Assignment One

 

This assignment takes your own doctoral or other current research topic as a starting point. 1) Think about why you chose the topic and prepare a paragraph or two, or a couple of powerpoint slides, or a short video, summarising your reasons.

2) Present this to your peer mentoring group. You could post the text, ppt or video on the group Teams channel in advance to provide more time for discussion.

3) Using the group discussion toolkit, take turns to present and discuss your work. Is your research transformative? There is no implied criticism in asking this question!

Assignment Two

This assignment is about identifying areas, or “opportunity spaces” in need of transformative research. Many areas of life are not considered important enough to warrant significant Research and Development efforts. Other areas are critically important, especially in fields such as climate change, but lack serious funding for political reasons. The point of this assignment is to identify an opportunity space that you, as a group, consider significant. At this stage, you do not need to think in depth about how to address the problem, but you do need to think about why you might choose this problem, why it is important and why it would be transformative to address it.

• Each group member should put forward one idea and justify it (5 mins each)
• The group assembles the ideas into a list and prioritises it until there is a “number one”. (20-30 mins)
• The group prepares either a two-page concept note, a six slide deck or a three minute video describing and justifying the choice of idea (one hour session )