Project Compass Learning Community Meeting

November 6, 2010Framingham, MA

Where does 1) the deeper involvement of

students as collaborators, and 2) community engagement fit into the work of Project Compass

going forward?

Carnegie Elective Classification – Community Engagement

Central definition “Community Engagement describes the

collaboration between higher education institutions and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.”

“The Students of Color Committee here would like to support their position that engaged faculty help to enhance diversity - from being minorities themselves to attracting minority students to study at the university- with some articles that point to compelling cases or statistics. Do you have any suggestions re: such articles or ideas about where they should look/who they might ask?”

“

“For the sake of creating new knowledge, what is the intellectual space for complementary epistemologies at Middlebury College?”

“I do participatory action research – is that valued by this university?”

“My time as visiting scholar at MIT is coming to an end next January, and I am exploring a PhD program that gives me the opportunity to organize some of the ideas I have been working for a long time.

I have an extensive experience working in processes of knowledge co-creation and innovation in communities and organizations in Latin America, more than 300 cases in 20 years, using approaches of reflective practice, facilitating processes of reframing and creativeness, before knowing the work of Schon. I have authored 3 books and co-authored two more.

I have been here in MIT for 5 years working in the field of reflective practice, action research, practicum and innovation in communities.

Could you suggest universities where I could find PhD programs for people like me with these kind of interests?”

Antonio, A.L. (2002)Faculty of color reconsidered: reassessing contributions to scholarship. Journal of Higher Education.73.5 (Sept-Oct): p582(21).

Gonzalez, K.P. and Padilla, R.V., Eds.(2008) Doing the Public Good: Latina/o Scholars Engage Civic Participation, Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Hale, C.R.,Ed. 2008. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship, Berkeley, CA: GAIA Books, Global, Area, and International Archive, University of California Press.

hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.

Ibarra, R.A. 2001. Beyond Affirmative Action: Reframing the Context of Higher Education. University of Wisconsin Press.

Rendón, L.I. (1992) From the Barrio to the Academy: Revelations of a Mexican American “Scholarship Girl.” In Zwerling, S.L. and London, H.B. eds. First Generation Students: Confronting the Cultural Issues. New Directions for Community Colleges, no. 80, winter. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass, p. 63.

Rendon, L. 2008. Sentipensante Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Rhoades, G. Kiyama, J.M., McCormick, R., and Quiroz, M. (2008) Local cosmopolitans and cosmopolitan locals: New models of professionals in the academy. The Review of Higher Education, 31, 2, 209-35.

What Determines Faculty-Engaged Scholarship?Lori J. Vogelgesang, Nida Denson, and Uma M. Jayakumar. The Review of Higher EducationSummer 2010, Volume 33, No. 4, pp. 437–472

“Previous research has documented that women and faculty of color are more likely to engage in community-service-related behaviors, including advising student groups engaged in community service (Antonio, Astin, & Cress, 2000; Baez, 2000). Women and faculty of color are also more likely to cite such experiences as critical to their purpose in the academy (Thomas, 2001). While faculty of color may express strong commitments to their ethnic/ racial community, these commitments may often feel more like obligations considering how they detract from the kind of individual scholarly work that is rewarded in the professoriate (Tierney & Bensimon, 1996; Turner, 2002; Turner & Myers, 2000). This observation is a powerful example of how institutional values can shape faculty contributions to community. In the case of faculty of color, institutions are muting, instead of further enhancing, existing service-oriented values.”

What Determines Faculty-Engaged Scholarship?Lori J. Vogelgesang, Nida Denson, and Uma M. Jayakumar. The Review of Higher EducationSummer 2010, Volume 33, No. 4, pp. 437–472

“What is particularly noteworthy is that—even after personal characteristics, departmental, and institutional characteristics were taken into consideration— there was still a unique positive effect of “Perceived Institutional Commitment to Community Engagement” on the degree to which faculty use their scholarship to address local community needs. For this outcome measure, then, perception of institutional support matters, even above and beyond the individual dispositions of faculty members, and even when disciplinary culture is accounted for.”

The literature suggests that the next generation of faculty approaches engagement with a strong connection to, even seamlessness with, the work of diversity on campus.

1. Asset-based approaches that validate the contributions of culturally, socially, economically, racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse students includes valuing their community experiences and bringing those experiences to bear on their education.

2. A greater diversity of students also brings a greater diversity – and awareness of – learning styles and attention to how student learn as it relates to whether students persist and succeed academically.

3. It is also clear that culturally, ethnically, and racially diverse faculty express tendencies toward shaping their research agenda and academic careers with attention to social issues and community connections, and are seeking academic homes that validate their scholarly identities.

4. The next generation of faculty takes it as axiomatic that civic engagement cannot be done effectively without a strong commitment to diversity and that diversity on campus cannot be meaningfully accomplished without a strong commitment to community engagement. Next generation scholars weave together diversity and engagement as the foundation for educational participation and success in a diverse democracy.

Full Participation(as a term to capture the

connections between diversity, engagement, and the success of underserved students in higher education)

Full participation of diverse students and diverse faculty in higher education and the wider democracy asks the question of what is the connection between

1. active and collaborative teaching and learning,

2. collaborative knowledge generation and discovery, and

3. the academic success of underserved students?

Full Participation explores connecting, in a systemic way

1. student success with faculty diversity, 2. faculty diversity with community

engagement and inclusive pedagogical practices,

3. faculty diversity with engaged scholarship, and

4. engaged scholarship with institutional rewards and supportive institutional cultures.

Data Points (There is a body of research for each data point):

• The aspirational mission of higher education is “to serve the people of {the state} and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.”

• Demographics of students: greater diversity (ethic, racial, cultural) and increasing numbers of underserved students (first-generation, low income, students of color).

• The academic success of underserved students is enhanced by increased opportunities to identify with faculty and staff who represent ethnic, racial, gender, and cultural diversity.

• The academic success of underserved students is enhanced by increased opportunities to participate in high-impact teaching and learning practices - practices that involved greater engagement in learning

• Demographics of faculty: greater diversity of graduate students and early career faculty – and a rotating door for careers in higher education – attracting more under-represented faculty into the academy than ever before and those faculty are leaving in greater numbers than coming in.

• Research has documented that women and faculty of color are more likely to engage in both interdisciplinary and community-service-related behaviors, including community engaged and inclusive pedagogical practice in teaching and learning and building research agendas related to public problem-solving in local communities and are more likely to cite such experiences as critical to their purpose in the academy.

• Faculty roles and rewards – and criteria for research/scholarship – either 1) reward community engagement as service (counting it for little in promotion and tenure) or 2) do not specifically reward community engagement in teaching, research and creative activity, or in service.

“Full participation” is not something done to students and communities or for students and communities, but is accomplished with students and communities.

The Learning Paradigm

• The “purpose is not to transfer knowledge but to create environments and experiences that bring students to discover and construct knowledge for themselves, to make students members of communities of learners that make discoveries and solve problems.”

Robert Barr and John Tagg “From Teaching to Learning,” 1995 (Change, Nov./Dec.)

The Learning Paradigm• “Under the Learning Paradigm, the goal for

underrepresented students (and all students) becomes not simply access but success. By “success” we mean the achievement of overall educational objectives…[aiming] for ever-higher graduation rates while maintaining or even increasing learning standards.”

Robert Barr and John Tagg “From Teaching to Learning,” 1995 (Change, Nov./Dec.)

Instructional Paradigm

(The faculty determines the content and the way the content will be delivered.)

Learning Paradigm

(The faculty creates a learning environment in which students learn through active and collaborative teaching and learning practices.)

“Collaborative Paradigm”

(The faculty, students, and community partners collaboratively determine the content to be covered, the way in which the content is best learned, and are collectively responsible for learning.)

Provide/deliver instruction Produce learning Co-produce learningTransfer knowledge from faculty to students

Elicit student discovery and construction of knowledge

Collaboratively discover and construct knowledge

Covering material Specified learning results Co-determine the learning outcomes and collaborate in the modes of instruction and assessment

End-of-course assessment Pre/during/post assessment Students and community partners collaborate in formative and summative assessments

Faculty are primarily lecturers Faculty are primarily designers of learning methods and environments

Faculty in collaboration with students and community partners determine learning methods and create learning environments

Teachers classify and sort students Teachers develop every students’ competencies and talents

Teachers and students and community partners together enhance students’ competencies and talents

Instructional Paradigm Collaborative Paradigm

Implications for Faculty, Students, and Institutions

Student as knowledge consumer

Student as knowledge producer, co-creator.

Knowledge is rational, analytic, positivist

Knowledge is relational, contextual, socially constructed.

Instruction is passive, rote, disengaged

Learning is active, collaborative, experiential

Expert generation and application of knowledge

Collaborative and reciprocal knowledge production and use.

Traditional knowledge generation- the dominant position in the academy that all valid knowledge is rational, analytic, and positivist (pure, disciplinary, homogeneous, expert-led, supply-driven, hierarchical, peer reviewed, and almost exclusively university-based.

Engaged knowledge generation - problem-centered, trans-disciplinary, heterogeneous, hybrid, demand-driven, entrepreneurial, network-embedded etc..(Gibbons, 1994)

• Students As Colleagues: Expanding the Circle of Service-Learning Leadership (2006) Edited by Edward Zlotkowski, Nicholas V. Longo, and James R. Williams.

• From Command to Community: A New Approach to Leadership Education in Colleges and Universities. Ed. Cynthia Gibson and Nicholas Longo. New England University Press, 2011.