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The research led by Dr Convery and Dr Weatherall with other staff members within the unit represents a diverse body of work around the practicalities, implications and uptake of land management to mitigate climate change, particularly through application of biomass based renewable energies and also through carbon sequestration. The group have influenced practitioners (particularly within the forestry and farming sectors), community groups developing renewable energy projects, small to medium enterprises (SMEs) involved in renewable energies, and other non-governmental stakeholder organisations, such as the Lake District National Park.
The work of Professor Diane Cox has been instrumental in enhancing services and improving outcomes for patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME), and other fatigue related conditions. Primarily, this has been through changing the interventions used by Occupational Therapists and other Allied Health Professionals in healthcare practice to manage such conditions. The research has influenced amendments to professional standards, guidelines and training for use of activity and lifestyle management approaches to treating CFS and related conditions, and has had further impact through influencing the set-up of specific CFS services using these techniques. The research has demonstrated that Occupational Therapy can improve engagement and participation in occupations through activity, and led to its widespread uptake into practice throughout the UK. The research has underpinned the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines for CFS/ME and directly influenced the form and implementation of NHS and private service provision for these conditions in the UK.
The applied research generated has targeted practitioners and athletes at all levels, and by combining expertise and knowledge from different areas (primarily Biomechanics and Physiology), aimed to directly influence the way in which muscle function is assessed in competitive sports. The studies in the area of muscle conditioning and function has generated a body of work that has the potential to be useful to coaches both in competition as well as in training, but to date has not been fully realised. By examining how the muscle responds to certain stimuli, training suggestions have been provided that can acutely increase the performance of an athlete, for example conditioning stimuli prior to athletics performance (reference 4 in section 3). These suggestions can assist both in improving the competitive performance as well as in improving the quality of the content and experience of training sessions.
Further, evaluating a range of tests and assessment tools, such as by examining their validity and reliability, monitoring and assessment becomes much more accurate and sport-specific, enabling high-quality training (such as in reference 2, section 3). In addition, as these assessments allow testing to take place within the training and performance environment the performer is accustomed to (such as in reference 6, section 3), they also result in minimal disruption of the training programme, which cannot be achieved using traditional assessment techniques which require a visit to a laboratory for the assessment to take place.
The range of applicability of the research to support uptake of the recommendations and resultant training and performance benefits has been maximised by ensuring the suggestions and equipment used are low cost and easily accessible, enabling coaches and athletes from a wide range of performance levels to utilise them, such as functional tests (such as in reference 5, section 3). The work has highlighted that coaches and athletes need to reassess their approaches to measuring performance and specific measurement techniques used, and that doing so can improve training techniques and athletic performance.
Since the 1990s, academics at the University have focused on coaching and coach education as a key area of interest, and have had substantial impacts on practice within these areas through an on-going process of research, dissemination and engagement. Through intrinsically applied work, the group initially employed an interdisciplinary approach to the development of the academic curriculum to train coaches and other sports practitioners through under- and postgraduate programmes. However, as engagement with practicing coaches increased, the approach increasingly moved from sport pedagogy aspects of coach education towards examining the cultural and historical perspectives of this practice, and into the psychosocial elements of coaching practice. Through a nexus of research and engagement, the group has directly influenced coaching standards and guidelines, and stimulated improvements in practice and practitioner debate. In particular, this has led to impact on UK coach education provision, for example through development of accredited coach education programmes for two national coaching agencies SportsCoachUK and the Football Association by members of the interdisciplinary research team.
The practice-based research output nanoq: flat out and bluesome, a cultural life of polar bears has had impact on cultural life, civil society and on both artistic practitioners and museum/gallery professionals. These impacts have been created through the interdisciplinary nature of the work, and have challenged engrained approaches to the divide between art and museology, and to fixed perceptions of human interactions with the natural world.
Evidence for the cultural impacts and influence on civil society, through provoking consideration of environmental issues on the level of an emotive response to changing values and the consequences of societal norms, is primarily provided through reviews of the outcomes themselves, mainly through arts and science journals, book chapters and testimonials by scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields. Similarly, impact on the approach to professional practice in art curation and, particularly, in museology is similarly documented in the public domain.
The research undertaken by Professor Sue Bloxham and colleagues has had a significant impact on the approach to assessment in Higher Education. It has influenced practitioners, universities and advisory/regulatory bodies, providing advice for University tutors on communicating assessment expectations and contributing to national body and university guidance to encourage student learning and consistent marking. The research has helped tutors understand their individual `standards framework' involving tacit, norm-referenced knowledge, holistic judgement and local negotiation of shared standards as well as the importance of dialogic, formative assessment opportunities for communicating their standards to students. This has led to improvements in assessment policies, practice and national guidelines in the UK.
Across the Higher Education sector, in the UK and in much of Europe, university lecturers in professional fields are usually appointed on the basis of their practitioner experience and expertise, and they may have little prior experience of teaching at Higher Education level or of research activity. The impact of the research in this case study has been on individuals, Heads of Department, academic developers and universities across the UK in influencing changes in academic induction practices leading to enhanced professional development of university lecturers in professional fields, especially in teacher education, nursing and the allied health professions. The dissemination of the research included the publication by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) of guidelines for academic induction of teacher educators.
The body of research relating to perception and interpretation of medical images has generated a range of impacts on the practice and training of radiologists and reporting radiographers, with resultant benefits for patients. Engagement with the research findings has raised awareness in clinical practitioners of the implicit strategies they use during medical image interpretation and in particular the type and frequency of errors, including the prevalence of decision-making mistakes over issues of pathology perception. Practitioners have benefited through considering their individual strategies, leading to enhanced decision making processes and reducing error rates in interpretation of 2D and 3D images.
The impact has been achieved through engagement with the sector through relevant professional bodies, practitioner orientated publications and direct involvement of the research team in training and development activities for practitioners.
The impact of the research on practitioner diagnostic strategies is applicable across all areas of radiology and diagnostic radiography, but is also being explicitly pursued to determine training methods and assessment when radiologists view 3D Computed Tomography Colonography data for bowel cancer.
This case study relates to the impact of research by the University of Cumbria's Centre for Regional Economic Development (CRED) on the regional impacts of inward investors on supply chains and the effectiveness of policies designed to grow regional clusters. On the basis of publications, Professor Frank Peck (Director of CRED) was appointed Expert Evaluator for a sequence of EU FP7 "Regions of Knowledge" project proposals (2007-2011), and subsequently invited to join an EU Expert Group examining the role of clusters in Smart Specialisation Strategies in EU Regions. This work has demonstrated that existing cluster initiatives can justifiably be used as a means of implementing smart specialization. As a result, regions are being encouraged to retain cluster strategies as integral parts of EU regional and innovation policies for the 2014 - 2020 programming period.
Theatrum Mundi: Armarium is a highly significant collaborative art work by University of Cumbria Professor of Fine Art Robert Williams and renowned US artist Mark Dion, which has often been cited by scholars, curators and critics from the worlds of art, archaeology, literature and museology as an influential work that explores the nature of collections, collaborative art practice and museum oriented contemporary art work within what is often referred to as `institutional critique'.
As an early example of a collection based piece of work in contemporary art, the work has also had significant impact on the resurgence of the use of cabinets of curiosity or wunderkammer as a prominent modern artistic theme, influencing artistic practice.