This blog was originally posted in this form on the LSE Teaching Blog.

To tie in with the call for submissions to LSE’s Research Festival Exhibition we asked staff and students in two departments at the School to tell us about the teaching and learning reflected in recent poster competitions they have held.

The Department of Management’s PhD poster competition took place in the context of its 2014 HR conference, Sometimes you see it, sometimes you don’t: visible and invisible diversity at work. An event attended by over 100 people – practitioners as well as academic staff and students – it had, as Dr Connson Locke who chaired the organising committee says, “the dual purpose of bringing together people to talk about HR and to showcase, through things like the PhD poster competition, the research we are doing”.

To engage the conference attendees with the research as fully as possible, they were asked to vote on the best poster – a process that in itself, according to the winner Jonathan Ashong Lamptey, “meant that the ‘so what?’ question researchers often avoid had to be tackled directly and with clarity. I was surprised at how much the exercise revealed gaps in my knowledge. This was more encouraging than it sounds because it essentially functioned as a revision tool. I have now introduced ‘drafting a poster’ as part of my research process: in my mind, if I can’t present my thoughts succinctly then perhaps I need to reconsider what I am doing.”

Posters by (left to right) Jonathan Ashong Lamptey, Ceren Erdem and Karin King. Full size versions can be seen by clicking on the images.

His fellow entrants in the competition had similar learning experiences. Ceren Erdem says: “It helped me to think simply about my research as the poster had to be detailed enough and yet easily understandable for observers who didn’t have much time.” And Karin King reflected on her experience of producing a poster to come up with two pieces of advice: “First, know your audience – think about their purposes for and interests in understanding your findings – and second, a picture really is worth a thousand words: a poster requires the researcher to find ways to tell the research story simply and elegantly through images, while maintaining enough detail to do the research justice.”

Over in the Department of Statistics, there is a rolling exhibition of posters by MPhil and PhD students, all of whom are encouraged to produce at least one poster during the period of their research. “There is no compulsion to produce a poster,” says Ian Marshall, the department’s Research Administrator, “but we find that an annual competition with a prize is a good incentive! And, though we don’t provide any formal guidance in design or layout, the students seem to be inspired enough by the exhibition to think about the core ‘narrative’ in their own research story and how best to convey that in graphic form.”

One of the students who participated in last year’s competition, Tayfun Terzi, whose poster appears left (click to view full size version), agrees: “A PhD thesis often feels like a mountain of more or less connected ideas, and producing this poster really helped me to disentangle and clearly articulate some of those.” As can be seen, Tayfun’s poster made use of visual elements such as cartoons and illustrations to convey complex ideas, as well as a fold-out section that, as Tayfun says, “afforded another level of interactivity to spark people’s interest in my work.”

Find out more … at the Department of Management’s HR Conference 2014 page and the Department of Statistics’ PhD Presentation Events and Research Posters page.

LSE Research Festival is welcoming submissions to its exhibition – of posters, films and photographs – until 28 February 2015.

With many thanks to all those who contributed to this post.