience, and what brings you together: that’s your shared language, and where your connection begins. 

For example, with participants in Gaza, while we had come from different educational cultures, we all had some previous experience of writing proposals and abstracts. We had shared knowledge about what it feels like to communicate something you’re passionate about, hoping you can convince readers to share that passion, and invest in you and your ideas. That shared knowledge became our common language, our point of connection, and from there we were able to build new knowledge together.  

2. Don’t make value judgements. 

Focus not on which way is ‘right’ or ‘better’ or ‘worse’ but on empowering your audience to find their own contextual practice.  

With LINES for Palestine participants, we talked explicitly about the ways in which our educational cultures might prioritise different ways of making and sharing knowledge and meaning, what expectations the UK context might have, and how to meet them effectively. We talked about differences in our academic cultures and ways of communicating, and looked to find places that we could each make adjustments to communicate better together. 

3. Hidden curriculum knowledge is deeply valuable. 

It might be a cliché, but knowledge is power, and by sharing your contextual knowledge you can help to make sure participants have the awareness they need to find success in a new academic environment. The deep contextual knowledge (of the task at hand, and of the institutional conventions) you have almost instinctively at your fingertips is often new and important information for others.  

During the series of workshops I led this summer, I spent as long on covering how you communicate your research proposal to prospective supervisors, as on how to write the proposal itself. Not everyone knows how UK-based academics expect you to speak about yourself or your project. A great proposal is really important but to get a proposal accepted and funded, it needs to be read and championed by the right people. In addition, we talked about the ebb and flow of the academic year, and where the processes of PhD applications and funding applications sit in that cycle.  

So, to return to the question I began with: How do we navigate this? Perhaps predictably for a self-described self-reflector (surrounded by a fantastic team full of fantastically reflective people), I think my answer is: we continue to interrogate ourselves. We make sure that our actions speak for who we are. If they do, we don’t rest there but we deepen those commitments. If they don’t, we look for ways to join our words and actions together, to ensure that our impact on the world resonates with our values.