Unearth Your Potential: Stakeholder Engagement and Soil Literacy

The British Society of Soil Science is pleased to be hosting a webinar in partnership with Wiley on Thursday 13 August from 12:00-1:15pm (UK time) which is free of charge to register. Join expert speakers as they discuss Stakeholder Engagement and Soil Literacy.

Interactive training: From a Real-World Soil Problem to a Research Question

Facilitators:

• Dr. Emma McKenna and Dr. Calum McGeown Queen's University Belfast​ (LOESS UK)
• Dr Karolina Trdlicova, James Hutton Institute (Echo Soil UK) 
• Dr Claire McDonnell, Technological University Dublin, Ireland (LOESS Ireland)

Workshop description

As the EU Mission "A Soil Deal for Europe" expands the use of Living Labs and multi-actor approaches, soil scientists are increasingly being asked to work across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries.

Drawing on experiences from the LOESS and ECHO Soil projects, this online workshop will explore how community-identified soil challenges can be developed into research questions and collaborative research projects.

We will move through a series of exercises which ask you to spend time thinking about a community research issue and how you would approach working on it. We will create time for individual reflection and use interactive polling to work through this real-world scenario. You will consider the questions you might ask to understand a community organisation’s research needs and explore how you could build on these needs to create researchable questions.

The workshop will offer you the space to reflect on how community engagement can strengthen the relevance, impact and uptake of your research. It will also highlight the learning from LOESS and ECHO soil on how citizen science and engaged research approaches can support participation in Mission Soil activities, including Living Labs and other multi-actor initiatives.

Learning objectives

• Identify resources and practices developed within the LOESS and ECHO Soil projects that can support your engagement with citizen science and community-engaged soil research and education.
• Assess and reflect on your current understanding of partnership working and community-engaged research, and identify personal learning goals.
• Describe the key principles that underpin effective partnership working.
• Begin to develop a research question from a real-world soil issue using a community-engaged research approach.

Register Here: Unearth Your Potential: Stakeholder Engagement and Soil Literacy