Sets 1 and 1a

1 Questions for awareness raising

When looking at the model or picture of roles of scientists, you may ask:

1. What roles are you most/least familiar with?
2. Focus on the roles you are least familiar with:
   What do you value about this role?
   How does this role contribute to the production or use of knowledge?
   What other aspects do you value?
3. What do you value about each of the other roles?
4. What are the risks when performing these roles: for the individual scientist, for the project team, and for the scientific system?
5. What could a division of tasks between the different roles for knowledge production and sustainability transformations look like?
6. To what extent could collaboration with scientists performing different roles enrich your scientific work?
7. To what extent could collaboration with scientists performing different roles enhance the societal relevance of your work?
8. Do you think that awareness of different roles of scientists would enhance clarity in the way you talk about science to other societal actors? To fellow scientists? If yes, why?
9. Which roles help to maintain status quo, which induce change?

For a workshop setting, we recommend that you focus only on 2-5 of these questions.

1a Additional questions for awareness raising in a heterogenous group

In a group setting, you may also want to discuss the different positions within a group. To this purpose, you need to visualise the roles that are performed by the participants (see figure 5: Spider diagram to identify individual scientists’ role profiles). Then ask:

1. When we look at the distribution of the roles in our group – what is surprising? Did you expect a certain role to be more/less prominent?
2. Which role(s) do you think should we – as representatives of the scientific system – foster?
3. Have you ever experienced ambiguity or conflict between roles? How did you deal with this? What kind of support is needed to deal with such situations?