Scholarship of Engagement

IAM PDW Maynooth September, 2012

Peter McKiernan Strathclyde and Murdoch Universities

Agenda

• Personal journey: two stories • Your stories • So what is SoE? • Skill sets to success sets • What projects? • What questions to ask?

Scholarship of Engagement

Involves the Community

Enhances Academic’s Scholarship

Benefits the

Community

Engagement!

Differentiating SoE from other Community Interventions

Involves the Community

Benefits the Community

Involves the Academic’s Expertise

Advances Academic’s Scholarship

Volunteering Yes Yes No No

Professional Service

Yes Yes Yes No

Scholarship of Engagement

Yes Yes Yes Yes

Howard, 2008

Definition

• The Scholarship of Engagement “requires going beyond the expert model that often gets in the way of constructive university-community collaboration...calls on faculty to move beyond „outreach,‟...asks scholars to go beyond „service,‟ with its overtones of noblesse oblige. What it emphasizes is genuine collaboration: that the learning and teaching be multidirectional and the expertise shared. It represents a basic re-conceptualization of faculty involvement in community-based work.”

O‟Meara & Rice, Faculty Priorities Reconsidered (2005).

Assessing SoE What do we want to know? How will we know it?

Benefits of Partnership Community Perspective HE Perspective Service Sector Perspective

Participation & Collaboration Planning, Decision-Making Implementation, Management

Communication Within Partnerships Between Partnerships

Sustainability Organisational Structures Resource Allocation

Scholarship of Engagement Discovery, Integration, Application, Teaching & Learning* (Boyer, 1990)

Gelmon, 2003

Local not Global

• “The unwitting outcome of a value system that prioritizes a “cosmopolitan” model of professionals who circulate in (inter)national labor markets has been a profession that is increasingly detached from communities in which they are situated.”

(Rhoades, 2009)

Traditional Views on Scholarship Versus the Scholarship of Engagement

Traditional Scholarship

• Breaks new ground in the discipline • Answers significant questions in the discipline • Is reviewed and validated by qualified peers in the discipline • Is based on a solid theoretical basis • Applies appropriate investigative methods Is disseminated to appropriate audiences • Makes significant advances in knowledge and understanding of the discipline

Scholarship of Engagement

• Breaks new ground in the discipline and has a direct application to broader public issues • Answers significant questions in the discipline, which have relevance to public or community

issues • Is reviewed and validated by qualified peers in the discipline and members of the community • Is based on solid theoretical and practical bases • Applies appropriate investigative methods and Is disseminated to appropriate audiences • Makes significant advances in knowledge and understanding of the discipline and public

social issues • Applies the knowledge to address social issues in the local community Andy Furco, Director of Service-learning Research, UC Berkeley

Epistemological Shift Traditional Academic Knowledge Generation

Engaged Knowledge Generation

Unidirectional Flow Of Knowledge

An Ecosystem of Knowledge

Application Engagement

Benefits?

Academics External Partners Discipline/Profession

Students Institutions

Lorilee Sandmann (Georgia Univ)

• The focus of my career in adult, continuing, and higher education has been developing knowledge that can help solve public problems through the collaboration of communities and institutions of higher education. This area of inquiry, scholarship of engagement or “engaged scholarship,” is typically expressed in community-based service learning, research, and partnerships. As evidenced below, I am recognized as a national and international leader and scholarly practitioner in this field of study with impact in (a) conceptualizing the theory and practice of the scholarship of engagement, (b) identifying and strengthening major institutional change processes and systems that promote and institutionalize higher education community engagement, and (c) building capacity for engaged scholarship with future faculty, current faculty, and higher education administrators. My work is advancing the scholarship of engagement theory, knowledge about engagement through research, application and practice, as well as leadership and service so that the academy can become more responsive and relevant to the public good.

Mary Beth Lima (11 Playgrounds built)_

• Make it count! • P&T is about counting; find out what your dept, college, university

wants • Create “countable” products

frame your work in the dept, college, and univ missions • Find ways to engage your colleagues • If you get to choose external evaluators, pick people that are

familiar with and support community engagement • Be persistent • Dare to fail • Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer • If you never stepped on anyone’s toes, you never took a walk