So much has been written about service learning and community engagement: the opportunities service learning creates, the enriching qualities it provides, and the impact on students and the communities they serve. This ground has been covered. Service learning has become an important part of the educational experience of many students and hopefully of many more in the future.

What I want to share is a bit about what service learning looks like from a dual perspective of someone who participated first as a student and now as a community leader who regularly supervises service learning students from the very same program in which I received my degree. This is a story about Lowell Community Health Center and University of Massachusetts Lowell and the partnership they have created. It is also a story about how institutions grab hold of the opportunity to adapt to changing demographics when the “world” comes to their door.

The world has come to Lowell’s door. Lowell, Massachusetts has always been an immigrant city, but this has become even truer in recent decades. Lowell is now home to families from Africa, Asia, Central and South America. All of the countries in Africa are represented by families living in Lowell. Lowell has mutual assistance associations of Cameroonians, Liberians, Sierra Leonians, and Kenyans, just to name a few of the many immigrant communities in Lowell. Perhaps most notably, Lowell is home to the second largest Cambodian community in the United States (the third largest in the world).

As a health center, Lowell Community Health Center — where I work and am Director of Community Health Promotion?is directly confronted with a diversity of health needs. Many of the immigrants and refugees now living in Lowell come from countries that are suffering through civil wars. People arrive with great health care and social needs. They come with very different experiences of health care and often differing beliefs about what constitutes responsive health care. How then can service learning students in health be brought on board to be a part of LCHC and through their experiences at LCHC learn to become the kind of providers that are responsive to and respective of diverse health needs that may be very different from their own experiences?

When I was a student I was very fortunate to discover UML’s Community Health program and my mentor Professor Nicole Champagne. All through high school, I thought I wanted to become a physician. That was my aim. I started taking the required premed courses such as organic chemistry. But at the same time, I volunteered to help with HIV/AIDS outreach and education programs helping some of the most vulnerable individuals I have met become self-sufficient. Here, I discovered that there was another way to have enormous impact and that was through health education. I fell in love with the feeling I had every time someone said “Thank you Misi,” Misi was a dear name clients called me which they used to demonstrate respect and appreciation. I changed my major to health education and discovered a program that has aspects of service learning built into nearly every course. Early courses started with small, limited components upon which students reflected. The program then culminates with an intensive service learning experience in the senior year in which students spend 32 hours per week for a full semester in the kind of setting in which they eventually hope to work. I carried out the service learning at Lowell Community Health Center doing HIV Counseling and Testing and HIV Case Management. In this capacity, I was able to see and experience many of the theories that we spoke about in our classes and was able to test my own assumptions about what would be effective or not. Creating lessons for HIV 101 Education classes, creating spreadsheets to collect process data, and seeing the holistic nature of helping someone were a few of the knowledge and skills I used during my service learning semester. Had I been thrown into the experience without all of the gradual steps that are the hallmark of the community health program’s approach to service learning I likely would not have understood the complexities in designing effective messages for LCHC’s patients and clients. But I was prepared for the experience by all of the earlier, smaller steps in the program. These included the designing of health education boards and the delivery of educational lessons on topics such as healthy relationships for teens, HIV/AIDS prevention for high risk individuals, proper nutrition and even tenant’s and landlord’s rights and responsibilities for new immigrants arriving to the area.

When I first came to my role at LCHC, I began to reflect a great deal on my service learning experiences as a student. What made these work? How could they have been even better? One of the conclusions I drew from my service learning experience as a student was that if students had a great experience, their interests were captured. They would want to continue the kind of work they did in service learning. But if students had bad experiences at an early stage they never seemed to recover. They seemed to be turned off from service learning for all time.

And what were some of these bad experiences? Some (but not all) seemed to reflect the preparation/receptiveness of the community partner. Was the setting such that the students had few enriching things to do? Was there little in the way of a reflective piece built into the experience? Were the tasks appropriate to the student level?not too hard, not too easy, not too big, not too small? Most important?if we are thinking about global issues?how did the setting set these cross-culturally experiences up? How as a site supervisor could I develop creative and effective involvement of students so that they would better prepared to contribute to the future?

I found that if I was to be effective at my job and there effective as a supervisor of service learning, I needed to learn much more about the communities we serve, cultural health beliefs and how these interact with the health care system. One extended experience at LCHC was key to my learning: the Cambodian Community Health 2010 partnership. This is a CDC-funded program that happens to include much in the ways of activities and initiatives that could provide opportunities for students to engage in service learning. CCH2010 is a multiyear program. It is a partnership program. My role in the project was as staff development coordinator. I am not Cambodian. To assist the staff in their growth I needed to listen closely and learn, while using and adapting my skills learned. The staff and partners in CCH2010 taught me so much about the Cambodian community, the coalition building process and the importance of obtaining community feedback in program design and evaluation.

So, I wanted UML community health students to be a part of and learn from CCH2010. But how? Let me describe one experience. Two students from the Community Health Education program asked to do their service learning semester with me working on the CCH2010 project. After thinking through the possibilities, I gave them the task of creating a heart disease newsletter that would be produced first in English and then in Khmer, the Cambodian language. The first impression the students had was that this task was much too easy and would not take much time. At CCH2010, we needed this task done. We did not have the time or staffing. The students at first assumed that they could simply find the relevant information in the literature and then write the text themselves, place a few pictures and send the newsletter to print. Wrong. They found that they needed to facilitate a process. They needed to listen to CCH2010 staff and participants to identify what should be included and how the information should be presented. Only then would the science, audience, and prevention come together. The students needed writing skills, but they also needed to find the people who would suggest ideas and approaches to be included that would effectively reach out to the Cambodian community, particularly to elders. To do so, the students had to build trust; they had to go to meetings and listen. They did all of this. And they ended with a wonderful newsletter and template that CCH2010 continues to use and an incredibly rich cross-cultural experience that will be with them forever.

There were many points in this process of involving students in CCH2010 that things could have derailed. However, since I was fortunate enough to have experience with service learning as a student, I was able to have some say in the approach we took. I found that I could frame the student tasks at the appropriate level and could anticipate the inevitable problems that emerge. Many of these challenges had to do with cultural competence. How do students begin to approach learning about cultural competence? Learning about cultural competence is important in this new world in which we live but this kind of learning is subtle.

How do we prepare students and shape the request for their involvement at the right level? Often this is very challenging. Perhaps I can illustrate this with a “midsemester” example. Dr. Champagne called me to see if two of her students could be moved to LCHC; they were in placements that were not working out. In their current placements the students were learning little and they were not being challenged to apply their knowledge or reflect on what they learned. I agreed to have them come to LCHC to work on a pressing issue for us. We were in need of a detailed literature review of African immigration and its impact on host community.

This topic was important for LCHC because we were undertaking a much-requested new program that would focus on torture survivors and their needs that could be met through health programs. The students had little previous experience in carrying out a literature review where the focus was not strictly academic. They asked about the parameters of the review. They asked many questions about how to do. If I had not had my own service learning experience I would have been unprepared for the degree to which the students needed initial coaching to succeed at a task that looked relatively straightforward. The students underestimated difficulties, for example; they underestimated how hard and how time consuming this task would be. Yet, once they completed the review, they were very appreciative of having been given this opportunity. They said that they, prior to the service learning experience, had no ideas of how serious and widespread torture is an issue worldwide.

Was their literature review of the highest quality? Perhaps not. But it provided LCHC with useful information and, perhaps more importantly, it changed the way these students viewed health care and health education. The students are eager to find post-graduation positions that would bring them into the world of diverse health needs.

One of the things that we are learning at LCHC is how much we have to offer. Lowell Community Health Center was chosen as one of the top five culturally competent health centers in the nation in a report commissioned by the Office of Minority Health. We are realizing the degree to which we can be a resource. In the past we have not thought of ourselves in this way. I now go into UML classrooms to lecture about what we do, how we do it and why we do it, particularly utilizing real scenarios based on our experiences. This is one way to close the gap and create a feedback loop. As a result of these service learning experiences, we end up with better employees and better health care is offered.

LCHC is good site for service learning because we provide preventive and corrective perspective. We are both a community based organization and a health center. Students are able to see a continuum of activities. They see diversity and see how much their skills are needed and they are able to see people through a continuum of care and on the road to becoming healthy individuals. Students see all the pieces coming together at LCHC from social case management, to health education, to treatment of chronic disease and treatment for mental health.

At LCHC, we see ourselves as continually learning from our patients, our clients and community. Becoming culturally competent is, as one of our LCHC colleagues has stated, a journey and not a destination. As our communities evolve, so do our practices and our approach. This makes service learning in this type of setting even more important and valuable. We are aware that realities are different for each individual and we do whatever it takes to meet them where they are. Because of this, many see LCHC and its leadership as teachers and mentors. Our executive director stills sees herself as a learner, yet, someone like me, who is much newer in the field, sees her as a teacher. Her passion for greater good for everyone is contagious ? this is vital in any service learning experience. This is the experience I have had at LCHC and continue to pass on to many of the students that have walked through our doors. Now I am ‘passion’ contagious.

This ability to share our experiences with students also has a positive effect on our staff at LCHC. Aside from learning from our students, our staff morale raises knowing that they can now teach others about what they have learned. As an example, two of our community health education service learning students shadowed one of our Community Health Workers for a week. The students wanted to learn what “outreach” was all about. Did it work? Do people really listen? What is outreach? So they went out to conduct street outreach. Street outreach basically consists of going to the street and speaking with random individuals as they walk by. After a few attempts, the students quickly learned that engaging people takes skill and practice. The students were shocked to see how well our Community Health Worker stopped people and asked them about their primary care and whether or not they had health insurance. In many instances, the health worker would use her own cell phone to make a supported referral to the health center to assure that people got connected with a primary care provider. One student said, “it’s as if she knows the people,” the reality is, she did not. Through this activity, the students realized the level of skill needed to conduct outreach and developed an appreciation for the work. So much, that both students were hoping to be employed at LCHC to do the same.

The previous example demonstrates how service learning is so important to a student’s vision of her or his future. What happens in service learning can make or break student interest. If early service learning does not work well, student interest can be soured. Yet at the same time, what they learn, what they take away from the experience can’t always be predicted. As I mentioned earlier, some of the learning is subtle. This is particularly true when testing our own biases and assumptions we make. One time a student who was at our site observed a case management session between a gentleman, a health worker and a financial counselor at the health center. The student was attentively listening to the man who was seeking assistance and listening to his story of how he was thrown in jail, and what he was trying to accomplish now that he was out of jail. The student later approached me and said “Sheila, I never knew that people who went to jail looked like that [normal]. I thought people were dirty and on the street.” Such experiences, such as simple observation, have the wonderful side benefit of making it hard for students to stereotype others. Additionally, it helps students realize that their realities are not necessarily the realities of their ‘target audiences’ ? as we called them in school.

As should be apparent, much of this is a partnership between LCHC and UML. LCHC gives feedback. LCHC gets feedback. We are asked about and are thinking about what needs to be changed in or added to the UML curriculum. For example, many students I have supervised do not seem to understand that the production of materials and development of programs takes money. For this reason, I feel since it is important for the curriculum to include classes that speak about grant writing, the importance of obtaining funding and even how to write the grants or grants basics. At times, this lack of understanding has become an area of frustration for them in the beginning of the internship. In the end though, the students realize how things work and how things come together in the ‘real world’ and know that things do not just happen, but instead, things are skillfully created through a detailed process that includes time, a lot of effort and creative thinking.

I’ve been changed by fulfilling these dual roles?student and supervisor?and having them take place in the LCHC-UML partnership in the very diverse immigrant city of Lowell, Massachusetts. I no longer think that things like service learning are one-sided with only the student undergoing learning. I no longer assume that you can put things in place at the outset and they will simply run themselves. Increasingly I think of service learning opportunities as a bit like “gardens” that take tending by experienced “gardeners” who initiate the involvement of people who are new to gardening. These are master gardeners in the sense that they have lots of knowledge that they are ready to test out under the various weather and soil conditions that can unpredictably but regularly occur. The community of Lowell continues to provide all of us opportunities to learn and change as we try to meet the needs of all of the people who find their way to Lowell.

Dedicated to student success, the College provides excellence in teaching, personal attention, and extensive opportunities for exploration and growth. Closely linked to the fabric of the community, Middlesex’s partnerships with school, business and service organizations provide leadership in economic and community development and foster a culture of civic engagement and responsive workforce development.
Mission statement of Middlesex Community College

These words from the mission statement of Middlesex Community College (MCC) form the basis for access and success at the college. Yet, defining and measuring access and success at any college can be problematic. As Sylvia Hurtado has suggested, the pipeline metaphor for education should be replaced with a transit-system model: “Students get on the bus at one point, get off again, take the train to the next stop, walk for a while?and maybe get to their destination, eventually” (Miller, 2004, p. 4). Measuring success in this transit-system model can be challenging since results will be different depending upon students’ proximity to their final destination. As Miller (2004) states, “with each movement in and out of the system comes disengagement from the collegiate experience and discouragement that can diminish the chances of graduation” (p. 4). Therefore, a critical component to access and success requires addressing the disengagement and discouragement students can experience as they stop and take detours in their educational journeys.

The focus on excellence in teaching at MCC is one way to adapt to students on the move. Through a strong emphasis on active pedagogies in the Service-Learning Program, the Teaching, Learning, and Reflection Center, and the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, the culture at the college encourages faculty “to connect the dots between theory and practice, between one individual teaching strategy and the next” (Sperling, 2003, p. 596) as a way to deepen understanding of the diverse learners in our classrooms. In this essay we will provide an overview of approaches to student success at MCC and will use the case studies of Sara and George to discuss how a student’s unique needs are shaped by the context of different communities. We will suggest ways that the college’s mission of providing “personal attention and extensive opportunities for exploration and growth” is translated for each of them and show challenges and opportunities inherent in the translation process.

As open access institutions community colleges educate 45% of all undergraduates and 47% of black, 55% of Hispanic, 47% of Asian/Pacific Islander, and 57% of Native American undergraduate students (American Association of Community Colleges, 2006). In diverse classrooms one size does not fit all; professors need a toolbox of different strategies to connect with the specific needs of individual students. Programs at MCC’s Teaching, Learning, and Reflection Center provide pedagogical tools for faculty and small class sizes with extensive support from disability services and academic support centers create environments that invite student success. In the college’s Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, professors are given time to focus on questions about student learning, to research solutions and to share results in a supportive community of practice. Through this inquiry process, faculty construct knowledge that connects to broader educational issues; such connections provide important new insights for daily classroom practice.

Alexander Astin has commented that the problem in higher education is that “we value being smart much more than we do developing smartness” (Astin, 1998, p. 22), and Moore has echoed this in stating that we need to focus more on the value added by the college to the student than on the value added by the student to the college (Moore, 2004). Professors at community colleges care about teaching and strive to create classroom environments that value all learners. In his paper, “Reflections of a Community College Educator,” MCC Professor Bob Fera explains:

We may, as Astin suggests, broaden the notion of smartness. This may be accomplished in many ways, perhaps the most exciting coming from Gardner’s theory of intelligences and Goleman’s treatise on emotional intelligence. In a word, we may begin to see the value of many different talents, hidden or realized, that our students bring to class, regardless of the school’s stature. Secondly, we are invited to consider the importance of developing or unearthing the many talents that our students bring with them.
Bob Fera, 2006

Faculty at MCC approach access and success by “developing or unearthing the many talents that our students bring with them.” We focus on finding strategies for “helping underprepared students prepare, prepared students advance, and advanced students excel” (Motto of the National Association of Developmental Education). But, we need to use strategies that both fit with the context of our different local communities and are realistic for students in the transit-system model.

Like professors at colleges across the country, MCC faculty work with students who are facing a variety of obstacles to college access and success. At MCC, 61% of students are from low income and/or first generation immigrant families. Many are the first person in their family to attend college. While in school they are also raising children, caring for elderly relatives and working to help support their family and pay for their education. MCC has an additional challenge; addressing the unique needs of students on two very different campuses. In Bedford attractive brick buildings surround a traditional grassy quadrangle. The campus is located in a suburban, affluent town about 30 miles north of Boston. About fifteen miles north is City Campus, a series of multi-story buildings in downtown Lowell. With a population of slightly over 100,000, the City of Lowell has a large immigrant population with linguistic minorities comprising approximately 40% of the population. The average annual high school dropout rate in the city of Lowell is 32%; the rate is 1% in Bedford.

Faculty and staff find that in many cases, students on the two campuses have different needs, motivations and challenges. Many come to college with a career goal and no sense of its plausibility or the realities of that profession. Others come with no plan for the future. In all cases students want to see the practical applications of what they are learning in the classroom. Students’ community engagement is an important way for students to make that connection. Ideally, through lessons taught both in the classroom and in the community students will become skilled professionals and engaged citizens. As evidenced by the examples below, the college’s internal and external collaborations are critical to student success. The case studies of Sara and George are hypothetical but represent the experiences of many actual MCC students. With 50% of new nurses and close to 80% of firefighters, law enforcement officers, and emergency medical technicians credentialed at community colleges (American Association of Community Colleges, 2006), Sara and George’s interests in criminal justice and nursing also reflect “typical” students at community colleges around the country.

Sara is a second-year student who is taking classes on the Bedford campus. She is 19-years-old and came to college directly from high school. She is a criminal justice major and wants to work with juveniles when she graduates. She has lived her entire life in Billerica, MA, a small, suburban community situated between the Bedford and Lowell campuses. Sara attended Billerica High School and works 25 hours a week as a waitress in Billerica. This semester Sara has decided to enroll in Introduction to Sociology and complete a service-learning project. One option for a service-learning placement is the Lowell Juvenile Court. Sara rejects this option because her father does not want her driving her car into Lowell. She instead chooses to perform her service-learning hours at a Boys and Girls Club because it is in Billerica and therefore closer to home. She also knows two people who work at the Club.

Sara is a typical Bedford student; she has limited real world experience and does not have a clear idea of the needs and challenges facing her community. Her first civic engagement choice is made based on convenience rather than true interest.

George walks from his apartment in Lowell to the City campus. He is 25 and works a full-time job in a warehouse while attending college. He came to the United States with his family from Haiti when he was ten. He graduated from Lowell High School and worked for a few years before returning to school. He has a wife and a 6-month-old baby. George is a liberal arts major doing a service-learning project for his cultural anthropology class at the homeless shelter within walking distance of the college. He thinks he would like to eventually attend nursing school and work in an urban hospital.

In contrast, George’s service-learning placement is connected to his career goals; he will start to get a sense of one of the populations he may be working with in an urban health career setting. George’s more focused experience is not unusual. In general, service-learning has been embraced more fully by the Lowell campus community. There seem to be a number of reasons for this difference; proximity to appropriate sites, average student age (older in Lowell) and a sense that Lowell students have a much clearer sense of the needs within their community. Community needs tend to be out in the open in a city and are often more hidden in suburban areas.

At MCC, student success is enhanced through civic engagement in at least four ways. First, as mentioned earlier, work in the community helps students make important connections between classroom learning and the real world. Service-learning helps to create a more permeable classroom, a place where “knowledge generated within it is extended beyond its boundaries” and “one into which outside knowledge is assimilated” (Sandy, 1998). Through her interactions at the Billerica Boys and Girls Club and study of sociology, Sara expanded her vision of community needs and became more open to multiple perspectives. She initially entered a service-learning site based on her comfort level; success for her was a willingness to try a less comfortable site in the next semester. In comparison, George discovered that his own multicultural background and bilingual skills were viewed as real assets at the homeless shelter; this awareness fostered increased perseverance to stay the course and manage challenges of balancing work, study, and family demands.

Second, civic engagement helps students explore potential career pathways. This is often achieved simply by the student’s first hand experience at a community placement. For example, MCC criminal justice students such as Sara have an opportunity to do their service-learning work in the courts, probation departments, battered women’s shelters and in local schools. These placements often help students see that there are a variety of career pathways that can be developed based on an interest in the field of criminal justice. Anecdotally, students tell us that their community work has opened their eyes to professional options they did not know were possible. Armed with a realistic career goal, students return to the classroom with added motivation. MCC takes this a step further by encouraging collaborations between faculty, Service-Learning, and the Career Services staff. Following her experience at the Boys and Girls Club Sara spent another semester at a preschool center for low income children. She realized that she loved working with young children and wondered about switching her major to early childhood education. She met with a career counselor to explore concrete options for early childhood jobs. The Career staff plans events specifically geared to students who may have developed a particular career interest through their community work. For example, this year, Service-Learning and Career Services co-sponsored two events; “Supporting Katrina Recovery” featuring women in public service who responded to Hurricane Katrina and “Foreign Service as a Career”.

Third, not all skills are best taught in the classroom; many are best learned in the community. Students who are engaged in the community develop stronger workplace skills which are critical to future success. Students working in the community learn how to listen and communicate more effectively both in writing and verbally. They also have opportunities to work in groups and on teams and be supervised and evaluated by professionals in the field. More importantly perhaps, the skills developed at service-learning sites are critical to the development of an articulate, compassionate and engaged democratic citizenry. Our student, George, moved forward with his planned nursing major. As part of his coursework he participated as a team serving veterans with serious mental illness at the Bedford Veterans’ Hospital. Marie Ryder, the course instructor, has collaborated with the hospital for many years. She and her students have engaged in studies to explore experiences for health care professionals that reduce stigmatizing attitudes toward those with mental illness (Sadow, Ryder, & Webster, 2002). As a member of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at MCC, Marie actively engages in research to explore how her students learn from the community and then modifies her teaching approaches based on results. This ongoing inquiry into teaching practice will benefit George and his classmates on a daily basis and it will serve as a model to them of the importance of reflective practice. Marie’s sustained partnership with staff at the VA Hospital demonstrates clearly the win-win results for college and community when professionals collaborate across institutional settings.

Fourth, not all students shine in the classroom; some have language issues that make class participation challenging, others have disabilities that present barriers to traditional college success, for many older students it has been several years since they opened a textbook. Civic engagement is an opportunity for those students to find a place where learning comes more easily and where they can be successful. The confidence developed in the community is then brought back to the classroom. The college is taking service work a step further by creating an Engaged Scholar distinction for students who perform a significant amount of service in a number of courses and includes a mention of this honor on student transcripts and at graduation. Such acknowledgement provides an opportunity for MCC to publicly honor students who have distinguished themselves through service in some of the same ways we honor academic success.

The case studies of Sara and George help to show that fostering success in students does require “excellence in teaching, personal attention, and extensive opportunities for exploration and growth.” Student success however is not the result of the college’s efforts alone; it also requires partnerships between the college, and its larger community. Student learning and by extension student success is enhanced through the relationships that develop when a college sees itself as part of the fabric of the local community. A natural and productive collaboration occurs when members of the college community are engaged in the community and the community has needs this vital and creative group can meet. These collaborations inevitably lead to deeper and more meaningful learning which itself represents student success. During the past three years, MCC has participated in a Learn and Serve grant, The Lowell Civic Collaborative which involves a unique civic engagement partnership between MCC and two outstanding community resources, the Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell and Minute Man National Historical Park in Lexington, a suburban area near Bedford. Since 2003, thirty-one Liberal Arts and Science faculty from a variety of disciplines have incorporated civic engagement topics into their courses. These projects have ranged from biology students assisting staff to assess water quality and to determine invasive plant growth in a sheep grazing project at Minute Man National Historical Park to students in a Math Connections course gathering data from Lowell National Historical Park on immigration and tourism to graph, chart and share with the LNHP staff. Read more examples.

Through participating with the National Parks, faculty have gained a deeper understanding of the two campuses and their local communities and have begun to see more ways to use the distinct resources of both campuses. As part of The Lowell Civic Collaborative and MacNeil/Lehrer’s By the People Project the college hosted a civic dialogue in October 2005 focusing on MCC’s educational question of the year: “What skills or knowledge will students need most to be effective citizens in our world in the future?” A total of 268 students, faculty, community members, and campus staff participated (96 in Lowell and 172 in Bedford) in lively dialogue. The discussion was extended by postings on the COPPER blog, a weblog created as part of MCC’s work as a cluster group with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The dialogues and blog help unite the campuses around a central issue of importance and have provided a valuable way to chronicle views from a wide range of participants from the president of the college to students in a sociology class to experts on civic engagement to elected officials. These exchanges help to define what is needed for access and success at the college from a variety of perspectives and generate new ways to “foster a culture of civic engagement and responsive workforce development.”

As we plan for the future a number of important goals emerge. First, while civic engagement is utilized through some programs’ curricula there are others that have not incorporated civic engagement in a meaningful way. While this situation is improving, students would benefit from an increase in the number of civic engagement opportunities in some academic areas. We have also found that service-learning has taken hold in Lowell more quickly and easily than in Bedford. While this development may certainly be attributable to the different student demographic and the opportunities available close to campus it is an imbalance that must be addressed. Finally, as the number of engaged students increases the need for a consistent, meaningful process for assessing their experiences grows. MCC is in the midst of a college-wide assessment project and civic engagement opportunities will be investigated both as a whole and within individual courses.

In analyzing the dilemma of students on the move, Miller (2004) suggests that we need to help students create their own intellectual coherence. She recommends that “in every course, the major focus should be the development of the motivation, understanding, and intellectual skills that will make auto-didacts of them, owners of their own education” (p. 4). Students have open access at community colleges, but they typically take many forms of transportation and detours in their travels through the educational transit system. Many will reach a final destination of graduation, but others may stop along the way and find success without a formal degree. Being “owners of their own education” means that students can define for themselves what success means.

References

American Association of Community Colleges. Community college fact sheet. Retrieved July 18, 2006

Astin, A. (1998). Higher education and civic responsibility. National Society for Experiential Education Quarterly, Winter, 18-26.

Fera, R. (2006). Reflections of a community college educator. Explorations from a Community of Practice: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Middlesex Community College, Fall 2006.

Miller, M. A. (2004, March/April). Students on the move. Change, 36(2), 4.

Moore, R. (2004). Do colleges identify or develop intelligence? Journal of Developmental Education, 28(1), 28-34.

Sadow, D., Ryder, M., & Webster, D. (2002). Is education of health professionals encouraging stigma towards the mentally ill? Journal of Mental Health, 11(6), 657-665.

Sandy, L. R. (1998). The permeable classroom. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 9(3), 47-60.

Sperling, C. (2003). How community colleges understand the scholarship of teaching and learning. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 27, 593-601.

Natural disasters shake us out of our complacency, creating a burst of energy that overrides our comfortable inertia; faced with forces totally outside of our control, we are, ironically, inspired to act. The South Asian tsunami, the Pakistan landslides, the Gulf Coast hurricanes — the very magnitude of hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted, of towns destroyed, of regions reconfigured — have recently energized thousands of students from our campuses to try to help. The bigger, more immediate, and less tractable the problem, the more urgent is our impulse to rise to the occasion and to find some means to demonstrate our common humanity, to mediate the forces of nature, and to act with immediacy and spirit.

In a world where a billion people lack clean drinking water, where smoke from indoor cooking kills thousands of children each year, and where poverty, persecution and illiteracy are a fact of life for millions, there is no lack of problems of great magnitude. We have no need to wait for natural disasters to create conditions that require our participation. If students are inspired to act by their realization of acute human suffering, blatant inequities, and desperate situations, the world presents a constant array of such inspirations.

As experiential educators, we help students learn from the opportunities that the world presents. Typically, we work concentrically, starting with our immediate neighborhood, our city, our region, our country. Typically, we lack the resources to extend our reach to opportunities to serve overseas. As humanitarians, we deplore the shocking conditions that affect most of the world’s poor; as administrators, we carefully steward our scant resources. Typically, those resources do not stretch far enough to provide programs that enable students to address global issues.

However, failing to engage students with global issues, global partnerships, and global literacy in our increasingly interconnected world is as risky and limiting as ignoring computer literacy. As anyone who has tried to learn computer usage from a textbook knows, computer literacy requires hands-on experience; so too does global awareness. The world is a potent teacher, and students are exceptionally sensitive to its lessons, which last a lifetime. The responsibility of higher education in the next twenty years will be to educate ourselves and our students in resourcefulness and ingenuity to enable access to the opportunities that distant, international communities represent, where the unexpected is a given and the typical experience is transformative.

“Why” is a much easier question to answer than “how.” Clearly, helping American college students to gain international service experiences will be educational for those students, whose perspectives will be broadened, whose observations and memories will enrich their thoughts and conversations for years, and whose attitudes and expectations will be reshaped by their exposure to cultures and people both similar and very different from themselves. The same is often true of community service work done in disparate communities within the United States, but the degree of impact tends to be significantly higher for international experiences, if only because the students are keenly aware of being in a foreign environment.

Besides the education in external factors — the cultural, geographic, political, social, economic, and technical influences that shape communities and countries — students also gain internal, personal insights. They learn about their own principles, preferences, tolerances, assumptions, capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as the hallmarks of their own culture and country. Thus, an interesting benefit of educating students as global citizens is that they consider seriously, sometimes for the first time, their role as US citizens as well.

Also good for US students and communities are the understanding of social responsibility and the activation of problem-solving capacities that international public service experiences engender. Professionals who understand their capacity to create positive change are a powerful force for good; such professionals were often students who actively experienced their own powers and limitations within a challenging context. Working on diverse teams, learning to respect and collaborate with indigenous people, negotiating foreign terrain both literally and figuratively, dealing with cultural and ethical dilemmas, understanding contextual perspectives of global issues, struggling with language barriers and inadequate resources, being truly self-dependent or dependent on strangers: experiences like these create self-knowledge, stimulate mature understanding of broad social contexts and the roles of individuals within them, and provide the foundation for self-confidence, reflection, and critical thinking.

While it is easy to accept that American students and communities will gain from international service experiences, it is more challenging to ensure that international communities will benefit. Many international opportunities may be accurately termed “service tourism,” as students provide token services in programs that exist to give American students a taste of international experience. As with other forms of tourism, the major benefit of such programs may simply be tourist dollars that stimulate local economies, while American students in fact become the service recipients, benefiting from the time and efforts of the NGOs and communities that host them while having little impact on real community needs.

In my view, neither service tourism nor exhaustive preparatory cultural emersion courses are optimal to facilitate effective international service experiences. The latter may be too costly, both in terms of time and funding. Two key premises of experiential education and public service within a college context are that students learn by doing and that education outside the classroom can be as potent and valuable as education within the classroom. It is ironic from that perspective to delay on-site education in international service for lengthy preparatory coursework. Certainly, students should receive appropriate guidance and encouragement to seek out opportunities to prepare themselves for overseas work; courses in language, culture, politics, social systems, economics or other aspects are undoubtedly valuable. However, value should not be confused with necessity, and teaching should not be confused with learning. Providing opportunities for on-site supervision of longer-term projects may optimize the learning situation more fully as they effectively prepare students for the needs of that specific community.

Funding is, of course, a challenge that is never far from the minds of concerned administrators. While the financial constraints are real and significant, we should not consider them prohibitive or absolute. In truth, if our aim is to empower students to act as change agents, our focus should be to “teach them how to fish” for the resources they require — after providing them with the equipment to get started effectively. If institutions can motivate students with passionate intent, empower them with strategies and confidence, instill a commitment to social responsibility, model the willingness to take appropriate risks, and offer them some portion of seed funding to get started, the students may themselves raise the rest of the funds they need to do effective international service. Our aim is not, after all, to support passive learners but rather to cultivate change agents — people who have the vision, daring, drive, entrepreneurship, and collaborative strategies to create positive change in communities around the world. If we trust them to change the world, it seems that we should also trust them to build on our useful but modest financial support. Whether a particular project succeeds or fails to acquire needed resources, the students will become educated in the challenges of international development work, of which fundraising is an inevitable part.

As educators, our focus cannot be on programmatic development and resource acquisition alone; our main task is to find ways to convince students that they can effectively work as collaborative change agents abroad, to figure out streamlined ways to prepare them to do so, and to enable effective integration of lessons learned when they return. Given financial constraints, we must ourselves envision new models and work to motivate, facilitate, and celebrate student initiative, ingenuity, and resourcefulness as well. In many ways, international public service is not a test of financial standing but a challenge to our imagination and creativity.

While many creative institutional models exist, at MIT we have developed opportunities that attract students to an array of choices yet require shared responsibility. This model arose through equal parts of philosophy and necessity, though not necessarily in that order. As many of you know from your own experience, a lack of funding often stimulates creativity; we generously share that condition with our students as part of the invaluable training we offer.

The array of opportunities for international service experiences at MIT includes grants, Public Service Fellowships that offer modest stipends or that pay for basic expenses, service learning classes, and the IDEAS Competition, which challenges teams of students to invent programs, processes, and technologies that meet community needs. The service learning courses include D-Lab, which combines classes on engineering and cultural issues with fieldwork opportunities. Other service learning courses are available in a variety of disciplines, including Urban Studies and Mechanical Engineering. The motto of one of the most effective engineering courses echoes our working premise of preparing students by enabling them to share in the challenges, boasting “a problem too big, a time too short, a team too large, and a budget too small.” Despite these challenges, or perhaps because of them, 2.009: Product Engineering Processes has produced highly inventive and effective technologies for communities as well as excellent and confident engineers. A recent survey indicated that the course’s service learning focus effectively renewed students’ interest in engineering as a career because it demonstrated the social relevance of mechanical engineering.

Like 2.009, the IDEAS Competition invites students to rise to a daunting challenge: to learn about the needs of a community anywhere in the world and to form a team that creates an innovative, feasible, and effective solution that addresses those needs. The Competition supports student efforts with a series of events, feedback sessions, mentoring opportunities, and small grants that enable students to get effective help in developing their community connections, proposals, and projects before the final events. At that point, the projects are judged by an independent panel of experts from the faculty and community, and winning teams receive modest awards to continue to develop their projects. They are also required to attend a retreat that assists them in planning and team building.

IDEAS (an acronym for Innovation, Development, Enterprise, Action, and Service) is in itself a challenge: it is run by a half-time staff person and a group of volunteers that includes students, alumni, and staff. It receives no Institute funding unless a particular department or office chooses to sponsor one of the awards, as the Graduate Students Office has done for the past few years. Like all of our international public service programs, we raise all other funds each year (including the salary of the staff member who runs the programs) from grants, corporate sponsorships, and private donations.

Now in its fifth year, the IDEAS Competition seems to be a popular and successful means of inspiring student participation in community innovation. Interestingly, most of the projects are internationally focused, so students have to overcome challenges of distance, communication, and intercultural partnerships. IDEAS has produced both social programs and technologies. Though none of the IDEAS awards even comes close to fully financing the winning innovations, many teams have succeeded in gaining significant external funding to enable them to develop and disseminate their innovations to the communities for whom they were intended. To date, IDEAS winners have accrued well over a million dollars in external funding, and their innovations have helped thousands of people worldwide. The IDEAS Competition model has also been adapted and adopted at other universities in the US and abroad.

I believe that the success of IDEAS and the other MIT programs stems from the way these programs support students while they challenge them to become partners in their own development and in that of communities worldwide. A high bar and a small purse signal to students that we trust their abilities, and the support and mentoring systems we have put in place demonstrate our willingness to work with them as they face their own challenges.

Essentially, we provide expectations of success and some scaffolding on which to build it. Motivated as we ourselves are to take risks and to act despite the lack of resources, we can be empathetic advisors to our students. I would like to point out that although we are making a virtue of necessity, we would nevertheless prefer full funding; I would like to assure MIT and wealthy people everywhere that we would endeavor to do just as good a job with the handicap of a $10 million dollar endowment. Until that is forthcoming, however, we will continue to try to find ways to inspire students to become active global citizens who are aware of devastation regardless of the news and who dare to respond to human needs regardless of the challenge.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Campus Compact, a national coalition of over 950 college and university presidents that promotes community service, civic engagement, and service-learning. For the past two decades the Compact, which features over sixty members from Massachusetts, has contributed to and been a beneficiary of a dramatic thawing of town-gown relations that better positions the Commonwealth and the entire country in today’s knowledge economy. As regions around the world aggressively organize to compete in this economy, it is timely to celebrate the thawing of town-gown relations and suggest ways in which organizations like Campus Compact can further strengthen campus-community partnerships going forward.

Thawing of Town-Gown Tensions

Historically, colleges and universities literally walled themselves off from their host communities. This was particularly the case in urban settings in the 1960s and 1970s as cities hemorrhaged from urban decline. Community and government agencies, in turn, have often viewed colleges as pariahs, complaining about their tax-exempt status, physical encroachment, and noisy students. The term town-gown itself typically conjures up acrimony and tension which has frequently played out when academic and community stakeholders have interacted.

Over the past two decades, a dramatic sea change has occurred, by which institutions of higher learning and their host communities have come to recognize their relationship as symbiotic. There are at least four major forces at play that have helped to bring about this transformation.

The Public Service Revolution

Visionary academic leaders like the founders of Campus Compact challenged the mid-1980s notion that college students had grown apathetic by championing public service in student life programming and academics. The results have been profound.

Over the past ten years, the number of campus-based public service programs in Massachusetts alone has increased 75%. The estimated number of hours students contribute to service on campuses grew from 20,000 to 350,000 annually. The number of colleges with service offices rose from 10% to 85%. Barbara Canyes, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Campus Compact, reports that “Many new institutional structures have been built into systems to allow for better communications to communities.”¹ Universities like Harvard, for example, regularly publish service directories that raise awareness on and off campus about the institution’s commitment to service. Quantifying the full spectrum of an institution’s service provides good fodder for public relations. In the 1990s, Brown University in Providence aggressively advertised that 1 in 4 volunteers in the city’s public schools were Brown students; the promotion of this finding tangibly improved its relations with city officials.

A Greater Commitment to Community & Government Relations

This type of promotion epitomizes a second force strengthening town-gown relations. Two decades ago, community affairs at most universities were handled by the general counsel or public relations officers on a part time basis. But increased demands for accountability by government and community agencies have led colleges to build out specific community and government relations staff capacities. New campus-based institutes and think tanks have also proliferated and are registering new influence on local public policy making.

One precipitating factor is the changing nature of civic leadership. Perceptibly, politicians and other civic leaders are looking to higher education to help fill the void left by corporate mergers and acquisitions. In Boston, for example, many thorny civic issues are now tackled by academic-based think tanks like the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern, the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard, the McCormack Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University.

Another major factor is the growing reach of government in the academy. Historically, the federal government was loath to regulate higher education, but has increased its oversight as financial aid and research funding have grown as sources of institutional revenue. At the same time, state and local governments have become more aggressive in regulating or exacting concessions from colleges as they seek to expand physical infrastructure. Many municipalities have created new academic zoning and master plan requirements. Mayors and city councils have become savvier in prodding institutions to increase community contributions against the backdrop of the tax-exempt debate, particularly acute in the Northeast where many cities are peculiarly reliant on the agricultural economy-era property tax.

College and university administrators are embracing the overtures of government officials out of recognition that positive relations with their host communities are in their enlightened self-interest. In the 1960s and 1970s, universities like Columbia deliberately disengaged from their adjacent neighborhoods. This strategy backfired as many institutions saw their own standing (and applications) fall in direct relation to their communities’ declining fortunes. Former Columbia President George Rupp estimates that the University’s community missteps from the late 1960s through the 1980s may have cost Columbia a billion dollars in contributions.²

Over the past twenty years, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Trinity in Hartford, Clark in Worcester, and many other colleges have significantly invested in adjacent neighborhoods in innovative ways with local groups. Under the presidency of Judith Rodin, the University of Pennsylvania led the rebuilding of West Philadelphia by pursuing five bread and butter strategies: 1) creating clean and safe streets; 2) increasing housing and home ownership; 3) promoting commercial development; 4) fostering economic opportunity; and 5) fortifying public education.³ Those strategies have paid big dividends, including a 31% reduction in crime, an 88% increase in median home values in five years, 150,000 square feet of new retail space, and new businesses and schools.⁴ The University’s standing in national rankings is now soaring. Trinity pursued similar strategies that led to a 77% increase in applications⁵. Clark’s Park Campus School has been called the best urban public high school in the Commonwealth, and in 2004, the University Park Partnership, Main South Community Development Corporation, and Clark received the state’s inaugural Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Partnership Award.⁶

Colleges and universities also increasingly agree to make payments or services or form new strategic partnerships in lieu of paying taxes. In Boston, where local institutions contribute tens of millions in direct payments to municipalities annually on commercial taxes, payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT), and other fees, universities have individual PILOT agreements with the city. In 2004, Tufts University announced a new agreement with the cities of Medford and Somerville that included a $1.25 million contribution to each city to be paid over the next 10 years⁷. In Providence, colleges and universities have agreed to a formula by which PILOT is made on a voluntary sliding scale triggered by certain factors such as endowment size and property purchases⁸. In Worcester, colleges recently participated in a Mayoral task force on town-gown relations that resulted in promising new strategic public-private initiatives. All of these are the products of more sophisticated joint town-gown strategizing.

Touting the Economic Impact of Higher Education

Another major force gaining currency of late is the growing recognition and promotion of the academy’s economic impact. Higher education’s impact on a region’s economy has always been significant. But it has become all the more catalytic locally and nationally amidst the rapid transformation to a primarily knowledge-based economy.

Take, for example, Greater Boston, home to the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan economy. Amidst a changing corporate climate, higher education is ever more distinguished as a major sector in its own right and one that helps to develop other leading knowledge sectors like health care and biotechnology. The region’s 75 colleges and universities employ well over 50,000 faculty and staff.⁹ The eight major research universities in the area alone have an economic impact of over $7 billion and spend nearly $3.9 billion annually on payroll, purchasing, and construction.¹⁰ They receive $1.5 billion in research funds and their affiliated hospitals and research centers attract an additional $1 billion.¹¹ Area universities and their affiliated hospitals represent more than one-third of the state’s largest 25 employers.¹² Leading companies like Boston Scientific, EMC, and Analog Devices were founded by graduates of local colleges. Major companies like Novartis and Merck are moving to Boston to be close to higher education clusters. Students at the eight major institutions alone spend about $850 million and visitors an additional $250 million.¹³ The region’s concentration of knowledge networks rooted in higher education attracts workers to the region and helps to train the local workforce beyond degree programs through a wide range of community outreach efforts.

Higher education’s growing economic impact and heightened awareness about it are natural byproducts of the ascendant knowledge economy and not limited to Massachusetts. Nationally, education and knowledge creation enjoyed the second highest level of job growth by traded cluster in the 1990s.¹⁴ Colleges and universities across the U.S. are embracing economic ventures, incented by laws like the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 that facilitated university patenting and product licensing and led to a tenfold increase nationally in academic activity in this area.¹⁵

The knowledge economy has also placed a higher premium on arguably the most important output of colleges ? human capital. A 2004 study by Robert Weissbourd and Christopher Berry for CEOs for Cities, The Changing Dynamics of Urban America, finds that college degree attainment is the single biggest driver of urban economic growth.¹⁶ States increasingly view higher education as important engines of growth. Despite the recent recession, higher education funding by the States has increased as a percentage of overall outlays nationally in the past decade. Paul Grogan, President of the Boston Foundation, frequently points out that in today’s footloose economy, local leaders from across sectors increasingly recognize colleges and universities as valuable stationary assets and anchors of economic growth.

Colleges and universities are taking note of their rising economic impact and clout and promoting them. Harvard, MIT, and Brown recently produced economic impact statements and the eight largest research universities in Greater Boston published a report “Engines of Economic Growth” documenting their collective impact. Local business and government leaders are also reaching out to higher education leaders for assistance in corporate recruitment, as evidenced by the Commonwealth’s Office of Economic Development’s recent successful efforts to mobilize local university leadership in recruiting Bristol Myers Squibb to Fort Devens. These efforts are inspired by similar strategies to integrate higher education leaders in regional development efforts pioneered by officials in the Research Triangle, Austin, and other fast growing competitor knowledge economy centers.

Innovative Higher Education Alliances

Several colleges and universities across regions are seeking to institutionalize and grow such partnerships to scale by forming innovative alliances within their sector and across sectors. Most alliances like the Colleges of Worcester Consortium provide multiple functions, including promotion of the sector writ large, cross-campus exchanges, and facilitation of economies of scale. Others like the I-91 Knowledge Corridor are more project oriented, marketing regions like the Springfield-Hartford area as emerging knowledge economy hubs. In 2003, public colleges and universities in Southeastern Massachusetts formed the Connect partnership which recently issued a report outlining how the region can better position itself in the knowledge economy.

Another evolving model is that of higher education-civic partnerships that tackle major regional competitiveness issues. As an outgrowth of the Mayor’s task force, Worcester recently formed a new UniverCity Partnership to leverage collaboration between the City, the Consortium and other public and private entities to promote the region’s development. Perhaps the best example of this cross-sectoral approach is Philadelphia’s Knowledge Industry Partnership (KIP), a broad-based coalition of the region’s civic, business, government, and academic leaders working together to maximize the impact of the region’s knowledge industry. KIP promotes the region as “One Big Campus” to prospective students, encourages them to explore the city upon matriculation, and sponsors internships and externships (with over 2,500 placements to date) all designed to bolster the region’s supply and retention of knowledge economy workers.¹⁷ A similar effort called College 360 seeks to “enroll, engage, and employ” students in Northeast Ohio.¹⁸

Building Upon the Momentum

While these four forces hold promise, colleges and universities and their external stakeholders need to build on their momentum. A 2005 Carol R. Goldberg Seminar report co-sponsored by the Boston Foundation and the University College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts reported that leaders across sectors were optimistic about the future of town-gown relations but argued that more strategic, sustained commitments were needed to institutionalize collaborative approaches. As former Northeastern University President Richard Freeland put it, “Our challenge within academia is to shift toward actively working with community leaders for our mutual benefit. The challenge for local communities and civic officials is to move toward seeing such institutions as critical engines of regional development. What is clear, of course, is that these twin paradigm shifts are the mirror image of each other. One can’t happen without the other.”¹⁹

As academic-based organizations like Campus Compact strengthen institutional commitments to public service to meet their part of this bargain, they ought to branch out and/or foster the formation of related efforts to help replicate best practices in community and government relations, economic development, and town-gown alliance building. Specifically, they should encourage colleges and universities to:

1. Marshal institutional resources in support of host communities’ petitions for more state aid to help compensate for tax-exempt property. While colleges and universities are growing the knowledge economy and providing new external value, this doesn’t radically change the fact that many host municipalities are still often strapped for cash due to their excessive reliance on the property tax, meaning that town-gown relations will continue to be raw unless new mechanisms are created to provide relief to municipalities. While many institutions have agreed to make PILOT, they ought to partner with host communities in pursuit of more creative and sustainable solutions to strengthen local government’s financial model. Connecticut and Rhode Island offer best practices examples. The State of Connecticut is mandated to reimburse its cities and towns nearly 80% of tax revenues that go uncollected from nonprofit institutions. The State of Rhode Island reimburses 27%. Such policies recognize the importance of investing in both non-profit academic institutions and municipal governments alike as part of a holistic statewide economic development strategy.
2. Create and commit to community investment goals across all institutional business line functions. Too few colleges set community investment goals across all corporate functions like purchasing, employment, and investments. Regardless of their other good works, institutions that do not incorporate community concerns in all of their operations risk being labeled hypocritical. Colleges should seek to direct purchasing to area vendors, target employment to nearby residents in need, consider joint mixed-use real estate ventures with local stakeholders, and invest in area assets whenever possible like any other major business looking to brandish its corporate citizenship credentials.
3. Document their economic and community impact regularly, highlighting opportunities for further development. Such promotion can do as much to raise awareness and inspire efforts on campus as off.
4. Pursue sectoral and cross-sectoral alliances when strategically advantageous on issues such as regional talent retention. Such alliances are commonplace in the health care sector and would enable higher education to advance its collective interests and offer a vehicle with which related government and business associations could partner on knowledge economy strategies. Private colleges and universities should particularly explore ways in which they can support public higher education as part of a wider strategy to strengthen the sector’s role in a regional economy.

Campus Compact provides an instructive model by which colleges and universities share best practices in embedding engagement in higher education. Building upon this model is critical to enable the Commonwealth and the entire country to maintain its economic edge and to continue to redefine town-gown as a positive term that connotes opportunity rather than acrimony.

Notes

¹ James Davitt Rooney & Julia Gittleman, “A New Era of Higher Education-Civic Partnerships: The Role and Impact of Colleges and Universities in Greater Boston Today”, October 2005, The Boston Foundation at 27. back

² The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) & CEOs for Cities, “Leveraging Colleges and Universities for Urban Economic Growth ? An Action Agenda”, 2003 at 36. back

³ University of Pennsylvania Office of the Vice President for Government, Community & Public Affairs, “Urban Alliance: How Penn’s Dynamic Engagement Transformed the Neighborhood,” 2004 at 1. back

⁴ Id. at 5, 9, 12. back

⁵ See ICIC & CEOs for Cities, 13. back

⁶ See Clark University, Clark and the Community: Education at back

⁷ See Rooney & Gittleman, Boston Foundation, 22. back

⁸ See Rhode Island School of Design, News, Press Releases: Mayor Cicilline Reaches an Historic Agreement with Providence Colleges + Universities. back

⁹ See Rooney & Gittleman, Boston Foundation, 15. back

¹⁰ Appleseed, Inc., “Engines of Economic Growth: The Economic Impact of Boston’s Eight Research Universities on the Metropolitan Boston Area”, 2003, Boston College, et al., 6-7. back

¹¹ See Appleseed, Boston College, et al., 3. back

¹² See Rooney & Gittleman, Boston Foundation, 14 back.

¹³ See Appleseed, Boston College, et al., 6. back

¹⁴ Michael Porter, Cluster Mapping Project, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School. back

¹⁵ Council on Government Relations, The Bayh-Dole Act: A Guide to the Law and Implementing Regulations, 1999. back

¹⁶ Robert Weissbourd and Christopher Berry, “The Changing Dynamics of Urban America,” CEOs for Cities, Executive Summary, 2004, 6. back

¹⁷ See Philadelphia’s Knowledge Industry Partnership. back

¹⁸ See College 360. back

¹⁹ See Rooney & Gittleman, Boston Foundation, 9. back

Global citizenship would seem a recent concept, but its origins can be traced back to at least 4th century Greece when Diogenes declared himself a cosmopolitan ? a citizen of the world. At the time, the earth’s shape, the configuration of the vast majority of its surface, and even the existence of its varied peoples and cultures, would have been largely unknown to him ? or anyone. The idea of global citizenship, then, emerged even before there was a clear understanding of just what the globe entailed or who populated it. Though the concept of a global citizen dates from antiquity, the full realization of that vision probably remains a dream, even in the present day. This paper will briefly explore how global citizenship might finally emerge, what might characterize a global citizen and, how Civic Engagement offers some of the most effective means for bringing that result to fruition.

At Home in the World

My own introduction to the notion of global citizenship came through service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, Africa, where I coordinated a water well construction project. Before becoming a Volunteer, I had been vaguely aware of a Peace Corps recruitment slogan: “You can never go home again.” At the conclusion of my two-year tour, when I returned to the U.S., I found myself reflecting on that catchphrase. I was happy to be back and yet, I found myself strangely disturbed and ill at ease. The disoriented feeling was reminiscent of how I had initially experienced my assignment in a remote corner of the Sierra Leone bush. I had been conscious of my many differences, and I had the feeling that I did not really belong. As time passed, however, my language and cultural competencies increased, and meaningful friendships developed. A sense of deep connection replaced my earlier doubts.

Jack Mezirow (1990) describes how transformative learning begins with a “disorienting dilemma” ? through an experience that creates a powerful sense of disequilibrium such that unexplored assumptions and beliefs are ultimately replaced with new perspectives and behaviors. In my own case as a returned Peace Corps Volunteer, the learning had come full circle, and I had experienced the cycle of both being a stranger and of belonging on two separate continents. The bittersweet implications of the slogan now held meaning for me, and I recognized that something profound had indeed changed. My sense of place in the world had both expanded and become inaccessible to me all at once.

Accidental Citizens

Even in the present day, people in much of the world are enculturated to identify themselves primarily in terms of social systems that are far smaller than nation-states, including: family, clan, tribe, community, region, and religion. Such a limited sense of affinity, while understandable in a historic context, does not always correspond with the reality of our contemporary lives. For instance, energy and water shortages, global warming, poverty, and terrorism are but a few examples of the challenges we face as a world community. Moreover, the most economically significant entities on our planet are increasingly made up of corporations, not nations. The world, then, is becoming more interconnected, and also vastly more complex.

Psychologist Robert Kegan (1995) suggests that many of us are unable to effectively learn from and handle the ambiguity and complexity of modern life. This puts us at the mercy of events, without capacity to move beyond a nagging sense characterized by a feeling of being “in over our heads” as we react to new circumstances with a repertoire of old behaviors and emotions (Kegan, 1995).

In the face of such complexity, we tend to look to familiar answers. It seems especially natural for Americans to assume that technological changes could be the key to bringing about greater awareness of and participation in a global community. Advances in information technology in particular do have the effect of making the world smaller in very real ways. Yet, greater access to information does not on its own lead to greater understanding or deeper relationships. Moreover, the powerful influence of technology has also concentrated the influence of economic and financial factors in our lives. In turn, our role as consumer and worker is emphasized over that of community member or citizen. William Harman, author of Global Mind Change, explains that we define behavior by “economic consumption, so much so that citizens, especially in the United States of America, refer to one another as fellow ‘consumers.’” (Harman, 1998, p. 123).

If technology and economic factors do not ultimately develop our capacity to see ourselves as global citizens, some might look to government for inspiration and support. But government at a global level is just barely in its infancy. The United Nations and its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations, were established as a direct consequence of horrific world wars. Consequently, the U.N. focus is on the affairs of nations and governments. The existence of the U.N. is tremendously important and brings great benefit to the peoples of participating countries, but such relationships do not, as yet, significantly involve direct, widespread, interaction between citizens.

In short, governments may eventually confer citizenship at a global level, or technology may eventually join us in a deeper form of world community, but both possibilities share basic assumptions: that change happens to us and that others (mostly above us) must do that work. But citizenship surely requires more from us than the role of passive consumer, isolated internet surfer or affiliate of a distant international body. Citizenship requires a capacity to think beyond one’s own needs and experiences, and it requires taking responsibility for oneself AND others. Influential system theorist, Peter Senge (1996), asks: “Why do we cling to the view that only the top can initiate significant change? Is it just our unwillingness to give up a familiar mental model? Is it the fear of stepping out of line without the imprimatur of the hierarchy? Perhaps, also, there is… the comfort of being able to hold someone else… responsible….” (Senge, 1996, p.42).

Making the Road Together

When knowledge of the world is primarily mediated, observed rather than experienced directly and personally, complexity tends to be interpreted in terms of competition, separateness and even danger. But this can be dangerous thinking in an increasingly interconnected world. Global Citizens, then, are inherently engaged citizens. Margaret Wheatley (1999), another prominent systems thinker, observes that when systems are fragmented and distressed (as our worldwide human system surely is), the essential strategy for healing is to create more connections, to increase the system’s knowledge of and relationship with itself. For any human system, Wheatley emphasizes the critical importance of creating and nurturing relationships as the way toward greater understanding and meaning ? and ultimately, wholeness.

It is in this way then, that Civic Engagement becomes critical for the development of our students and future global citizens. Engagement provides the opportunity to learn the skills and perspectives to literally engage with a variety of communities, to learn to trust the humanity and capabilities of those who are, at first appearance, different, even strange. Engagement provides an opportunity to work directly on the challenges of our time, and in the process, to actively construct new relationships, connection, sensibilities, commitments and affinities. Gandhi’s oft-repeated notion that we can participate in the change we hope to see in the world, to literally be that change, is a philosophical and deeply moral position. It is also a practical reminder that change and action are inevitably linked. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian scholar paraphrased the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado by observing: “…[W]e make the road by walking” (p. 6).

Senge, adds to this constructivist sentiment, explaining: “People often believe that you need to know how to do something before you can do it. If this were literally true, there would be little genuine innovation. An alternative view is that the creative process is actually a learning process, and the best we can possibly have at the outset is a hypothesis or tentative idea about what will be required to succeed. Robert Fritz characterizes the essence of the creative process as ‘create and adjust.’ We learn how to do something truly new only through doing it, then adjusting” (Senge, et al., 2004, p. 153).

The notion that we can and do create our own reality is a central tenet and rationale for encouraging Civic Engagement opportunities in our institutions of higher learning. Engagement in the lives of our fellow citizens, in the workings of our governments and institutions then, provides the opportunity to help directly, and to more deeply learn about them, to influence the course of events (and be influenced by them) and to literally construct a different future.

Principles for the Emerging Global Citizen

It seems, then, that being a global citizen is a choice, a state of mind and being each of us is capable of manifesting in our own lives. At this time in our history, it is not an inherent condition and is not conferred in some official, formal way. But it can be realized through action and reflection. What then might be some of the key elements that characterize the global citizen? At least eight principles seem to be essential for any would-be global citizen. These are:

• Holistic and collaborative approaches win
• Change is not loss
• Relationships deepen humanity
• Difficult problems require collective action
• Respect for others is golden
• Contribute where you live
• Find comfort with ambiguity
• Take responsibility

These principles are the most obvious to me, and I imagine others leap to mind for the interested reader. In order to reveal my own thoughts a bit more fully, I will discuss each of the eight principles briefly below

Holistic and collaborative approaches win

First, the global citizen must be able to see and experience life holistically, in something other than zero sum terms. Mary Parker Follett (Graham, 1995) spoke of the profound transformation that can be achieved when dominant mental models concerning “power over” others shift toward an aspiration to have “power with” others. A holistic perspective embraces the understanding that ultimate success is achieved primarily through collaboration and never when there are winners and losers.

Change is not loss

Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky observe: “People do not resist change, per se. People resist loss” (Heifetz and Linsky, 2002, p.11.). It is an important insight, as it helps explain a central challenge to realizing the notion of the global citizen: we must believe that the opportunity ultimately adds to who we are, rather than erasing or making our current identity irrelevant. This is true at all levels, from our personal self-concept, to our sense of membership in a community or society.

Relationships deepen humanity

A global citizen will intuitively understand the power of relationships, that they can move each of us closer to our common humanity without taking us farther away from our personal or cultural identity. Wheatley explains: “The participatory nature of reality has required scientists to focus their attention on relationships. No one can contemplate a system’s view of life without becoming engrossed in relational dynamics. Nothing exists independent of its relationships, whether looking at subatomic particles or human affairs….” (Wheatley, 1999, p.163).

Difficult problems require collective action

Persistent, intractable problems are only solved through collective action. For Ronald Heifetz (1994, 2002) such “adaptive challenges” may not even be recognized as problems and therefore solutions will not have been developed. In such circumstances, no single person has sufficient insight into the problem, much less the creativity to image the full solution. Thus, adaptive challenges require both a collective and constructivist response. Paul Loeb, who understands a great deal about citizenship, adds: “…our most serious problems, both the public ones and those that seem most personal, are in large part common problems, which can be solved only through common efforts. The dream of private sanctuary is an illusion. It erodes our souls by eroding our sense of larger connection: (Loeb, 1999, p. 7).

Respect for others is golden

Effective participation in a world community surely requires an appreciation for the essential value of what is often called the “golden rule,” a common principle of diverse societies over time. Loeb describes it as a kind of “mutual respect.” He refers to Rabbi Hillel, who over two thousand years ago stated clearly and simply: “What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary” (Loeb, 1999, p. 284).

Contribute where you live

Even a global society is mostly experienced at the local level. Global citizens will feel a deep commitment to and responsibility for the civic life of their own community ? whatever its size ? knowing how this effort contributes to the greater good. The environmental maxim to “Think globally, act locally” reminds us that we are part of a larger system, and that we must consider large and long-term consequences while being actively engaged and aware of the daily choices we make. Systems scholars, like Wheatley (1999), simply point out that systems are “nested” and so a change at one level invariably has an impact on other, even higher levels.

Find comfort with ambiguity

A global citizen will be comfortable with ambiguity and demonstrate a spirit of experimentation. Such a flexible approach is congruent with the emerging paradigm in which our world is a mutually constructed and change and modification are inherent and ongoing. Paulo Freire declares: “… [I]n order for us to create something, we have to start creating…. If you don’t have any kind of dream I am sure that it’s impossible to create something” (Horton and Freire, 1990, p. 56). Freire further adds: “…without practice there’s no knowledge; at least it’s difficult to know without practice” (Horton, M., and Freire, P., 1990, p. 98).

Take responsibility

Article 25 of U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that: ‘”everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for … health and well-being … including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one's] control’” (Chomsky, 2006, p. 231). These principles are incomplete and untenable unless we take responsibility ? as fellow human beings and citizens of the world ? to ensure that they are fully manifest. We are often said to have inherent rights as human beings. It is our commitment to take responsibility for ourselves and others that may most definitively characterize us as citizens.

Conclusion

This last point clearly links Civic Engagement with the principles of global citizenship. Students learn all eight principles (and probably many more) when they actively participate in their communities, in making the lives of their fellow citizens better and more meaningful. In turn, they are molded and even transformed by the experience, remade as they help remake the world. And this journey of discovery begins only when we and our students understand that we are responsible.

References

Chomsky, Noam. (2006). Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Graham, P, ed. (1995). Mary Parker Follett Prophet of Management: A Celebration of Writings From the 1920s. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Harman, W. (1998). Global Mind Change: The Promise of the 21st Century. San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Heifetz, R. A. (1999, April). Leadership vs. Authority. Across the Board, April, 1999.

Heifetz, R. A. and Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Horton, M., and Freire, P. (1990). We Make The Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Jarvis, P. (1999). The Practitioner-Researcher: Developing Theory from Practice. San Francisco: Josse-Bass.

Kegan, R. (1995). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA, US, Harvard University Press.

Loeb, P. (1999). Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. New York: St. Martin’s Grifin.

Marsick, V., and Watkins, K. E. (1990). Informed and Incidental Learning in the Workplace. London: Routledge.

Revans, R. (1982). The Origin and Growth of Action Learning. Bickley, England: Chartwell-Bratt.

Senge, P. (1996). Leading Learning Organizations: The Bold, the Powerful, and the Invisible. In F. Hesselbein, M. Goldsmith, R. Beckhard (Eds.), The Leader of the Future. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Senge, P. et al. (2004). Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning.

Wheatley, M. J. (1999). Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler.

We get the scripts for handling life’s challenges from folklore, fables, and fairy tales. Tales from around the world admonish us to fear the unknown and the darkness from tales of terrible things lurking there. In Xhosa folklore he is called the tokoloshe; in North America he is called the Boogyman. Other bedtime stories tell us how to treat our mother, brother, sister, wife, or father. In Umdhlubu’s tale, the frog taught townspeople and the girl’s father that the privileges of peaceful community life also carry obligations, one person to another.

To speculate that the tales may illuminate global citizenship, I must first explain my perception of what the term means. Though the definitional arguments currently rage in the theoretical literature, in a very practical sense a global citizen is a person with the ability to work, play, and live somewhere other than the land of their birth. Beyond simply having multiple addresses, this person exhibits agency (is proactive and engaged in civic life) and primacy (has the capacity to make change happen). At the emotional and philosophical level, the global citizen considers herself to be transnational: committed to the human issues no matter in what nation state they occur.

If we begin with this definition, one truth — with a lower case ‘t’ — is that as human beings we have shared experiences. The ideals and values these stories impart highlight our shared humanity. This obvious truth bears repeating: As we are all human beings, we share experiences and issues in common. To internationalize service-learning, therefore, we need to connect with this shared reality and explore its foundations. We will need to understand how we came to this place in our social history to see clearly what direction to go from here.

My own discipline, psychology, has long insisted on using rigidly controlled methodologies to expand our understanding of the human experience. This disciplinary stance is rooted in historical links with fields such as agronomy, biology, and chemistry. For a doctor, a heart is a heart and it is never a liver; the agronomist can reasonably expect lettuce seeds will never produce radishes; and the chemist can safely presume that gases, solids, and liquids have predictable qualities. Strong voices in psychology’s literature advocate for research that will allow the same specific classification systems for mental health. Hence, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, now in its fifth edition, has evolved from 350 categories to over 600 main categories, with accompanying subcategories, which are cross-referenced with still other qualifying information.

To generate data with this level of presumed specificity, the discipline relies on experimental methodology. In its strictest form, an experiment involves random assignment of subjects to condition (treatment) groups which are compared to control (non-treatment) groups. Factors are identified, numbers are assigned, measures are taken, and the results are analyzed using sophisticated statistics. The objective is to determine the degree of confidence one can have that the outcome did not occur by chance (p-value).

According to this philosophy of discovery, only knowledge generated empirically is valid. With our scientific lens firmly set on what an elite few define as “normal,” monolithic thinking and ethnocentricity are raised to the status of Truth — with a capital “T.” Service-learning’s emphasis on reflection-action and social constructivism has pried open the discussion. Tensions still remain in the discipline that can be traced to the original question about defining knowledge. The debate’s epicenter is whether priority should go to educating students — academic knowledge dispensed in classrooms — or creating social change — ordinary knowledge held by everyday people living with the issues at stake¹.

Academic knowledge can be acquired through intensive study and systematic investigation. It is quantifiable in the sense that one can learn an amount sufficient to be declared an expert. As proof of our intellectual prowess (or personal stamina!), we receive degrees, certifications, accreditations, and licenses. Consequently, academic knowledge is standardized and routinized. When students ask, we can provide the technical distinction between a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, a clinical social worker, an applied sociologist, and a social psychologist.

By contrast, ordinary knowledge is a tapestry, a kaleidoscope, a maelstrom of sights and sounds and memories and emotions. It is socially constructed and embedded in this thing we all call culture. We can agree that culture is shared, we believe that it is homogenous, and we imagine we who adhere to its norms are a community. But, many times, we cannot agree what all that means. Ordinary knowledge is subjective and idiosyncratic and nearly endlessly diverse regarding gender, race, social class, ability, religion or creed, to name just a few distinctions.

The debate about the legitimacy of knowledge highlights why considering a global dimension to citizenship stymies so many social scientists. To understand how acting locally is the same as acting globally, we must examine what some have called modernity or instrumental rationality. Contemporary life has given us access to knowledge and resources beyond the wildest imaginings my parents’ generation could have conjured. Using cell phones and the Internet we can access knowledge in bytes and megabytes and sound bytes. At our morning breakfast we can be global consumers with biscotti from Italy, coffee from Brazil, and English marmalade on Texas toast. Or we can take advantage of cheap international travel to turn destination posters into Kodak moments.

Because we are enmeshed in this market economy, our first tendency is to interpret all of life using the language of buying and selling and zero-sum games. Even psychology’s technical jargon for helping people connect with other people is not immune. One theory of attraction is called the exchange theory: in relationships, we give only as much as required to receive what we want. The cost-benefit theory of attraction is even more calculating: we decide what we will give based on its value in relation to what we are likely to receive.

International scholars such as Alberto Guerreiro Ramos have posited that we cannot think clearly about globalization until we set aside not only the language of the market economy but also its accompanying assumptions about privileges and duties². The result is our reliance on images and languages that have been misappropriated from their original purposes. The Zulu practice of lobola is an excellent example. This is a complex practice of exchanging goods at the time of a wedding. Historically, this has meant cattle were given to the family of the bride when she left for the home of her new husband. But more than the exchange of property was at stake. The practice also created a web of affiliations across generations and social circles. Families, thus united, solidified communities and became the source of identity, connection and symbolic capital.

South Africa’s colonial history codified lobola, a rich and complex cultural tradition, into static customary law with the Native Land Act of 1913. The result was that the Zulu peoples were pushed off their land where communities shared (or bartered) and into an economy where outsiders paid them wages. Over time the new language of the market economy was used to reinterpret lobola. The practice shifted from its relational purpose to being wage-based and driven by the market, not by tradition. During apartheid, the practice eroded further until it became perceived by many as a remittance paid to the woman’s family for her care and feeding while in their house. The ideals of relationship building and community development were increasingly obscured by the language of buying, selling, and profiteering. In post-apartheid South Africa, the practice is caught in the crossfire of debates that pit feminist ideology against traditional practices³.

The disconnect between the language used to describe practices such as lobola and the tradition itself helps us understand the phenomena Richard Kiely calls the chameleon complex⁴. A returning Traveler hides the new insights and revelations gained as she went about her international work. She has discovered that international service-learning is about recognizing substantive rationality; that is, social experience is socially constructed and, therefore, defies the neat categories that academic study has taught her to expect. The Traveler’s struggle is about making the choice to take on the hard social and moral questions. In the case of lobola, feminist literature may rail against its bride payment and gender obligations. The Traveler may know from talking with rural African women that many still perceive its value as a means of building social affiliations and solidifying communities. Are these women deluded and oppressed, as feminist literature would suggest, or are they seeking a new balance between traditional and modern social realities?

The heart of the matter, quite literally, is the critical and complex nature of reciprocity. If everyone, everywhere can be said to have shared experiences, then they also have valuable knowledge about what engaged citizenship requires. To acknowledge the overlapping aspects of our shared human experience, we have to let go of cherished taxonomies. Tapping into this information can only be done by decolonizing methodologies so that others beyond an elite few can articulate the nature of these moral dilemmas⁵.

Today’s language of stereotypes and zero-sum gamesmanship has deep historical roots. We can see the difficulty in overcoming its influence in the case of Sarah Baartman, a Khosian woman who died in 1815. Her life is important because, like so many other Black Africans, she was taken to colonial Europe and put on display to affirm her racial inferiority. We remember her name, unlike so many others, because she became the focus of a court case when England outlawed slavery. The court decided that she, who was a slave, was nonetheless a willing participant and so was the author of her own fate. Her public display was decreed to be indecent but not unlawful. Sarah Baartman died under mysterious circumstances. Her death is important because of its aftermath: her body was dissected, preserved, and displayed in a Paris museum until 1974. Her remains were not repatriated to South Africa until 2002.

Sarah Baartman has been claimed as an icon of suffering and deliverance by some African-American feminist writers. The colonial attitudes she faced are seen as the prototype for stereotypes Black women still endure of the over sexual woman with abnormal genitals. Yet writers from South Africa posit that western activists claiming her as an act of defiance are also forcibly (and erroneously) interpreting her unique Khosian experience in the western context. In the process of claiming her, western activists are usurping her story. Thus, despite their best intentions, Sarah Baartman’s unique, complex, and historically situated human story has been reduced to a collection of ideological categories.

Academics are too often guilty of the same unintentional destruction, in the name of value-free research initiatives. In reality, research is never neutral. The language of investigation is based on assumptions drawn from academic knowledge gathered from a particular cultural and historical context. Take, for example, the psychological literature on race, gender, and class. Until the consciousness movements of the 1960s and 1970s, theories of personality development presumed a white male CEO; his Hispanic female secretary; the Black servers in the company cafeteria,; and the Native American groundskeeper all had the same psychosocial experience. Ostensibly neutral research was designed — and in significant ways is still being designed — using the unspoken premise that a single standard exists that we could call “normal” and that all individuals can be measured against it.

When ordinary knowledge is ignored, however, the result is that prevailing terminology and theoretical jargon replace individual stories. To many in my profession, this is the ideal state of affairs because — presumably — the resulting conclusions can be applied to everybody precisely because they relate to nobody in particular. Research that asks the CEO, the secretary, the servers, and the gardener to tell their individual stories inserts too many uncontrollable variables into the analysis. Such research flies in the face of the precision experimental designs seek and so methodology trumps contextualizing.

Yet our individual, everyday stories are far more than a collection of spurious variables. They can teach about humanity and citizenship and global citizenship just as the mythical characters teach Truth — with a capital “T” — in cultures around the world. Perhaps we must, as some have suggested, detach the term “citizenship” from the discussion. The term historically has implied nationality but no single nation holds sway over a global citizen. Her activities are transnational and her commitment is to the human issues, not the nation state. Therefore, whether nationality is central to world-mindedness is questionable. One could defend national identity as the springboard for global participation since we tend to view the world through our own cultural lens. Still, the global citizen will have the moral equivalent of photogrey lenses that respond to changing environmental realities.

The global dimension to citizenship is that The Everyone, everywhere is in the global village. We need to advance the discussion of how to promote a global conscience. Precedents already exist outside economic and political institutions, brought about through grassroots activism. These global citizens can be seen at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle (1999) and Genoa (2001); in the women’s movement from the first wave to the third wave; in the Infant Formula Action Network that organized the boycott against breast milk substitutes; and in faith-based initiatives like KwaSizabantu Mission that feeds, houses, and clothes anyone from anywhere in the world who comes to their doors⁶.

Clearly this discussion requires a strategy for doing the emotional work involved with moral and identity questions. Service-learning’s emphasis on reflection-action and social constructivism can also be used to pry open this discussion. Now we will move into unknown territory, especially for social science’s pathological obsession about legitimate knowledge.

The past few days I have been mulling over the sights and sounds of Durban, South Africa in 2006. As my research team has made its way to appointments and from various community events, I have tried to let events simmer in the back of my mind. This is the best way for me to allow insight to take its own shape rather than my forcing it into something that is comfortable for me (and potentially fraught with ethnocentric inaccuracies). Several realizations have made themselves known, but they all lead to the same conclusion that is so common as to be a cliché: People are the same all over the world.

As part of our work on this biennial trip, my team and I are writing blogs. I spoke in an early blog about how the city seemed to have changed since our visit in 2004. How people appeared to be more wary and weary, that tensions and paranoia were higher, and that the general climate less friendly or animated. My impressions have been confirmed as we’ve talked to people during our travels around the city by bus and on foot. A general theme has emerged about the declines in everything from the quality of consumer goods to the condition of the roads to the rate of unemployment. People point out the number of homeless “come down from Jo’burg” as evidence of the general malaise that has gripped the country.

Our community partners running NGOs (non-governmental organizations) describe how hard it is to find funds or keep volunteers or maintain participation from their constituent groups. They also raise questions about the very notion of a constituent-group, considering the fact that everyone is affected by the -isms of society. We’ve traded war stories about unruly boards of directors, endless meetings, and paperwork that never dies. The research project I direct is somewhat unique within the NGO community in terms of the Institutional Review Board requirements. However, our partners have their particular oversight requirements to manage as well.

As activists and social change agents, we are of like minds in our passion for social justice and our impatience for posturing. We have shared frustrations and disappointments when those who worked alongside us vanished or (even worse) sabotaged or (worst of all) attacked. We discussed the importance of taking care of our relationships. What good is it to save the world at the cost of relationships, marriages, and family? Some of us recognized taking care of ourselves is also crucial. You can’t give to others if you don’t take time out to refuel and regenerate.

In many ways these realizations are ordinary, almost mundane. Yet they have started me considering the human aspects of citizenship. That is, isn’t there a dimension of citizenship that is about what it means to be a human being no matter what nation-state we call home? We have found experiences on both sides of the ocean that look different on the surface, but about which we can swap stories by only changing the names and places.

So, is there — as our experiences imply — an aspect of global citizenship that is less about politics and economics and more about the human spirit?

I do not know the answers to these questions, but I will keep thinking about them. Like the frog in Umdhlubu’s story, I am searching for a way home. In my case, the journey leads me through the maze of competing schools of thought and across warring professional turfs. Still, I also believe that ordinary experience will lead me to greater understanding.

¹ As a 2004 Campus Compact Faculty Fellow, I co-authored a paper to introduce the conceptual model for supporting the continued development of service-learning as a pedagogy of engagement. A logic diagram was used, among other goals, to illustrate potential tensions within the field that merit ongoing discussion amongst those committed to the continued development of service-learning in higher education. The article, entitled A Logic Model of Service-Learning: Tensions and Issues for Further Consideration appears in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (Spring 2006, pp. 47-60). back

² For an excellent review of Dr. Ramos’ thinking, see a recent article by Curtis Ventriss and Gaylord Candler entitled, Albert Guerreiro Ramos, 20 Years Later: A New Science Still Unrealized in an Era of Public Cynicism and Theoretical Ambivalence. The article is in the May/June 2005 issue of the journal Public Administration Review. back

³ Some have said that this is a false debate because this cultural practice, like so many others, cannot be interpreted dichotomously. It is a complex practice that has changed, is changing, will continue to change as social realities respond to the encroaching western influence. The periodical publication Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity (a project of the Agenda Feminist Media Company, Rm. E320 Diakonia Centre, 20 Diakonia Avenue, Durban, 4001 South Africa) regularly features articles addressing the traditional-modern clash in the nations of Africa. Janet Hinson Shope’s article entitled, Lobola Is Here to Stay: Rural Black Women and the Contradictory Meanings of labola in Post-Apartheid South Africa is one such writing. back

⁴ Richard Kiely. (2004). A Chameleon with a Complex: Searching for Transformation in International Service-Learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Spring, 5-20. back

⁵ Linda Tuhiwai White presents an inspirational and humbling analysis of how well-intentioned social science has intruded upon Australian Aboriginal peoples. Her book is entitled Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. back

⁶ The KwaSizabantu region is in the eastern cape region of South Africa. The Kwasizabantu Mission was established in the 1960s and has since grown from one building on an acre of land to a booming complex on 700 acres. The mission’s services and rituals are ecumenical, with equal attention being devoted to the individual’s creature needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. Its farms make the mission self-sufficient while its contracts for bottled water, dairy products, fresh produce, and baked goods are income-generating. The mission has recently opened an AIDS clinic for women and plans a similar facility for men in the near future. back

The University of Maine at Machias is a small liberal arts campus located in a remote, rural, county on the coast of Maine. The current crisis in higher education is more severe in Maine than in many other parts of the country, and the situation is particularly difficult in the part of the state surrounding UMM, where traditional resource-based jobs are disappearing and rates of post-secondary study must rise if the residents are to prosper. Committed as a campus to engagement with its larger community, UMaine Machias uses a broad array of active teaching and learning strategies to address the gaps in aspirations, planning, and college readiness that prevent many in the local population from pursuing post-secondary education.

As a whole, Maine sees a very high percentage of its young people graduating from high school?86.5% in 2001?often leading both the nation and the northeast region (Maine Department of Education data cited in Plimpton, 2006, p.1), yet tracking the number of these graduates who enroll in post-secondary study immediately after high school produces a disappointing picture, with Maine’s figure of 50% in 2002 lagging significantly behind the 60% that characterized the rest of New England (NCES IPEDS data cited in Plimpton, 2006, p.1). Similarly, recent U.S Census data shows that only 37% of working-age adults in the state hold college degrees, compared to 46% in the rest of New England (cited in Plimpton, 2006, p.1). Obviously, despite its notable accomplishments in K-12 education, Maine faces a significant crisis in its post-secondary programs; this is a crisis, however, that has rather different characteristics in each of the two distinct regions of Maine.

Barriers to Post-Secondary Education in Rural Downeast Maine

Anyone who spends a significant amount of time in the state of Maine will eventually hear talk of “the two Maines.” In general, this phrase refers to a north/south split between the more populated, more urban, wealthier counties of southern Maine and the sparsely populated rural counties of the north and east that are primarily dependent on flagging, resource-based economies. Washington County, home of UMM, lies in the heart of Downeast Maine and is one of the most distressed counties in the state. Data reported in the Maine State Planning Offices’ 2005 Report Card on Poverty reveals that Washington County had the highest poverty rate in the state, 19% compared to a rate of 10.6 % for the state as a whole; 2002 estimates predicted a very slight decrease for the county’s rate to 17.6% (p. 25). 2002 per capita income at $22,469 was the lowest in the state (p. 30) and $6000 below the average for the state as a whole (p. 3). Similarly, Washington County consistently reports high unemployment rates: 8% in 2004 compared to a low of 2.8 % for the southern Cumberland County (p. 3). The educational data for the state reflects this dichotomy as well; in 2000, a meager 22.8 % of working-age adults in Washington Country had associates degrees or better compared to the high of 46.6 percent in, again, Cumberland County (Maine Department of Labor data cited in Plimpton, 2006, p. 33). Moreover, in 2001-2002 when the Maine-based Mitchell Institute undertook a study of Barriers to Post-Secondary Education in Maine, researchers found that “the experience in Southern Maine, where more residents are college graduates, appears to be significantly different than in other parts of the state” (p. 1). Young adults in Southern Maine are much more likely than students from other parts of the state to have a parent or other relative who has completed college, to have community support for college attendance, and to consistently express more optimistic attitudes about college and college finances. Young adults in other parts of the state, particularly Coastal and Downeast regions, often would be the first in their families to go to college. They are much more concerned about both the value and cost of college and report lower family and community support for post-secondary education. All of these are factors that can be significant barriers to students’ pursuing study beyond high school (pp. 2-3).

UMaine Machias’ Strategies for Reducing Barriers to Post-Secondary Education

Both the Mitchell Institute and the Maine’s MELMAC Educational Foundation have extensively studied the problem of these barriers to post-secondary education, and over the years they have identified three major strategies to overcome them. The first is a concerted effort to raise aspirations among high school students, the second is connecting these aspirations to realistic planning for post-secondary education, and the third is increasing college readiness by enhancing the rigor of students’ high school experience. UMaine Machias partners with its area schools in activities promoting all of these objectives. All of these partnerships are based on the premise, prevalent throughout the literature, that any positive exposure to college activities, even the proverbial campus visit, helps demystify secondary education and make it seem more accessible to students. The more substantive and extensive the interactions, the more students gain in enhanced aspirations, in understanding of the long-term planning process needed for college attendance, and in realistic assessment of the expectations colleges hold for their incoming students.

UMaine Machias’ Early College Program

UMM’s most expansive partnership with local high schools is its Early College Program. Established two years ago, UMM’s Early College Program makes regular college courses available to high school juniors and seniors recommended by their guidance counselors. While the program is open to any student, the majority of participants have come from five Washington County high schools that are members of the Downeast Community Learning Alliance (DECLA). In its first semester of operation, the UMM Early College Program enrolled 34 students; participation has subsequently risen substantially, with 79 students currently enrolled for the fall 2006 semester.
The Early College Program does not bring just students to campus, however. Parents and siblings are invited to join EC students for the on-campus orientation. The president or vice-president always welcomes participants to campus, and special presentations by admissions and financial aid personnel help troubleshoot the college application process for parents.

The University also goes into the high schools. The EC Coordinator regularly travels to area schools and administers placement exams to students or, if requested, to classes as a whole to help students become familiar with this aspect of the college-going experience. Placement scores can also be useful to guidance counselors who are trying to persuade students to take more rigorous college preparatory classes. The Coordinator often meets in their home schools with students who may be having difficulty in their classes and may require support services. Moreover, the minutiae of advising, course registration, progress-monitoring, dealing with absences?all of which are handled by the EC Coordinator?militate that the University and high school personnel are in frequent, often daily contact. Of necessity, any barriers that may have existed between the participating institutions have fallen as a true partnership has formed between the campus and the area high schools. The importance the University places on this partnership is clear from its decision, despite its own financial pressures, to reduce tuition for Early College students by 25% and to waive most fees. Guidance counselors have observed that the whole culture regarding college in their schools is changing. When 79 of approximately 320 juniors and seniors in DECLA schools are taking college classes, such far-reaching change is probably inevitable: students realize that not only college, but college success is available to anyone.

Service Learning: Bringing Local Area Schools to UMaine Machias

The Early College Program, given its rapid growth, may be UMM’s most dramatic effort to increase access to secondary education for young adults of Downeast Maine, but it is only one of a number of ongoing projects, all of which are related to the campus’ commitment to active learning and engagement with the broader community. The UMM faculty formalized this commitment several years ago when they voted to require that service learning be infused across the curriculum, with each academic program mandated to build at least one service learning experience into the coursework it requires of its students. Many programs were already more than meeting this requirement. In some of their classes, recreation management students were planning and hosting various events such as a Halloween-evening Haunted Forest activity held for area youngsters in the Machias high school. Chemistry students monitored water quality in area streams; marine biology students worked on salmon conservation projects; behavioral science students collaborated with area social services agencies to study county-wide problems; history students researched and rehabilitated a long-neglected African-American cemetery. For other programs, more significant changes accompanied this shift. English and Book Arts, for example sought out donations that have allowed the establishment of an in-house press that will provide students with hands-on experience with all aspects of the production of fine, hand-made editions of works by local authors and artists.

Increasingly, these active teaching and learning activities involve collaboration with area schools. Students taking Special Topics in Ornithology this spring, for example, hosted a campus visit of fifth through eighth grade students from a local elementary school. Putting their classroom learning into practice, they led these younger students through dissections, comparative studies of skeletal structures, examinations of how birds have adapted for flight, and analysis of migration patterns. Some of these collaborations extend beyond the scope of a particular course. One ongoing campus/community partnership originated in a science professor’s proposal to build a series of labyrinth gardens though projects tied to diverse course offerings. Two gardens are nearing completion and community involvement has been extensive with donations of supplies, benches, plantings, as well as financial support. High school students and faculty have also participated in work on both labyrinths, spending their service days on the UMM campus digging, planting, and otherwise helping to further this ongoing project.

One of these collaborations even has a global reach as a UMM program links area high school students and faculty with their counterparts in the Middle East. UMaine Machias is a participant in Soliya, an international program in which students in the United States and in predominantly Muslim countries examine their respective histories, cultures, and perceptions of the other through facilitated, collaborative study using videoconferencing and other sophisticated online technologies (http://www.soliya.net). Last fall, to fulfill a Soliya course requirement, one of UMM’s students, collaborating with a young woman from the American University in Beirut, developed an action proposal entitled Think! The goal of Think! was to help young people in each country gain a better understanding of United States and Middle East relations and of the two different cultures through a day-long workshop, followed up by possible virtual pen pal and video-tape exchanges. In April, UMM’s Think! Coordinator gathered high school students and faculty from 3 area schools as well as faculty and students from the college for a workshop?complete with Lebanese food and traditional bellydancing?that examined historical, cultural, and media issues. Her colleague in Beirut organized a corresponding workshop in June.

Service Learning: Bringing UMaine Machias to Local Area Schools

All of the above activities brought area elementary and high school students to the campus to participate in projects generated by UMM’s engaged students and faculty. Other activities bring the campus into the local schools. Some projects may be one-time events such as a performance by a theater class. Others are more truly collaborations and have more far-reaching implications for the students involved. One notable example arose out of the Early College Program. This past spring a section of UMM’s introductory education course, EDU 112 School and Community, was offered live at a local high school and broadcast from there to other receiving sites. Students at this high school, approximately 40 miles from the campus, had been able to participate only minimally in Early College coursework because of transportation difficulties. Housing the course at the high school impacted not only the students actually taking the course on site, but also created a college “buzz” in the school at large, with students often looking into the classroom to see what was going on with the “college course.” Moreover, since a significant component of the course took enrolled students into classrooms at the associated elementary school where they observed classroom practices, assisted teachers, and tutored students, the impact of the course extended even beyond the walls of the high school. Response from all participants in this experiment was overwhelmingly positive and next year this section of EDU 112, having been invited by enthusiastic administrators, will travel to another high school with the expectation that students will have a similarly positive experience.

Other faculty at UMM are proposing similarly expansive partnerships with the schools of Washington County. One idea currently being examined calls for the creation of a mobile science museum, staffed by UMM students, that would travel to area schools with, for example, items from the University’s collection of marine mammal skeletons. UMM students would have an opportunity to reinforce their learning of course material by teaching it; local school students would have a hands-on-learning opportunity; and area schools, in an era of dwindling resources, would have an opportunity to enhance their curricula with challenging yet fun mathematics and science activities.

A second proposal involves partnering with teachers to provide access to equipment and training in molecular biology. The University would acquire several sets of portable equipment that would allow students to collect samples, extract the DNA, amplify a particular piece of DNA, and visualize it. University faculty would train high school science teachers to use this equipment in their own classrooms and then loan the equipment to schools on a circulating basis. This work could also be extended by bring samples to UMM for DNA sequencing or other more sophisticated projects. Both this project and the mobile science museum/lab will only be realized if the faculty involved can find external funding, but each has the potential to bring more advanced work into the mathematics and science classes of local schools as well as giving UMM students another opportunity to put what they are their learning in their coursework at the service of the broader community.

Lessons Learned and Long-Term Considerations: The UMaine Machias Experience

As it has been developing these K-16 partnerships, UMM has both learned some lessons and discovered areas that need further examination. The first and most important of the lessons learned is that for undertakings like these to be successful, they must truly be collaborative enterprises. The University faculty and students cannot view themselves as enlightened benefactors bringing academic “riches” to poor, benighted local school districts. Each party must acknowledge what the other brings to the partnership and all participants must be mutually respectful. Any significant manifestations of town/gown rivalries can sabotage this process before it has fairly begun.

With more specific reference to Early College, an early clear finding is that programs such as these can be enormously successful, even in areas with no strong tradition of college attendance. That very success, however, can generate problems when student demand exceeds available funding. Early College programs, even when discounted tuition is available, are expensive undertakings. Often financed at their start-up by grant funding, participating institutions may eventually face the unhappy dilemma of having to ration access and of developing restrictive criteria for spending the limited amount of money that they do have most effectively. Similarly, they must address the question of sustainability: what happens when grant funding disappears? These are matters high school and college administrators ultimately cannot address alone. If educators and state legislatures are truly serious about promoting seamless K-16 experiences, everyone must begin to consider the long-term financial implications of such a policy.

Another issue facing Early College programs is clear identification of the target population and the development of appropriate programming. EC coursework can serve many purposes. For high-achieving students, it can supplement AP classes and bring additional challenges into the high school experience. For many students, taking college classes can fill a sometimes “empty” senior year with meaningful coursework that gives students a head start on achieving a college degree. For at-risk students, Early College courses can help demystify the college experience and make students aware that a college degree is accessible to them. Because these programs can serve so many different purposes, each one must be carefully designed to bring maximum benefit to the participating students. This is particularly true for programs targeting underachieving populations. For EC programming to have an impact on the college aspirations and success of these students, it is absolutely essential that the college experience be a positive one. Consequently, they cannot simply be thrown into ordinary college courses where their lower academic skills will very often precipitate failure. Placing these students into remedial courses, where they can experience the college setting and success in a “college” course while simultaneously building their skill levels could be one option. A second would be to follow something like the Upward Bound model and to nurture these students and their academic skills?perhaps with activities and classes both at the high school and on the college campus?until they are able to be successful in regular college coursework. Moreover, these programs must above all else be supportive of students even when they fail. They are asking students to take a risk and cannot punish them if results are lackluster (by, for example, making students pay for courses they do not pass). Such punitive measures will only diminish students’ fragile self-esteem and add to the aura of negativity that already surrounds the idea of college for many of them.

Other Logistical Lessons Learned

UMM has also learned a number of important lessons as it expanded other partnerships with area schools. One of these is that K-16 outreach is a natural outgrowth of the campus’ formal commitment to service to its broader community and to engaged practices in all of its educational programs. This commitment, in effect, reflects a change in campus culture brought about by the sustained hard work of many UMM faculty and staff and by consistent administrative support. In this context, the University’s partnerships with area schools and other local civic organizations become a natural outgrowth of classroom activities and bring benefits both to UMM and to its community partners.

While these and similar outreach activities may arise naturally from the culture of an engaged campus, only a Pollyanna would deny that they also bring with them significant practical complications, all of which require the investment of considerable time and resources. For Early College programs, conflicting class times, semester schedules, and even grading systems (when students are receiving dual credit) must all be resolved; basing college classes in high schools has its own set of logistical difficulties. Particularly in rural areas where distances between collaborating schools may be large and public transit all but non-existent, transportation and its attendant costs become a major issue for any kind of joint activity.

Planning for courses becomes more complicated when the broader community becomes a partner in students’ research and scholarship. Some projects, such as UMM’s proposed mobile science museum/lab and traveling DNA kits, require resources far beyond the means of many campuses and will require that the faculty involved seek external funding (and be given the time and support that writing those grant proposals will require).

More broadly, all participating schools must establish effective assessments that identify the least and most efficacious kinds of activities, with this information being shared both locally and in the larger, national conversation about best practices.

Finally, some undertakings will require that the campus challenge itself, take a chance, foster and have faith in the imagination and creativity of its faculty: campus/community labyrinth gardens as a vehicle for service learning activities in courses?

But the campus that is willing to experiment, to support its faculty, staff, and students as they make the broader community their classroom and share their learning experiences with area students of all ages is serving well not only its current enrollees. The campus is also serving those younger elementary, middle, and high school students in the broader community who, because of their participation in campus classes and activities, may have gained both a desire to pursue post-secondary education and a more realistic understanding of how best to prepare themselves for success in their college work and, ultimately, for more prosperous post-secondary careers.

References

Maine State Planning Office. (2005, April). 2005 report card on poverty. Retrieved July 17, 2006

Mitchell Institute. (2002, July). Barriers to post-secondary education in Maine: Making college the
obvious and attainable next step for more Maine students (executive summary). Retrieved July 11, 2006

Plimpton, L. (2006, January). Indicators of higher education attainment in Maine: College as a Right and responsibility for all Maine people. Retrieved July 11, 2006.

Much like other assessment terms, benchmarking has been used appropriately and inappropriately to rate, compare, chart progress, and evaluate. Palomba and Banta (1999) provide a definition that comes close to the processes and potential for the new Carnegie classification — Community Engagement. The authors describe benchmarking as a “promising practice” defined as “the process of identifying and learning from institutions that are recognized for outstanding practices.” They add that benchmarking often includes careful study of “best” or “promising practices.” In contrast, the processes of rating or comparing are not intended with the new classification.

The benchmarking potential of the new Community Engagement classification began with its development processes — using insights about outstanding practices from two major sources:

1. The efforts of major national groups or organizations — Campus Compact’s study and publication of the indicators of community engagement at community colleges, an assessment tool developed by the Community Campus Partnerships for Health, and the Defining and Benchmarking Engagement Project of NASULGC’s CIC Committee on Engagement.
2. A pilot study sponsored by Carnegie to examine community engagement practices as indicators for a documentation framework and conducted at 14 institutions (see Carnegie website for list of pilot institutions).

A framework draft was derived from the first source. That draft then became the focus of a careful study by those pilot institutions as they examined “promising practices” in their self-assessment and documentation approaches. Their work paved the way for the institutions that would later apply for the new classification by determining the significance, practicality, and usefulness of practice indicators. Most importantly, their pilot documentation trials achieved an inclusive framework that would respect and affirm the diversity of approaches to community engagement in higher education. Within that inclusive framework is the potential for self-study and reflection for a wide range of institutions.

The 2006 Community Engagement classification applications reflect that range of fit and exemplify the motivation for and interest in self-assessment of community engagement practices. Just as important as those intentions of campus applications are the intentions of those institutions that have decided not to apply, but to focus on continued development and/or implementation of “promising practices.” The benchmarking potential of the new Carnegie classification is already demonstrated and contributing to the future of community engagement in higher education.

The benchmarking potential of the new community engagement classification can be further demonstrated through three major questions and related issues. Those questions and issues take us into the future of both community engagement and a classification that achieves benchmarking.

Question 1: Why Apply for the New Classification —Community Engagement?

The Carnegie classification has been intensely welcomed by institutions from across the country. The first round of applications derive from a wide range of institutions in terms of type, size, student population, program emphasis, and geographical location. My conversations with colleagues at those institutions reveal a broad list of very diverse reasons for their celebratory wishes and their applications. An exploration of those rationales and/or motivations leads to questions and possible implications for community engagement in general.

Some institutions see the classification as an opportunity for national recognition, a way to honor the efforts of engaged scholars, or as a connection with the cachet of the Carnegie name. The documentation process is extensive and requires time and resources on the part of an institution to meet the requirements. When asked “why?” a number of institutional representatives responded that having a Carnegie classification was worth the work. When probed with a further “why?” the responses included use in grant seeking, communicating with community, and responding to constituencies for accountability purposes.

Other institutions genuinely encourage the inquiry and evidence gathering associated with the documentation required for classification. Again, the issue of work is raised, but most institutions responded that the actual data gathering and tracking for documentation was “long overdue.” It is one of the areas of community engagement that continues to demand more attention and resources than previously realized. Bob Bringle (2006) has assessed the situation on many campuses as “underreported” due to a variety of factors. The lack of common language, even in what we call this concept (community engagement vs civic engagement vs and so on), leads to difficulties in reporting and assessing. The lack of models for assessing and evaluating impact also contributes to the underreporting or lack of reporting conditions.

There are those institutions, labeled prestigious for their achievements in research, grant funding, and related scholarship, who seek to associate their reputation with community engagement to achieve a more holistic description of the institution. There have been some assumptions over the last 20 years that the traditional Research I institutions would probably not pursue community engagement to any significant extent. Thus, some of the interest on the part of those institutions is to demonstrate to their higher education peers that an institution can achieve multiple forms of scholarship. There is also an intent to focus resources and agendas on community engagement from within those institutions.

Finally, there are those institutions, often prompted by individuals on the campus, who want to use the classification to highlight their lack of progress and to increase momentum to improve their engagement practices. I was told by those individuals that they were aware that they could not meet the requirements for the classification, and that such deficits would prompt attention from upper administration and motivate colleagues to dedicate more resources to the agenda.

This discussion of the varied reasons and motivations for interest in and applications to the new classification is not intended as judgment but rather as a description of the ways that the classification can serve higher education. We think that its documentation framework will stand as a source of “promising practices” reflecting the best work in community engagement in higher education. We intend that it be useful for self-study, planning, and guidance to those institutions that are in the early stages of developing an agenda of community engagement. We hope that other reasons and ultimately other purposes are served by using the documentation framework of the new community engagement classification.

Question 2: Inclusive vs. Exclusive Classification?

One of the major challenges of developing a documentation framework for the community engagement classification was the commitment to an inclusive framework. Our intention was to design a framework that respected the diversity of engagement approaches and the differences between institutions of higher education. We identified practices and environmental supports that are essential for community engagement to be institutionalized but did not specify what those practices would look like. For example, the practice of “assessing community perceptions about the effectiveness of the institution’s engagement with community” is an essential practice, but we have seen multiple forms of that practice. There are campuses that use surveys and focus groups, and there are campuses that host a monthly council of community advisors to inform the institution’s role in the community. There are colleges that send representatives to ongoing community meetings to check in on those perceptions, and universities with a community member as an official advisor to the administrative council. We expect that we will see at least a few more approaches to the practice of assessing community perceptions in our first round of applications.

On the other hand, there are practices that most of us would agree are essential to institutionalized community engagement that have not been implemented broadly in higher education. The issue of the scholarship of community engagement being specified in promotion and tenure guidelines is one that caused the most disagreement among the pilot campuses in 2005. Support for the practice was almost unanimous but when representatives considered their own institutions, they agreed that most of their institutions would not qualify for the classification if that practice became a requirement. We returned to the issue many times and could never achieve real agreement. We reached a compromise by including it as an optional requirement, one of four optional requirements to be selected. We expect that if it had been a requirement, the classification would have become an exclusive one with very few institutions meeting the requirements.

That expectation left us with questions…would it be better to include such a requirement and have only a very small number of institutions be classified?…would it prompt institutions to implement such practices for purposes of achieving classification?

The issue of the scholarship of community engagement and its inclusion in promotion and tenure guidelines is a significant one to be revisited consistently in the future of the community engagement classification. It opens up related issues such as the preparation of future faculty, hiring practices, and acceptance of alternative forms of scholarship. It leads to questions of frequency of classification revisions, applications, and depth of documentation.

Question 3: What Kind of Data? Quantitative vs. Qualitative?

In line with the intention to be inclusive with the new classification, the issue of quantitative data became problematic. Unlike the traditional classification system, there are no national data sources for community engagement that could be used for classification purposes. Many of the “promising practices” (mission statements, infrastructure, leadership) do not lend themselves to quantitative data well and those that do (service learning courses, number of faculty and students) are influenced by size, location, program emphasis, and other qualities of the institution. The lack of comparable quantitative data leads to further issues of review and decision making about which institutions are classified and which are not. There are issues of “how much engagement?’ for classification, or “how much involvement constitutes an engaged campus?”

The question of how much and how to document is not solely in the hands of the Carnegie work group. Fortunately, the classification for community engagement has been introduced at a time when major organizations are also focused on benchmarking and/or assessing engagement. The efforts of NASULGC, Campus Compact, and Community Campus Partnerships for Health and Campus Compact guided the Carnegie developments and the intention is for continued collaboration in future developments. In some ways, the efforts to quantify community engagement for classification is a microcosm of the challenge of assessing and evaluating community engagement in general. There is uncertainty among many engaged colleagues that quantification of community engagement is not even an appropriate endeavor. There are also those colleagues that experience huge discomfort with the lack of quantification.

In sum, it is expected that those questions will be expanded and others will emerge from the first round of review of applications — documentation submitted by institutions seeking classification. The resulting data base of documentation has the potential to guide, inform, and model a wide array of “promising practices” and achieve its benchmarking function. In addition, the ongoing revision of the classification framework, ongoing applications from an expanding cadre of institutions, and ongoing reviews of institutional documentation will be characterized by extended inquiry processes. Those inquiry processes can serve as a reflection of the efforts, insights, and new practices that emerge with the future growth and expansion of community engagement in higher education.

References

Bringle, R. (2006). Personal communication.

Palomba, C. A., & Banta, T. W. (1999). Assessment essentials: Plannning, implementing, and improving assessment in higher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Inequality is ubiquitous. It exists everywhere in society including places like the work place, hospitals, elderly homes, and, of course, schools. There are many theories as to why such inequity exists. Some argue that IQ is what brings inequality: some people simply retain information and understand better than others, making them more successful. Though this may be true in some cases, it cannot explain the clear patterns of inequalities regarding race, and socioeconomics. Others, such as Jonathan Kozol, argue that a lack of material resources at some schools impede students’ abilities to grow and learn as successfully as students in schools with a plethora of both economic resources and facilities. Although Kozol’s points are valid, they do not necessarily address why many economically privileged students fail to succeed in college or in business. I would argue that no matter what the economic status of the school district or student, teacher expectations is what plays the most influential role in student success.

For me, as a Hispanic, I consider myself lucky to have parents who opted to teach me English, although I wish they taught me Spanish as well. My success, however, cannot only be attributed to my English skills. Teacher expectations played a huge role in what I was able to achieve in the public school system. Throughout grade school and junior high, I was fortunate to have a few scattered teachers who truly influenced my own outlook on school and motivated me to have a desire for knowledge that other students did not have; there was one teacher in particular who changed my outlook and allowed me to move forward in my academics and as a citizen. It was because of her that I came to Vermont and because of her that I had any interest in helping students like Maria. After I met this teacher, my goals shifted dramatically.

I met Gail Glover when I was fourteen years old on my second day of high school. Gail was my Spanish teacher. Before I met her, I had no desire to learn any foreign language. I hated Spanish. As a Hispanic who grew up in a predominately white school, I was pressured by my peers into hating the language. I was essentially taught to be embarrassed to be Mexican-American and trained to be “one of them.” If I knew how to speak Spanish, I would fit the stereotype, which was something I did not want to do. So, when I was given the opportunity to take the first of the two required years of high school Spanish in eighth grade, I took it hoping to get it out of the way as soon as possible. I took it with a narrow mind and I hated it.

The next year I hoped to get the second and final year over with so I promptly registered for Spanish II. Initially, I was placed in another teacher’s class, but due to some scheduling conflicts with a biology class I ended up in Gail’s seventh period class- her only Spanish II class. Looking back on it, I feel as if it was supposed to work out that way. Mostly, she taught the more advanced Spanish III and I was lucky to be in her single Spanish II class. On the second day of school, I walked into the classroom to find people dressed in costumes and performing skits — already, on the second day of school. I looked at who I guessed was the teacher. She was no bigger than any of the students in the room and hard to distinguish as older. She looked over at me, walked over and said, “¿Cómo te llamas?” I looked at her blankly, “¿Cómo te what???” I thought. Then she said, in English, “What’s your name?” “Ohhh,” I thought, “okay, I get it.” “Mary,” I said. “Okay, María.” She replied, “Siéntate aquí. Tenemos que terminar la tarea de ayer, y después vamos a empezar el trabajo para hoy.” I had no idea what she said to me. I was completely confused. The day before I was in a different Spanish II class and in that class, the teacher said everything in English and all she really did was take attendance. There was no work for the first day in that other class. This new class was already performing skits that they wrote as homework from the night before! I couldn’t believe the difference.

With time, I began to enjoy my Spanish class. Once I warmed up to listening to Gail speak Spanish, I understood what was happening and I learned it. It wasn’t only the Spanish speaking that did it. Gail was…different. She was constantly doing something weird or sneaking a funny word in to see if we were paying attention. I always was. I never wanted to miss anything. She did everything from hopping about the room in the middle of a lesson, for no apparent reason, to singing strange songs in some terrible pitch about penguins doing the mambo. Yes, she was strange, but that was the hook for me. Since she was so unpredictable, my attention to detail in her class resulted in my learning all about Spanish grammar, Latin American culture, and truly learning how beautiful knowing a foreign language can be. As the year came to an end, I found myself wanting to learn more. So I decided to take just one more year of Spanish and I enrolled in Spanish III. Sra. Glover would be my teacher again.

In addition to registering for Spanish III, I decided to register for French and Latin. I became obsessed with learning and understanding other languages, and I knew that Gail majored in Spanish and French. I wanted to be multilingual too. So, I took the other languages, but Spanish still grabbed my attention the most. It seemed to me that it was not only more beautiful than the other languages, it also made the most sense and it was taught by a crazy person, so there was always the entertainment aspect. I couldn’t learn fast enough. I was determined to understand everything that seemed difficult and I knew that the year would soon end. Sometimes, I would get to school early so that I could go in for extra help and ask all of the questions that I thought of about the previous day’s lesson. I am certain that my most frequent visits were right about the time we learned the subjunctive. What is wrong with that tense? Anyone who has learned a foreign language probably understands what I mean. There are all kinds of rules that come along with the subjunctive and, as it seemed to me when I first learned it, half of the time you don’t even have to use it. It all depended on what the speaker wanted to say. I remember that the old’ subjunctive really threw me when it came time for the test. I always felt that I could argue, in many cases that the regular past or present could have worked in one of the blanks where I could have also used subjunctive. Though I am certain that Gail was most likely annoyed about my persistence and curiosity from time to time, she never let me know it and she always gave me an answer for my questions. One of my favorite things about her was that she never told me, “That’s just the way it is” as so many other language teachers had. Occasionally, I would ask a question she could not answer off of the top of her head, but the next day, she would have an answer for me.

Being a fun teacher was not all of it; it was just a small part. It was so much more personal than that. As a person, she not only opened my eyes and showed me that Spanish was fun. She also opened my eyes enough to see that I could learn languages, and learn them well. She always made me feel like I could succeed on any path I chose to travel in life. It is because of her that I realized that I could be different. She helped me to step into a whole new world of possibilities, and showed me how beautiful it is to know more than one language.

Gail graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1981 and after talking with her about what would come next for me; I decided to look at her alma mater as an option for me. Middlebury has a great language program, so I took her advice and applied. When I got in, I wondered how someone like me who went to such a terrible public school could get into a place like that. I certainly did my share of hard work in high school, but that hard worked stemmed from the encouragement of my teachers and parents.
I learned a lot from Gail about how a teacher’s attitude can really affect the way that a student learns. Even in high school, shortly after having her as a teacher, I put what she taught me into practice. During my sophomore year of high school, I began working with Mexican immigrants students who came to my school because their parents migrated to the United States in search of a better life. Many Mexican families found the education system to be especially challenging in the United States and realized the difficulty that came with trying to educate their children. The fact is that many school districts across the country do not offer LEP or ESL (English as a Second Language) programs to help these populations adapt and learn in their new environment. And since they cannot understand English and, therefore, cannot understand what is going on at the school that they are attending, they drop out because there is little reason why they should spend 7 or 8 hours a day in a place that where they get little, if any, help.

In high school, I realized that there was little help for these students. In fact, they were placed in special education classrooms instead of ESL classrooms even though the only “disability” they had was a language barrier. With the proper help, these children could have really succeeded and grown to like the school that they attended. I was enraged by their lack of access to resources, so I teamed up with some of the Spanish teachers in the school and we started a tutoring program for the Mexican students that attended my high school. One student, named Maria, and I really hit it off. She was extremely intelligent and did very well when she understood the material that she was expected to grasp. For three years, we prepared for the Texas state standardized test that, at the time, was called the TAAS test. All she needed to do to graduate was pass it. We took several practice exams and worked mostly on her comprehension of the reading, but also on the math and science portions. In March of my senior year, she took and passed each section of the exam and was able to graduate with me. It was a very rewarding experience and it proved to me that when people are given the proper tools for success, they can succeed. Maria, unlike many of the other Mexican students who passed through my school district, was given access to the material that the other students did not have and was surrounded by people who encouraged her.
Educational access can be interpreted in many different ways. For Maria and me, access was given to us by those who thought we were capable. When I came to Vermont, I began working with children of all ages. Some are more challenging than others, but I have found that patience and positive energy go a long way both inside and outside of the classroom. No matter what the circumstances, when a student finds a teacher who motivates, captivates, and encourages them, that student takes positive steps forward.

I had no idea what the meeting was to be about. All I knew from my colleague was that three community leaders from the Evanston neighborhood, which borders Xavier University in Cincinnati, wanted to talk to us — and it was urgent.

Our offices had become a convenient space for gatherings to discuss various community revitalization efforts between Xavier and Evanston, a proud African-American community trying to recover from years of economic decline. As our relationship grew, the meetings, typically called by those of us at the university, had become feel-good sessions. This one, however, was requested by the three residents — and they were not feeling good.

Essentially, the community representatives, all women, were upset that the housing strategy that we agreed to focus on as part of our partnership with the community had been lagging behind. To get the project back on track, they had mobilized community residents to take over the housing component. They proposed that grant funding through the university that had been designated for a housing non-profit organization to do the work now be diverted to the community council, which was ready to take full responsibility for it.

Our 90- minute meeting ended with an agreement that the community would put together a formal proposal to do the work. As the women left our offices, my colleague and I looked at each other with exhaustion — then we cast broad grins and gave each other high fives.

The evidence of true collaboration with the community finally was becoming evident. Its residents were demanding power.

Power — or at least the imbalance of it — often lies simmering beneath the surface of most university-community relations, however it is seldom explicitly talked about. The parties learn to dance around it in order to realize the benefits of their partnership as best they can. However, as soon as the university expresses its dominant power, even in subtle ways, the underlying mistrust emerges. Left unaddressed, the good will weakens and the partnership begins to break down.

Many university administrators and faculty who desire to genuinely embrace the communities around them talk enthusiastically about collaboration. After years of failed community relations, administrators now recognize that ignoring our neighbors is short-sighted, yet treating them like a case study to be observed or a project to be serviced is offensive. Collaboration holds promise of mutually beneficial engagement built on shared interests.

Yet even with our good intentions, true collaboration is not easily realized and power often is the hindrance. More than likely, we move along a kind of community engagement continuum that has been identified by the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation in St. Paul, Minn., which has done tremendous work researching and facilitating community partnerships. On one end of the continuum is communication, where we seek input and share information. After some success, we move on to cooperation, where the community and university find occasions to work together when it is convenient for both parties. We may regularly include the community in our events, or join community-based activities. Collaboration, which awaits at the far end of the continuum, requires much more of us. (Mattessich, Murray-Close, & Monsey, 2001). Ultimately, for it to take place, power must be shared, which means that any university that wants to embed itself in community must be willing to relinquish it. The Wilder Foundation maintains that true collaboration requires “a commitment to mutual relationships and goals; a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility; mutual authority and accountability for success; and sharing of resources and rewards” The National Academy of Public Administration, in its investigation of successful cross-sector initiatives, replaces the term collaboration with “high-powered partnerships.” It says such a partnership is “a mutually beneficial and reciprocal relationship among entities that share responsibilities, authority, and accountability for results” (Barnett, 2003).

Sharing responsibility, accountability and resources can be difficult, but they are likely to be gradually realized in the course of ongoing communication and cooperation. However, sharing authority — or power — between a university and a community is far more challenging because of the inherent discrepancy in power that already exists between the two parties.

Universities generally maintain among the highest levels of civic reputation, political clout, expertise, and resources of any institution in their regions. On the other hand, their residential neighbors — particularly if they live in resource poor communities — typically hold but one lever of power: the ability to disrupt. Only when the community opposes something — and then vehemently so — does it gain the media and political attention necessary to mitigate the university’s influence.

Having worked during my career both on the institutional side of this predicament in corporate and non-profit community relations and on the community side as director of grassroots neighborhood organizations, I have seen this phenomenon of community resistance play out repeatedly. It wasn’t long after I arrived at Xavier in 2002 that I witnessed it anew.

Xavier had spent a great deal of energy soothing over Evanston’s long-held hostility toward the university that had emerged through the typical set of town-gown tensions: the university’s indifference toward the community’s affairs; disorderly students; and the obligatory capital improvement imposition. In this case, the closing of a major street without community consent.

Having overcome those battles, it was understandable that the university felt good about itself for having purchased and renovated an historic building in Evanston, across from the main campus, for use as university office space. The art deco manufacturing building with marble stairways and terrazzo-tile floors was going to be vacated by a publishing company. Left abandoned, it might have ended up as yet another community symbol of blight and decay.

However, in my initial meetings with community residents, when I touted the building purchase as an example of Xavier’s commitment to neighborhood revitalization, I was met with skepticism. “So, what other properties is Xavier going to buy up in our community?” residents would demand to know. “Is this just the beginning of you taking over our neighborhood?”

It did not take me long to realize that the source of this cynicism had nothing to do with the merits of the purchase. In fact, as I engaged with them, many residents would concede that renovating the building was good for the community. Their real concern was the demonstration of power the university exercised in buying the building. No one in the community could do that. And if the university could, what else might it do? The only tool the community had to equalize the effect was to challenge the university’s motives.

That is what made the evening meeting with the Evanston community leaders some four years so meaningful. The community sensed the university was using its power as fiscal agent for its community partnership grant inappropriately by not insisting certain work be done. In response, they were demanding a share of the power and with it, embracing responsibility and accountability. “Give us control over the dollars,” they insisted, “and we will make sure the work happens.”

Without a sense of empowerment, they probably would have resorted to the disruptive tactics that communities see as their only resort. They would have attacked our motives, charged us with withholding funds for the university’s benefit or exploiting the community for our own gain. You do that when you’re fighting a bully. When you’re taking on your equal, you simply punch back. And we had worked hard to make the relationship as close to a peer arrangement as possible.

It is important to acknowledge here that there are benefits to being the biggest kid on the block. Namely, you get to be in charge. On the contrary, sharing power brings with it risks. The other party might mess up, and if they do, you suffer as well. Worse yet, they may deliberately take advantage of you. It is safer to hoard power if you have that option, and universities often do.

So why share power? The best response I have heard comes from Fr. Howard Gray, a Jesuit priest who has served as a faculty member, administrator and consultant for several Jesuit universities. “If you share power, you risk being abused,” Gray told us recently at an administrative retreat on campus. “If you don’t share power, you are certain to be abusive.”

In other words, if you don’t share power, you get to always win, and inevitably your winning will be at the expense of someone else losing. John McKnight and John Kretzmann argue that it is precisely this kind of institutional imposition that overwhelms and snuffs out the identification and mobilization of community assets, particularly in economically distressed urban communities, which find themselves in their predicaments mainly because institutions have won for decades at their expense through economic and social disinvestment and exploitation (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993).

The community understands this dynamic far better than the university. Residents know that the institution ultimately is trying to serve its self interests and if there is a choice to be made between its own agenda and the community’s, the institution is likely to operate on its own behalf — as long as it holds all the power. So a powerless community is always in fighting mode, ready to pounce the moment it senses it might be taken advantage of.

Collaboration is impossible to achieve in such a climate. Collaboration seeks only mutual wins, but they are hard to identify when agendas are hidden and mistrust lies just beneath the surface. A weak community can be controlled, but it will always seek to disrupt the affairs of the university as a result. A powerful community will make demands — and mistakes — but it will possess the ability to collaborate. Leadership is more consistent. Agreements are more credible. Capacity is greater. Relationships can be sustained.

Part of the satisfaction of seeing Evanston residents boldly demand a share of power — rather than privately scowl or publicly demean us — was that we had challenged ourselves to relinquish power. At Xavier, our Catholic Jesuit values, which embrace the pursuit of social justice, compel us to take this matter seriously. Still, we are not perfect and sometimes take advantage, even unwittingly, of the privilege we have as the more powerful partner, as our friends in Evanston reminded us.

Nevertheless, we have taken several deliberate steps to create a structure where power can be shared with the community and true collaboration achieved. These steps include:

Defining focused, achievable goals

Not everything a university does is open to partnership. Some authority the university will not concede, even as it relates to the community. Likewise, there are community initiatives residents would prefer the university to influence. Collaborative partnerships, therefore, must explicitly define what falls within the realm of shared responsibility, accountability and authority.

Xavier’s move from cooperation with Evanston to true collaboration began with the creation of a community plan that spells out the specific initiatives we would pursue together with measurable outcomes and clear mutual benefits. One aspect of the plan, for instance, calls for commercial revitalization and focuses on a two-block business district in the neighborhood. In reality, the community would have preferred to focus on another area closer to the center of the neighborhood. University administrators were pushing for an area closer to campus. The area we chose was in the interests of both. That doesn’t mean the community and university won’t pursue their own projects on their own, but we won’t do it in collaboration — at least not for now.

Making the university more transparent

Community leaders believe the university is engaging with them out of their own selfish motives. And they are right. The problem is that universities are reluctant to divulge their institutional goals to the community. They might be misinterpreted or, worse yet, the community might interfere.

Residents, meanwhile, knowing full well that the university has an agenda, become suspicious when they don’t hear it articulated. Absent a credible explanation, the community interprets its own agenda for the university. Thus, the well-intentioned purchase of a building appears to be part of a plot to take over the neighborhood.

When Xavier began developing a new facilities master plan two years ago, the administrative vice president tucked under his arms the maps and sketches heretofore only on display in his office and took them to a meeting of Evanston residents focused on the neighborhood’s development. It was risky, but the executive, recalling the backlash from the secret street closing a decade prior, was willing to take it. Amazingly, not one shred of information was ever leaked to the press; no speculator emerged to buy up the property the university had set its eyes on. To the contrary, having been giving a seat at the table — a bit of power that comes from access and information — the attendees at the meeting guarded the information. If it were compromised, so would the power they had been granted.

Several of those residents remained engaged in the entire planning process, meeting with architects and reviewing final recommendations before they were approved by the board of trustees. Rather than mobilizing to fight the plan, several community residents already are championing it.

Creating a table where the community has clear authority.

Show me a room full of administrators and I will easily sort them by their relative power by asking two questions: Who controls how money is spent? Who controls how people spend their time? If the community is to be engaged in collaboration, the partners must define upfront what direct control the community will have over the way money and time are allocated. This is not satisfied by giving residents the opportunity to provide input, where residents hand over information to others so they can make decisions. Collaboration requires defining this area upfront.

When Xavier received its COPC grant, it was obvious that the community needed some evidence that they had some ownership in it. We did two things to achieve this: First, we created a steering committee with a majority of community residents that is co-chaired by me and the president of the Evanston Community Council. Second, we gave the community authority in hiring the staff coordinator.

Investing in community empowerment.

Sharing authority requires that community leaders have a power base independent of the university. Building a cozy relationship with one community representative might seem efficient, but it does not sustain collaboration. Either the representative will compromise the community’s interests in order to gain favor with the university and retain his seat of power, or the community will suspect that he has done so and withdraw support. Either way, the representative’s legitimacy is destroyed and collaboration is doomed.

Communities need a broad base of participants who have access to information, relationships, and are engaged in the decision-making process. In order to encourage this, Xavier holds a leadership academy for residents and has assisted in community organizing efforts. At the same time, we have invested in community organizing training for residents independent of the university in order to equip leaders to engage with the university from a position of strength.

Dispersing community relationships across the university.

It is efficient for the university to create a single conduit for dealing with the community such as one office or one person. It is extremely debilitating to the community to do so. Real power comes from the breadth of networks in which we participate. A resident who knows one person at the university has far less influence than someone who knows a dozen. While it is true some coordination and accountability for partnerships may come from a central office, relationships ought to be spread out to include students, faculty and the senior administration.

The president of the Evanston Community Council often says that the opportunity for collaboration with the university became evident to the community when Xavier’s president ventured out to meetings in the community. That is when she, as CEO of the community, began to engage her “peer.” Now, as partnerships with the community develop, we push different departments and offices to manage them on behalf of the university, with support from my office.

References

Barnett, C. C., et. al. (2003). Powering the Future: High-Performance Partnerships. Washington, DC.: National Academy of Public Administration.

Kretzmann, J. P., & McKnight, J. L. (1993). Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets. Evanston, IL: Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.

Mattessich, P. W., Murray-Close, M., & Monsey, B. R. (2001). Collaboration: What Makes It Work. St. Paul, MN: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation.

The campus will be distinctive in serving the diverse people of California, especially the working class and historically undereducated and low-income populations…The identity of the university will be framed by a substantive commitment to multilingual, multicultural, gender-equitable learning…Our graduates will have an understanding of interdependence and global competence, distinctive technical and educational skills, the experience and abilities to contribute to California’s high quality work force, the critical thinking abilities to be productive citizens, and the social responsibility and skills to be community builders.
CSU Monterey Bay Vision Statement (1994, emphasis added)

Introduction: Service Learning as a Graduation Requirement

Created in 1995 on the site of the former Fort Ord, California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) was designed to offer its students a model, 21st century education. While many aspects of CSUMB’s innovative educational program have flourished (such as CSUMB’s outcomes-based educational program, its focus on interdisciplinarity, and the integration of wireless technology in learning), CSUMB has been most recognized nationally for its innovative service learning requirement and its commitment to developing students’ capacity and commitment to leading socially and civically engaged lives. This commitment to civic engagement is a central component of the CSUMB Vision Statement, which emphasizes that students will develop the “critical thinking abilities to be productive citizens, and the social responsibility and skills to be community builders” (CSUMB, 1994).

Unlike many higher education institutions that seek to promote an ethic of service through extra-curricular student programs and work-study efforts, CSUMB has made its commitment to service and civic engagement a core educational goal, placing service learning squarely at the heart of its academic program. All CSUMB undergraduates are required to complete two service learning courses: a required lower division course called “Introduction to Service in Multicultural Communities;” and an upper division service learning course in their major. The lower division course gives students a foundation in issues of service, social justice and social responsibility; and the upper-division course exposes students to social issues that are pertinent to their career or field of study. In both cases, students have the opportunity to work with community organizations that are working to address our most complex social issues. Through this two-semester service learning requirement, 50% of CSUMB students are enrolled in service learning courses each academic year, contributing tens of thousands of hours of work to local schools, agencies and non-profit organizations in the Monterey Bay region.

The goal of CSUMB’s service learning program is to have students develop the capacity and will to be multicultural community builders: “students who have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to work effectively in a diverse society to create more just and equitable workplaces, communities and social institutions” (Service Learning Institute, 2003). While the scope of the CSUMB service learning program is indeed impressive, and the hours of service truly significant, the most important contribution of the CSUMB service learning program is its success in integrating concepts of diversity, compassion, justice and social responsibility at the heart of all undergraduate degree programs. Through the service learning requirement. CSUMB students come to know intimately the rewards of active community involvement, and become more confident and committed to their role as community builders in our diverse, multicultural world.

Implementing such a broad vision for the integration of civic engagement throughout the curriculum has required CSUMB to reinterpret the conventional understanding of service learning. In essence, this has meant moving beyond an understanding of service learning as pedagogy, and emphasizing civic learning outcomes as a core component of all service learning courses.

The Conventional Paradigm: Service Learning as Pedagogy

As it has spread throughout higher education over the past two decades, service learning has largely been introduced to faculty as a pedagogy, a more effective, engaging and rewarding (though also more time consuming) approach to teaching. Faculty development programs have focused on introducing a variety of experiential learning techniques to harness the learning derived from the service experience in a way that is relevant to the academic goals of the course.

While there has been a lot of enthusiasm about forging community partnerships and the positive impact that students can have in the community (number of hours of service, monetary value added, etc.), the driving force for the integration of service learning in higher education has been service learning’s effectiveness as a powerful, engaging pedagogy in helping students meet their course learning outcomes.

Service learning has found a comfortable home in higher education as a pedagogical strategy. In many cases, service learning offices are located within or connected to centers for faculty development. In this context, service learning (along with technology-mediated instruction, project-based learning, and outcomes-based learning, among others) is seen as one of a variety of potential strategies to help faculty members become more effective facilitators of student learning.

Appropriately for this pedagogical orientation, the word most closely associated with the field of service learning over the past two decades has been “reflection.” Reflection is commonly understood to be the collection of strategies that help students mindfully turn their service experiences into relevant academic learning. Reflection is the hyphen in service-learning; the glue that holds these two disparate pieces of the enterprise together. As the emphasis over the past two decades has been on service learning as pedagogy, the field has done an excellent job of popularizing a variety of approaches to reflection. Most significantly, it has helped to legitimate “journaling” as a rigorous academic endeavor. Now ten years old, one of the seminal publications in the field, representing the first decade of learning about the “how to” of service learning, was “A Practitioner’s Guide to Reflection in Service-Learning,” by Janet Eyler, Dwight Giles and Angela Schmiede (1996). This was one of the first technical assistance projects funded by the Corporation for National Service, and was an answer to higher education’s thirst for concrete insights into the pedagogical process of converting experience into learning. In the decade since the publication of “A Practitioner’s Guide to Reflection in Service Learning,” our approaches to reflection have become even more sophisticated as higher education has developed a greater comfort level with learner-center, experiential approaches to teaching and learning.

As has become evident over the past two decades, service learning is a powerful, engaging approach to teaching and learning (Eyler and Giles, 1999). Service learning involves students in real life work in real communities in real time. As a result, learning itself becomes real, and mastering technical, conceptual, and theoretical knowledge matters. When students don’t show up for a tutoring session with elementary school children, or if their newly-developed web-site is not functional, there are real consequences that have a human face. This is very different from the anonymity associated with missing a class or not handing in an assignment. But, as effective as service learning might be in making learning real and helping students to become engaged with the subject matter, we need to be careful not to conflate “engaged learning” with the development of a students’ sense of and commitment to “civic engagement.” Engaged learning is powerful learning, but it is not necessarily tapping into the social, civic or moral realm of student learning and of students’ lives (Ehrlich, Colby, et. al., 2003). While engaged learning is a key characteristic of a service learning course, it is not its defining characteristic at CSUMB. Rather, service learning courses must also include explicit civic learning outcomes.

A Focus on Civic Learning: Moving from the “How To” to the “What” of Service Learning

While it is true that service learning is a powerful, engaged pedagogy, this only represents part of its essence. Over the past two decades the field has spent significant energy developing the “how to” of service learning (the pedagogy piece); but we have overlooked and under-discussed the “what” of service learning (the content piece related to “civic engagement”). What do we want students to learn from their experiences with service and civic engagement? And, how does this learning about service and civic engagement relate to the rest of the academic agenda to which students are exposed in their undergraduate programs?

At CSUMB, service learning is more than just a pedagogy or approach to teaching. It is also a knowledge-base that examines the complex intersection of issues of justice, compassion, diversity and social responsibility with the technical, conceptual and theoretical world of the academic disciplines (Service Learning Institute, 1999). This fundamental re-conceptualization has required a new organizational framework, one that places service learning squarely in the academic main tent as a full partner in the development and implementation of CSUMB’s academic program. At CSUMB, service learning is not housed in a faculty development office. Nor is it a unit of student affairs. Service learning is an academic department, and a legitimate member of the academic community, participating in all aspects of academic program planning and implementation. The Service Learning Institute has tenured and tenure-track faculty, offers courses, and even offers a minor in Service Learning Leadership (a major is currently in development). Like other departments, it has a recognized expertise in a distinctive area of knowledge: in this case, knowledge related to issues of service, social justice and civic engagement.

As part of the founding Vision for the campus, all CSUMB majors devote curricular space to the development of the social, civic and moral capacities and commitments of their students. CSUMB’s goal is to not just educate technically competent professionals, but to educate technically competent, socially responsible, and civically engaged professionals. As a legitimate member of the academic community at CSUMB, the Service Learning Institute has been well-placed to help each major develop this civic dimension of its academic program. Building on CSUMB’s outcomes-based educational framework, service learning courses in each major have integrated explicit learning outcomes related to service and social justice into their courses. Students in CSUMB service learning courses don’t just “do service,” but they spend significant amount of class time “learning about service.” For example, computer science students not only design web-sites and build networks for community organizations, but they examine the phenomenon known as the “digital divide” as a core component of their service learning course. They are wrestling with the question: has the digital revolution lessened or increased inequality in our society? Art students work with museums to collect, preserve and display historical objects. But they also actively debate what a museum’s role in representing a diverse society’s history and culture is. These students struggle with the question: who decides what is worth collecting, preserving and displaying? These are just two examples of how issues of service, social responsibility and social justice have become embedded in the core of CSUMB’s academic programs

With its explicit focus on civic learning outcomes, service learning is one way that civic engagement has become a legitimate and essential component of all academic programs, helping CSUMB fulfill the expectations of its Vision Statement that students will develop the “social responsibility and skills to be community builders.”

Intentionality: Making Civic Learning a Core Responsibility of Higher Education

At CSUMB we challenge ourselves to be intentional in what we do. This purposefulness came out of our first WASC accreditation experience when the chair of our team, Dr. Judith Ramalay, constantly challenged us with the question, “to what end?” We had to reflect on what we were doing and to articulate the reasons why we thought it was important and what it meant to our students. We asked ourselves what we wanted our graduates to “look like” when they left us as a result of the CSUMB learning experience. We answered that question in a number of ways. Our mission statement says that we are committed to building a multicultural learning community, from which our graduates emerge prepared to contribute productively, responsible and ethically to California and the global community. Our Vision Statement establishes “service learning” as a vehicle to enable students to develop the “critical thinking abilities to be productive citizens, and the social responsibility and skills to be community builders.” Our intention is to educate the future generation of multicultural community builders, so that our graduates will leave with knowledge, skills, and abilities to be productive members of their future communities. They will understand what it means to be part of a community, how to contribute positively to the creation of more just and equitable communities, and to participate in the democratic process.

For students to be well prepared for our increasingly diverse and global society, students must develop the skills to work collaboratively across the differences that have traditionally separated the diverse segments of our society. Because we teach the concept of civic responsibility as a serious academic subject, rather than a voluntary topic explored according to self-interest, CSUMB’s service learning program gives value to these issues and creates a clear expectation that our graduates will participate actively in the communities of their future.

Higher education must make this goal a core academic priority: to make civic learning a serious, legitimate and rigorous academic endeavor. For colleges and universities to truly take their place as engaged institutions, they most boldly adopt a more robust definition of service learning, and make social, moral, and civic learning a core component of their academic programs. Students should not just be “doing service,” but they should be debating approaches to service, and digging deep into the meaning of terms such as “the commons,” “the public,” “social justice,” and “participatory democracy.” If we are to truly have an impact, these terms must become as commonly heard in the halls of our science, humanities and art buildings as in our political science departments. For this to occur faculty across the disciplines need to become immersed in this conversation, and themselves deepen their understanding of their own civic responsibility as professionals in their fields. Higher education must embrace civic learning as a core academic topic, which like “writing across the curriculum,” manifests itself in every corner of the academy.

Building a vibrant democracy requires that each new generation of citizens become inspired to and capable of embracing their civic responsibilities and building our national commons. The challenges which globalization brings to this task in the twenty-first century requires that higher education play an even more central role in fulfilling this civic mission. If we want to live in a society where people are able to move beyond difference and actively care about each other and work to build a new multicultural commons, then civic learning must become a central part of service learning, and a central part of higher education. Our future depends on our capacity to educate multicultural community builders.

Sources:

California State University Monterey Bay (1994). Vision Statement. CSU Monterey Bay Web-site

Ehrlich, Colby, Beaumont, and Stephens (2003). Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Eyler, Janet and Dwight E. Giles Jr. (1999). Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning?, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Eyler, J., Giles. D., Schmiede, A. (1996). A practitioner’s guide to reflection in service learning: Student voices and reflections. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University and the Corporation for National Service.

titute, “What is a Multicultural Community Builder?” California State University Monterey Bay, Service Learning Institute Web-site, 2003, 27 April 2005 Service Learning Ins.

Service Learning Institute , “CSUMB’s Service Learning Prism,” California State University Monterey Bay Service Learning Institute Website, 1999, 27 April 2005.

The mission of the Corporation for National and Community Service, an independent federal agency, is to improve lives, strengthen communities, and foster civic engagement through service and volunteering. Through a family of service programs ? primarily SeniorCorps, AmeriCorps, VISTA, NCCC and Learn and Serve America ? the Corporation provides opportunities for Americans of all ages and backgrounds to serve their communities and the nation. Higher education is a key partner in all of these efforts. Yet, in order to build a more civically engaged society and develop leaders in civic life for today and for the years ahead, National Service and the Higher Education community can work even more closely to set a strong course to the future.

The results of our work with higher education thus far demonstrate the power of our opportunity:

• Roughly one quarter of all institutions of higher education have been supported by Learn and Serve America funding since 1994.
• Since 1994, AmeriCorps members have earned over $1.1 billion in Education Awards to further their educational opportunities.
• In FY 2005, higher education institutions received more than $207 million in Corporation funds.
• Of the 75,000 members of AmeriCorps serving in 2005, over 20,000 performed their service in affiliation with colleges.
• More than 37,888 Senior Corps volunteers serve in 83 projects operated by colleges and universities nationwide.

The Corporation has enthusiastically supported the growth and development of Campus Compact from its inception, as one of our most critical partners and allies. Learn and Serve America has provided over $5 million in support of Campus Compact’s national office since 1994, supporting the Compact’s growth and expansion and leveraging several times this amount to support higher education service, service-learning and civic engagement nationally. The focus of much of this work has been on professional development for faculty and administrators, including community service directors. In addition to the national Compact, Learn and Serve has directly funded 21 of the state Compacts or Compact networks since 1994. With the support of Learn and Serve, the Compact has expanded to 31 states and more than 1000 member campuses.

The Corporation continues to place considerable strategic value on the growth and development of higher education service and citizenship. Most recently, we announced the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll program, a new initiative designed to identify and recognize institutions of higher education that pursue their civic mission through the encouragement and support of students’ community service efforts.

The Honor Roll is sponsored by the Corporation, the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation, USA Freedom Corps, and the U.S. Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development, and is presented in concert with Campus Compact. The Honor Roll program is intended to increase public awareness of the service contributions of higher education institutions and students to their communities and nation, and to increase the use of service-learning in higher education and the number of college students engaged in community service. The program will also identify and promote exemplary higher education community service programs and practices.
Of the institutions that apply and are designated to appear on the Honor Roll, a limited number, those judged to be of the highest caliber, will be selected to receive the Presidential Higher Education Community Service Award, including a certificate signed by the President. Some of these 2006 awards will be given to institutions that contributed significantly to meeting the needs of individuals and communities in the Gulf Region in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricanes.

Campus Compact’s 20th Anniversary celebration provides a fitting venue to present the inaugural President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll Awards. At a special ceremonial breakfast (from 7 to 9 AM at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place on October 17) members of the Honor Roll will also be announced, along with data about student service projects of the honored institutions.

In February 2006, the Corporation for National and Community Service released its Strategic Plan through 2010. Far beyond simply addressing the work of Corporation programs, the Plan sets forth bold national goals for service and service-learning, goals that USA Freedom Corps, the White House and many in the private, nonprofit and academic sectors have embraced.

The four initiatives set forth in the Plan, including the goals to be achieved by 2010, are:

• Mobilizing More Volunteers: We will expand the number of Americans who volunteer from 65.4 million to 75 million Americans.
• Ensuring a Brighter Future for All of America’s Youth: We will improve the lives of disadvantaged youth in two ways: by engaging 3 million of them in meaningful service; and, by engaging 3 million more Americans as mentors.
• Engaging Students in Communities: We will expand to 5 million the number of post-secondary students who serve in their communities, up from 3.x million; and, we will expand service learning participation from 30 percent to 50 percent of America’s k-12 schools.
• Harnessing Baby Boomers’ Experience: We will ensure that the reach, skills and experience of the Baby Boomers drives positive social change in America, by increasing the number of boomers engaged in service to 28.5 million, up from 25.5.

We look to the higher education community as a significant partner in achieving these national goals, which will frame our efforts for the next five years.

We understand that the Higher Education community has the capacity and the aligned interests to offer significant support to each of these initiatives; of course, we also know that our point of strongest alignment is our focus on increasing the numbers of post-secondary students who serve their communities. From the Corporation’s perspective, this focus on student service is not solely supported by our Learn and Serve America program, but, rather by our entire family of programs ? including VISTA, AmeriCorps, NCCC and Senior Corps as well as LSA. We are committed to building stronger partnerships between each of these programs and the higher education community in our pursuit of this objective.

Together we know we can encourage greater integration of service into the academic mission of America’s colleges and universities and increase the support offered on campus to those students who serve their communities.

In order to reach the goal of 5 million students serving communities from their college campuses over the next five years, we expect that we will engage institutions of higher education in several discrete initiatives, including:

• Use Higher Education assets and students to strengthen and expand our network of intermediaries (Volunteer Centers, Campus Compact, State Service Commissions, national foundations and public service non-profits, faith-based and other community based organizations at the state, community, and campus level)
• Reduce barriers that inhibit students from engaging in service (such as transportation, information, relationships with community agencies, lack of institutional support, etc.),
• Tie service more frequently to academic studies through high-quality service-learning,
• Increase college student participation in services to youth from disadvantaged circumstances (including mentoring and tutoring).
• Provide a national platform to promote the value and importance of service on campus.

Working closely with higher education institutions, the Campus Compact network and other higher education associations committed to service and civic engagement, we look to ensure that at least half of all higher education institutions provide the resources to coordinate service, service-learning, and community partnerships in order to stimulate more service and to improve the quality and coordination of existing activities.

Together with our colleagues in higher education and at the U.S. Department of Education, we would certainly hope to see one important outcome of our efforts be that colleges and universities provide more service opportunities through the Federal Work Study program and other co-curricular opportunities to serve.

In addition, we can work together to encourage higher education institutions to offer more service-learning courses, to increase the number of engaged academic departments, to encourage faculty and students to engage in collaborative community-based research, and to create more avenues for faculty, staff and students to engage in academically rigorous work that also provides benefit to local communities. Together there is much we can do to ensure that service to the community is an essential part of the mission and reward structure of higher education.

The Corporation offers significant benefits, in the form of education awards and stipends, to AmeriCorps members who commit to full or part-time service. Currently, 50 institutions match the education award, and that list is growing daily. Working together, we can expand this tangible recognition of the value of AmeriCorps service exponentially.

In addition, we can highlight the importance of service as a strategy for meeting a variety of pressing community needs. We are concentrating resources and efforts on meeting the needs of youth in disadvantaged circumstances, particularly through mentoring and tutoring. College access and preparedness are among the key issues facing communities today. While meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged, including youth in foster care and those who are the children of prisoners, is a daunting and challenging task, it is not insurmountable. The Corporation for National and Community Service and the higher education community are well placed to address these needs.

Higher education has a special relationship with elementary and secondary education. Here too, higher education can make a significant impact in meeting needs and stimulating greater service. Learn and Serve America programs have been a catalyst for the growth of service-learning activity in our nation’s K-12 schools. In 1984, nine percent of schools offered service learning opportunities. Today, service-learning reaches approximately 30 percent of all schools. Through our Strategic Plan, we have pledged to work to build service-learning into the curriculum of half of all K-12 schools by 2010. Higher education institutions’ help is required. Schools of education can ensure that this cohort of teachers and the next generation of teachers are skilled in incorporating service into the curriculum. While Education departments are uniquely suited to train teachers and work with schools, higher education programs of all types are building community partnerships with schools to assist in their academic and civic activities and to meet a wide variety of community needs.

Our efforts to advance a strategic plan to engage more students and more higher education institutions in service, service-learning and civic engagement make the most of the opportunities available to collaborate with colleges and universities, higher education associations, Campus Compacts, nonprofits and other government offices and agencies. And the prospects look great. Yet our vision of the future is not complete if we do not take into account some of the overarching barriers to collaboration and challenges to action.

One of the challenges we face is language. We do not have a common, agreed upon set of terms. The terms we use to signify activities that include service to the community, reflection by the participants, and benefits derived by the individuals served and serving vary widely. In addition, those who refer to programs that contain this kind of reflective service, sometimes aim to characterize it as institutionally driven, sometimes as anti-institutional, and sometimes as ad hoc or a-institutional. We use the terms volunteerism, community service, service-learning, civic engagement, community outreach, community partnerships, civic learning, engaged scholarship, community-based research, community engagement and many others. Attempts to find just the right term to distinguish activities in order to legitimize, raise prestige, signify academic rigor, emphasize broader social aims, or meet the historical mission of a specific institution are important and justifiable in each instance. Unfortunately, when each instance is taken together, those outside “the field” and those outside higher education, often do not know that these terms are part of a single continuum, part of a singular and important drive to ensure that higher education students, faculty, staff, and institutions are solving real world problems and contributing positively to local communities. By using such fine-grained language, we dilute our potential to make a big difference. We must find a way to balance the real need for some rhetorical distinctions among truly disparate service and civic engagement activities with the equally important and urgent requirement for others to understand the strength and size of our common agenda. How will we forge the coalition?

Another barrier to success is the divide separating K-12 and higher education. The lessons learned in the development of service and service-learning in elementary and secondary education have much to offer higher education as of course is true in reverse. We need to treat the conditions in these two educational arenas not as if one were more advanced than the other, but as a lesson in comparative study between two different cultures. Higher education may be able to learn a great deal about professional development or policy advances from K12, if it can be seen not as a developmentally inferior education system, but as a culturally distinct system.

Similar is the challenge faced in teacher education. In order to make service-learning and civic engagement a standard expectation in all educational settings, the professional education teachers receive must include service and civic education as values and methods. While there are pockets of excellence, innovation, and widespread use of service-learning in schools and colleges of education, service-learning has not become a regular feature of teacher education programs across the country. In some instances, service-learning is used as a method to educate pre-service teachers, but they are not taught how to use service-learning in the classrooms they will lead. In order to truly build service-learning into the next generation of schools and higher education institutions, teachers and other educators will need to know how to build the community partnerships and integrate service and learning so that students will be able to perform meaningful and valuable service.

No thoughts about the future of service and civic engagement in higher education would be complete without a discussion of the possibilities and hopes for the future of Campus Compact. As noted above, the growth of the Compact in its 20 years is extraordinary. The leadership exhibited by each of the national Compact’s executive directors, its staff members and national board members have created a strong and powerful organization. The Compact has done much to keep the vision of higher education institutions as civic institutions central and the Compact has done even more to make that vision a reality. In the coming years national Campus Compact should more directly take on the challenge of helping to shape national higher education policy. In addition, while Campus Compact is an organization of higher education presidents, the presidents might consider expanding both the membership and the services of the Compact. Students and faculty deeply committed to service and service-learning could find a home within which to advance networks and build skills. Of particular interest are the new higher education professionals ? community service directors, service-learning directors, civic engagement directors ? that have been created by the expansion of organized service and service-learning. Campus Compact has a boundless opportunity to support and advance this new professional field. Strengthening these individual constituencies will lead to advances in service and can contribute to an increase in the amount and quality of service and service-learning as well as the development of a coherent policy strategy.

National Campus Compact, the state Campus Compacts, individual colleges and universities, and the Corporation have worked together since 1994 to advance higher education’s civic mission. This has brought us close to the “tipping point.” We look forward over the coming years to working collaboratively with higher education institutions and the Campus Compact network to truly make service and civic engagement a common expectation of college students and of higher education institutions.

During recent years, increasing numbers of colleges and universities have engaged in innovative efforts to reinvigorate the civic mission on which their institutions were founded?one that calls on faculty, students, and administrators to apply their skills, resources, and talents to address important issues affecting communities, the nation, and the world. This movement has been fueled largely by community and liberal arts colleges and state universities. Research universities have been much quieter, despite the ambitious efforts many have undertaken to promote and advance civic engagement in their institutions.

Auspiciously, there is growing awareness that research universities, with their significant academic and societal influence, world-class faculty, outstanding students, state-of-the-art research facilities, and considerable financial resources, have the credibility and stature needed to help drive institutional and field-wide change more rapidly and in ways that will ensure deeper and longer-lasting commitment to civic engagement among colleges and universities for centuries to come. In particular, because research universities “set the bar” for scholarship across higher education, they are well-positioned to promote and advance new forms of scholarship?those that link the intellectual assets of higher education institutions to solving public problems and issues.

Although a cadre of leading research universities has begun to embrace and adopt more comprehensive and sustainable approaches to civic engagement such as engaged scholarship, the scholar-practitioners leading these efforts often lack opportunities to convene with and learn from their colleagues at peer institutions. As a result, there have been few attempts to coalesce their energy, intellect, and ingenuity toward creating a group of educators able to promote engaged scholarship as a key component of the larger civic engagement agenda across all of higher education.

To address this gap, in October 2005, Campus Compact and Tufts University convened scholars from a group of research universities that are advanced in their civic engagement work to discuss to how their institutions were promoting civic engagement on their campuses and in their communities. During the course of two full days, this group shared information about the innovative work in which they had been engaged and exchanged ideas about “what works” in advancing this initiative at research institutions. The group also decided to take action and become a more prominent and visible voice for leadership in the larger civic engagement movement in higher education by developing a case statement that outlines why it is important for research universities to embrace and advance engaged scholarship as a central component of their activities and programs and at every level: institutional, faculty, and student. The statement comprises several parts, among them:

A Definition of “Engaged Scholarship”

Engaged scholarship is predicated on the idea that major advances in knowledge tend to occur when human beings consciously work to solve the central problems confronting their society. Ernest Boyer (1990; 1996; Ramaley, 2004; Schon, 1995) described engaged scholarship as an approach that melds:

• The scholarship of discovery, which contributes to the search for new knowledge, the pursuit of inquiry, and the intellectual climate of universities.
• The scholarship of integration, which makes connections across disciplines, places specialized knowledge in larger contexts such as communities, and advances knowledge through synthesis.
• The scholarship of application through which scholars ask how knowledge can be applied to public problems and issues, address individual and societal needs, and use societal realities to test, inspire, and challenge theory.
• The scholarship of teaching, which includes not only transmitting knowledge, but also transforming and extending it beyond the university walls.

Generally, engaged scholarship:

• Draws on many sources of distributed knowledge
• Is based on partnerships
• Is shaped by multiple perspectives and expectations
• Deals with difficult and evolving questions — complex issues that may shift constantly
• Is long term, both effort and impact, often with episodic
• bursts of progress
• Requires diverse strategies and approaches
• Crosses disciplinary lines — a challenge for institutions organized around disciplines (Source: Holland, 2005a, p. 7)

Engaged scholarship also works on several levels:

At the institutional level, engaged scholarship connects the intellectual assets of higher education institutions, including faculty expertise and high-quality graduate and undergraduate students, to public issues.

At the faculty level, engaged scholarship is a vehicle through which faculty can participate in “academically relevant work that simultaneously fulfills the campus mission and goals, as well as community needs” (Sandmann, 2003, p. 4).

At the student level, engaged scholarship can enhance academic learning and knowledge generation because of its ability to blend research, teaching, and service.

Barriers to Engaged Scholarship

Scholar-practitioners identified several barriers to implementing engaged scholarship in their institutions, among them:

A focus on individual disciplines rather than on public problems or issues. Research universities have a long tradition of supporting and investing in objective inquiry whose primary purpose is to add to the knowledge base of a field or discipline. This emphasis also tends to overshadow the multidisciplinary approach engaged scholars employ to addressing problems, which they see as a primary focus of research.

An emphasis on abstract theory rather than actionable theory derived from and useful for “real-world” practice. Research institutions tend to adhere to a Platonic notion of scholarship and education that assumes pure abstract theory as superior to actionable theory derived from engagement in “real-world” practice. This view contrasts with Dewey’s notion of education as participatory, action-oriented, and focused on “learning by doing” — a focus that engaged scholars and teachers embrace (Harkavy, 2004).

Lack of understanding about what engaged scholarship is and how it works.
An uncertainty about what engaged scholarship is and how to assess it has led many at research universities to view this approach as somewhat suspect and less valid than traditional research (Finkelstein, 2001). Because engaged work is largely interdisciplinary and involves partnerships with community-based organizations, the links to academic expertise are not always evident.

Few incentives exist to reward engaged scholarship. Traditional disciplinary-focused research endures primarily because of a strong set of incentives that reward them, including expectations in National Research Council rankings and publication in academic journals. There is also a tendency among those who make tenure or promotion decisions to value individual, rather than collaborative, achievement, and the publication of articles that will help position scholars as leaders in particular fields or disciplines, rather than in solving complex social problems.

Institutions are organized in ways that prohibit engaged scholarship. A disciplinary focus has led to institutions being structured in ways that inhibit engaged scholarship and teaching. Within these structures, fields are emphasized, faculty work in silos, students are encouraged to “declare their emphasis,” and classroom instruction predominates over community-based learning.

Research universities are often cut off from the communities in which they are located. Research universities are sometimes viewed as distinctly separate from the communities in which they are located and, in some cases, where poverty and other social problems are rampant. While engaged scholars see such issues as opportunities to work with communities to design studies that find solutions to these problems, they can face challenges from institutions who view “external” organizations or non-academics as inappropriate to include as part of scholarly research efforts.

Why Research Universities Should Incorporate an Ethos of Engaged Scholarship

There are several reasons that research universities should incorporate an ethos of engaged scholarship in their curricula, policies, and programs:

Research universities were founded and established with a civic mission. In 1749, Benjamin Franklin wrote that the “ability to serve” should be the rationale for all schooling and for the secular college he founded (Penn) — a mission to which other colonial colleges, including Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth adhered, based on their desire to educate men “capable of creating good communities built on religious denominational principles” (Harkavy, 2004, p. 6). Land-grant universities, established through the Morrill Act in 1862, also stipulated “service to society” as their primary mission, as did urban research universities that were founded in the late nineteenth century.

Interdisciplinary, collaborative, and community-based scholarship increasingly is becoming a requirement for consideration for funding, accreditation, and categorization. Growing numbers of major federal funding agencies are incorporating criteria for research proposals that include collaborative approaches and stipulate the public impact or future application of the study. Additionally, regional and national higher education accreditation organizations have begun to introduce new accreditation standards related to engaged research and teaching (Sandmann, 2003).

Students and other higher education stakeholders increasingly are asking for engaged scholarship curricula and opportunities. Increasingly, research universities that fail to incorporate civic engagement into their work “risk having younger people, who see this as a new pathway to achieving a learning society, go elsewhere” (Minkler, 2005, p. 12).

Demographic, cultural, economic, and knowledge shifts in American society, as well as globally, are demanding new approaches to research and problem-solving. Rapid and complex developments in technology, science, business, and other domains, both in the United States and globally, have prompted a need for research that incorporates the contributions of many disciplines, addresses public problems, and is sensitive to increasingly diverse populations and communities.

Engaged scholarship aligns traditional research methods with teaching to enhance student learning. Offering a combination of community-based research and service-learning courses can, together, provide extraordinary opportunities for students to obtain more meaningful experience with the inquiry process and to marry theory and practice. Through community-based research courses students gain understanding and expertise on social issues by engaging in cross-disciplinary inquiry and action, accessing community situations, asking significant questions, collecting data and information, analyzing the data using appropriate disciplinary methods, and drawing conclusions that are transformed into strategic action steps.

Research universities provide the bulk of graduate education and, thus, can serve as a major pipeline for tomorrow’s faculty and administrators skilled in engaged scholarship approaches.

Engaged scholarship helps research universities align their focus on high-quality research with the civic missions on which they were founded… Working with communities to help solve universal local problems — such as substandard schools, lack of affordable housing, poverty, crime, access to health care, and others — allows research universities unprecedented opportunities to create the kind of institutional alignment that is needed to fulfill their civic missions since the resources and expertise of virtually every university unit are needed to identify and implement more effective solutions to these problems (Harkavy, 2006).

…and, in turn, can enhance their credibility, usefulness, and role as important institutions in civic life. A focus on civic engagement through service-learning, community-based research, or engaged scholarship can help burnish the image of research universities that, in recent years, have suffered from decreases in public funding and questions about their role in society. By speaking publicly about engaged scholarship — and encouraging other institutions to implement similar approaches to research — research universities not only help to promote these models but also, send a message to the public that they are responsive to community needs and committed to contributing more meaningfully and directly to public problems and issues at the local, national, and international levels.

What Research Universities Can to Promote Engaged Scholarship

Scholar-practitioners also developed a set of action steps that leaders in research universities can take to advance and promote engaged scholarship. Among these are: engaging and involving the institution’s senior academic and administrative leadership in promoting engaged scholarship; ensuring that such approaches are valued in tenure and promotion decisions, grant awards, and public recognition; providing training to graduate students in these approaches and giving them opportunities to meld engaged scholarship with teaching and curricula; securing funding streams for this work; developing a set of standards for what constitutes high-quality engaged scholarship; creating journals dedicated to this approach; establishing national or regional institutes for faculty interested in civic engagement; encouraging disciplinary and other education associations to advocate for engaged scholarship; and others.

Endnotes

Boyer, E. (1990, re-released 1997). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Boyer, E. (1996). The scholarship of engagement. Journal of Public Service and Outreach, 1 (1), 11-20.

Finkelstein, M.A. (2001). Toward a unified view of scholarship: Eliminating tensions between traditional and engaged work. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 6, 35-44.

Harkavy, I. (2006). Foreword. In Creating a new kind of university: Institutionalizing community-university engagement (S.L. Percy, N. Zimpher & M.J. Brukhardt, eds.) (pp. viii-xvi), Boston: Anker.

Harkavy, I. (2004). Service-learning and the development of democratic universities, democratic schools, and democratic good societies in the 21st century. In New perspectives on service-learning: Research to advance the field (M. Welch & S. Billig, eds.) (pp. 3-22), Greenwich: Information Age Publishing.

Holland, B. (2005a). Scholarship and mission in the 21st century university: The role of engagement. Remarks made at a University of California Symposium sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education on June 10, 2005. Berkeley: University of California.

Minkler, M. (2005). Remarks made at a University of California Symposium sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education on June 10, 2005. Berkeley: University of California.

Ramaley, J. (2004). Higher education in the 21st century: Living in Pasteur’s Quadrant. Presentation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Network for Academic Renewal Conference, March 4, 2005 (Long Beach, California). Retrieved on June 18, 2006.

Sandmann, L. (2003). When doing good is not good enough. Good to great: The scholarship of engagement. Address to the National Extension Director/Administrator Conference, February 12, 2003 (Fort Lauderdale, Florida).

Schon, D. (1995). The new scholarship requires a new epistemology. Change (Nov./Dec.), 27-34.

Campus Compact’s celebration of its 20th anniversary provides an opportunity to envision ways to embed engagement across institutions. This ambitious charge will facilitate institutionalization of service-learning and other forms of civic engagement while enhancing students’ educational experience to prepare them to be good citizens as well as competent professionals in a career. I would like suggest that there is an important concomitant step. This time for celebration also affords us a chance to pause and reflect on the important role of individual faculty members in the process institutionalizing service-learning and civic engagement. Specifically, this is a time to explore why faculty members choose to take the path of service-learning. There have been comprehensive empirical studies to identify demographic factors that might predict faculty predisposition to teaching service-learning. One study by Meaghan Mundy (2004) identified a single factor — faculty’s positive perception of service-learning. So, what constitutes these “positive perceptions”? The scientific exploration of faculty motivation is extremely important and merits continuation. At the same time, the Campus Compact celebration also affords an opportunity to reflect with a less empirical lens at a deeper, personal level.

I had the opportunity and pleasure of facilitating this type of a personal reflection process with about 90 faculty members from various institutions of higher education during a retreat hosted by Utah Campus Compact under towering red cliffs along the banks of the Colorado River near Moab, Utah in February of this year. In this inspiring setting, all of us were able to ponder our own inner geography of what guides us down the path of service-learning and civic engagement. We did this by simply asking a series of questions and allocating snippets of time to respond in writing. The process consisted of ping-ponging between posing the questions with brief moments of silence for written reflection and followed by small and large group dialogue for about 90 minutes. What emerged was profound, deep, and personal by diverging from traditional academic modus operandi when considering our scholarly work.

Coincidently, some of the motivations of faculty that emerged were similar to what Ann Colby and her colleagues (2003) identified as factors that motivate students for becoming civically engaged in their book, Educating Citizens. These include political, moral, identity of self, and spiritual factors. Through the course of reflection and dialogue, it became apparent that most of these factors were intertwined. Many participants in the discussion were unable to separate their political and moral reasons for teaching service-learning from their professional and personal sense of self. To an extent, teaching service-learning became a political act as it facilitated student awareness and action. Similarly, faculty discovered they felt compelled to use their knowledge and expertise to help make a difference. Hence the moral dimension of their work, without necessarily imposing any particular “morality” on students. In other words, their commitment to facilitating student awareness and action toward important social issues through service-learning reflects who they are — not merely what they do.

Initially, faculty discovered and shared they viewed service-learning as an effective pedagogy. This seems a logical starting point for academicians as they would naturally be drawn to this dimension of service-learning. They recognized its value for applied learning in authentic settings to address real issues in the real world. They saw service-learning as a “good way to teach and learn.” Over time and through experience, instructors became gratified to see immediate results and impact of their students’ work beyond test scores and grades. Faculty seemed to vicariously derive satisfaction for “making a difference” through their students and with community partners. This “difference” was a diversion from traditional academic products of things that “matter” such as publications, presentations, and high ratings of course evaluations. Skeptics and critics within the academy tend to scoff at this and characterize it as service. It is not; for two reasons. First, the traditional notion of service within the academic trilogy is associated with governance (serving on committees such as the curriculum committee in a department) or as being a good citizen within one’s discipline (serving on an editorial review board). Second, the service is tied to instructional objectives rather than merely doing “good deeds.” Because of the focus on learning outcomes, it is, in fact, part of teaching and is often integrated with research as well.

In essence, faculty began to recognize the same rewards that explain the current trend of students engaging in voluntary service as an alternative to conventional politics (e.g. voting) because they readily see they were making a difference through their efforts (Long, 2004; Rimmerman, 2005). Amazingly, faculty began to discern a sense of personal identity apart from professional identity of traditional faculty association with their discipline. Through exploration of connections and relationships, faculty suddenly discovered their own sense of self, and interest in others and society coupled with intellectual and epistemological activity. As such, students and faculty are co-creating new knowledge as wall as addressing critical social issues.

Curiously, all of these factors reflect what might be characterized as a spiritual dimension of learning — not to be confused with religion — which are related but not synonymous. English (2000) characterized 3 dimensions of spirituality in adult learning: 1) strong sense of self, 2) care, concern, and outreach to others, 3) continuous construction of meaning and knowledge. While these could be associated with religion, they certainly can be extended to secular contexts as well, particularly the last dimension within academic settings and even service-learning. A strong sense of self evolves by learning from and with others, which service-learning certain affords. This creates relationships that provide an opportunity to learn about alternative views and ways of being, which in turn, provides insights about our sense of self. Care, concern and outreach to others are important dimensions as learners acknowledge a world outside one’s self. This represents transcending “self” to be a part of others. This facilitates faculty and students’ role to be civically engaged as global citizens and to discover their place and role in the world. Continuous construction of meaning and knowledge is the discovery that life is greater than our self and that we are bound and related to others.

Retreat participants also spoke of community of colleagues this work evokes. There are very few other contexts (other than computer technology perhaps) in which professors from Architecture, Engineering, English, Family Consumer Studies, Health Sciences, Political Science, Philosophy, and Social Work can find a common interest, language, purpose, and commitment. As one colleague articulated, “I am drawn to the people who do this work. They bring out the best in me. Interacting with and learning from each other helps me become a better person as well as a better academician.” This act of coming together suggested serving a social and even a psychological support network for faculty. Participants consistently indicated how much it meant to them to find a colleague who shared their interest and passion. Comments like, “It’s nice to know I’m not the only one out there,” were common. Perhaps this discovery and affirmation of sense of self (professional and personally) is one of the most profound revelations of our collective reflection as we move beyond our disciplinary silos of isolation.

Extending beyond the inner landscape to the external world, this work brings the emergence of civic engagement within the revised Carnegie classification system. Likewise, there are more and more professional associations and accreditation bodies that “look” for service-learning. Both of these trends provide pragmatic validation whereby faculty can now say to colleagues, administrators, and to themselves, “See, this work does matter.” Similarly, discussions included how to articulate what it means to be a “civically engaged scholar” and how those scholarly efforts meet departmental criteria in the personal statement of the faculty member’s review portfolio. Again, this type of dialogue truly reflects an exploration of self and purpose. One participant described how he used the 6 standards of civically engaged scholarship compiled and articulated by Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (1997) in his personal statement and then offered copies as a model to his colleagues. My hunch is that some of these external and pragmatic factors coupled with community-based research within service-learning will begin get the attention of more faculty and administrators.

It’s also important to note what themes did not emerge. Curiously, retention and promotion issues did not play a prominent factor. While non-tenured faculty were certainly sensitive to the political and professional ramifications of their review, it became clear that their motivation for doing this work was not entirely driven by this factor. In fact, many participants in this dialogue admitted they had been counseled by peers, department chairs, and deans to avoid the risk of this “seductive activity” (an actual term used) until they had earned tenure. Yet, faculty members choose to engage in this work for other reasons beyond personal and professional advancement. In a nut shell, faculty didn’t choose this path because they thought it would help earn promotion and tenure — they did it for some of the reasons articulated above. They also recognized taking this path had the potential of facilitating promotion and tenure as long as other scholarly expectations were also being met.

Likewise, strategic and institutional power did not seem to play into personal decisions. Faculty at this retreat did not see that engaging in service-learning or civic engagement would necessarily garner prestige for the department or institution, let alone themselves. This doesn’t mean that other faculty not attending the retreat or administrators dealing with pragmatic issues don’t view service-learning in this way. For example, when academicians do see prestigious institutions practice and embrace service-learning and civic engagement, it tends to legitimize the practice. In fact, despite of its apparent flaws, the US News and World Report listing of institutions with exemplary service-learning programs garners considerable weight. When administrators and faculty are informed that their institution was included in the list, there is the inevitable and predictable follow-up question, “What other schools were included?” When prestigious institutions are named, eyebrows go up in surprise typically followed by a smile. As a result, service-learning is not seen as “fluff” once academicians understand what service-learning is and what it is not. From personal experience at my own institution, it is often useful to begin the dialogue with the latter as faculty and administrators assume they know what service-learning is.

Beyond basic enlightenment, the discussion must also include a deeper exploration of how service-learning can facilitate the role of higher education in promoting civic engagement. Therefore, an important strategy is to promote the reading and discussion of important documents such as the Presidents’ Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education published by Campus Compact and the newly published white paper entitled, Research Universities: A Needed Voice in the Effort to Return Higher Education to its Civic Mission, which is the product of a gathering of scholars from research institutions to see what other institutions are doing.

Faculty members at this retreat in the desert began to see that they were not merely scholars creating and disseminating knowledge. Instead, participants discovered they also have a responsibility to others in the local and global community. This discovery is in keeping with theoretical tenets of civic engagement articulated by educators such as John Dewey and Ernest Boyer. Service-learning enables us to remove ourselves from the confines of an abstract and theoretical world to become meaningfully engaged within the real world. Service-learning balances and combines an empirically-based pedagogy with something intangible and deeply personal. Perhaps more importantly, service-learning also allows us to become engaged with our own sense of self. This is the inner geography that often goes unexplored or uncharted. Service-learning promotes a deeper educational experience that helps students and faculty members discover who they are which, at the same time transcends their own needs to meeting the needs of others.

So, where do we go from here? Naturally we want to continue to explore the complex array of administrative, systemic, and cultural factors within academia that promote and impede service-learning and civic engagement if we hope to embed this within institutions of higher education. We need to continue to explore service-learning as a pedagogy. We need to examine how the act of service can be an effective teaching and learning tool. In particular, we can begin to consider how faculty can incorporate various perspectives such as politics, culture, health, economic, and the environment through the reflection process to broaden students’ understanding of their experience. Tapping into instructors’ personal interests and reaching out to colleagues and experts in the community from related disciplines in these domains can enhance the pedagogy. This has already been done through team teaching in one class at my own institution whereby faculty from economics, communications, environmental studies, and political science interacted with chemical engineering students in a service-learning course with high school science students to create solar-powered hydrogen cells. This approach went beyond the mere mechanics of assembling a power cell to consider the broader implications of their work.

Similarly, we should provide technical support to faculty who engage in this work through workshops on what service-learning is (and isn’t) and how to effectively incorporate it into their teaching. Simple education through brown-bag workshops for faculty and one-on-one discussions with department chairs can be effective mechanisms. These discussions should include concise “primers” of service-learning addressing definitions, theoretical foundations, and myths.

And obviously we want to conduct research to develop the field. Specifically, we need to encourage faculty to consider ways of conducting research ON service-learning as a way of integrating their research and teaching. The Michigan Journal of Community Service-learning and the annual conferences on the Advancement of Research in Service-learning and its accompanying volume series have made important strides in this arena. Conferences and publications are important. But in addition to these political, pragmatic, and scholarly strategies, I would suggest we also make and take time to go deeper. I believe we must continue this reflection process through dialogue and conversations — internally and with colleagues. It has already begun at a national with the creation of a group known as the Higher Education Network for Civic Engagement (HENCE). This group is in the early phases of dialogue and exchange of ideas to help promote the civic role of the academy. Equally important are small, informal conversations at each of our campuses as most of us do not have the luxury of escaping to the serene confines of the desert.

How and why do I believe this to be an important next step? Because participants at this gathering consistently shared in the dialogue and in post-session evaluation surveys that this exploration of the inner geography was both profound and rejuvenating. They confessed they rarely have the time or opportunity to engage in this type of reflection. It was they who proposed we must continue to make time for conversations (not just meetings or conference presentations) and for reflection (not merely research). This reflective essay merely conveys their hope and suggestion. Therefore, it seems we must continue to ask some of the same questions that were posed in the desert of Utah — specifically asking at least one critical question: “What would it mean if we didn’t do this work?” The answers have implications for our selves, students, institutions, disciplinary fields, society, and the global community. So above and beyond workshops, conferences, and journal articles, we need to gather for conversations. We can do this by sponsoring informal “brown bag” lunches or book clubs at our own institutions. Threaded on-line discussions could provide a “virtual community” of scholarly dialogue. The group of faculty from the University of Utah who attended the retreat in the desert has continued to meet informally with participants taking turns hosting the group at their homes. We might also consider allocating time at regional and state Campus Compact conferences to include affinity groups as well as traditional presentations and workshops that focus on important technical information. As mentioned above, the initial effort through the creation of HENCE is a good start for networking and dialogue. Another important dimension is to begin this conversation at the doctoral level. We need to begin to instill this form of scholarship and the ethos of civic engagement with the future professoriate (Billig & Welch, 2004). A service-learning center or a center for teaching and learning might sponsor doctoral seminars for credit or informal interest group discussions.

So, I would suggest we continue the exploration of our inner geography and these conversations into this next era of the Campus Compact and the next generation of the professoriate. It allows us all of us a chance to remind each other and ourselves of why we choose this path.

References

Billig, S. H., & Welch, M. (2004). Service-learning as civically engaged scholarship: Challenges and strategies in higher education and K-12 settings. In M.Welch & S.H. Billig (Eds.), New perspectives in service-learning: Research to advance the field (pp. 221-242). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Colby, A., Ehrlich, T., Beaumont, E., & Stephens, J. (2003). Educating citizens: Preparing America’s undergraduates for lives of moral and civic responsibility. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

English, L.M. (2000). Spiritual dimensions of informal learning. In L.M. English & M.A. Gillen (Eds.), Addressing spiritual dimensions of adult learning: What educators can do (pp. 29- 38). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Glassick, C.E., Huber, M.T., & Maeroff, G.I. (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Long, S.E. (2001). The wingspread statement on student civic engagement (2nd ed.). Providence, RI: Campus Compact.

Mundy, M. E. (2004). Faculty engagement in service-learning: Individual and organization factors at distinct institutional types. In M.Welch & S.H. Billig (Eds.) New perspectives in Service-learning: Research to advance the field. (pp. 169-194). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Rimmerman, C.A. (2005). The new citizenship: Unconventional politics, activism, and service. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

New communication tools are fundamentally altering the way our society reads the news, expresses creativity, socializes and shops. Just as with the development of every new technology, these same communication tools can be used for enhancing community understanding, citizenship and service-learning. If the campus is the microcosm that prepares students for citizenship in diverse and increasingly globalized democracy, campus leaders, including students and educators, should take the lead in utilizing these new communication tools for global learning and citizenship. This paper aims to examine these new tools and suggest how students and educators can use these tools to better prepare students for citizenship in a globalized world.

By every conceivable measurement, the era of ‘mass’ media is over. Major newspapers and network news, where professional journalists interpret the world for millions of readers and viewers, are quickly losing readers and viewers. In its place are the tools of what can be deemed ‘participatory’ media. Blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis and vlogs are all characterized by low barriers to access (you don’t need to pay to create or consume them), and the ability to unite people with various interests around the globe. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 57% of American teenagers create content for the internet- from text to pictures, music and video.’

Even technophobes have some understanding that new technologies are changing the way the world works. However, just because the medium of communication changes doesn’t mean society changes, right? Wrong. The immersion of ‘participatory’ media fundamentally alters the connection between how we understand the world (media consumption) and how we decide to take action in the world (citizen activity).

Here are two brief examples (one global, one local) to illustrate the pervasiveness of this phenomenon:

Afriblogosphere

One reason African countries have failed to develop is that their competent practitioner and intellectual elite have lacked networks and access to good ideas. Blogs about Africa have changed this. There are two type of blogs about Africa: practitioner blogs and cultural blogs. Practitioner blogs are written by concerned communities of professionals around the world who are serious about helping to solve Africa’s vast challenges. They exchange ideas and best practices, and engage in a debate about the biggest issues facing Africa. These ideas are often adopted with local twists to creatively solve public problems.

The Online Election

Never again will an American gubernatorial or national candidate ignore the extraordinary organizing and fundraising power of the Internet. This is exemplified in the commonly known story of Howard Dean. Dean’s campaign utilized a tool called Meetup.com, which allowed citizens to meet locally to support their candidate. By the end of the campaign, Dean had 189,040 Meetup supporters in 1,100 locations across America¹. The 2008 elections will no doubt see a massive increase in this phenomenon.

Many of the traditional tools of citizen organizing are becoming obsolete. How can the campus prepare students for global citizenship in a world whose civic infrastructure is so rapidly changing? The remainder of this essay will outline the three most prominent ways phenomenon that campus leaders (both students, educators and service learning professionals) can utilize to encourage global learning and citizenship. Most of the tools of this list are in very early stages of development, and it is up to collaboration amongst service learning advocates, educators and students to improve and enhance them.

It is important to note that we have purposefully not separated tools for the classroom and tools that can be used for extracurricular purposes. We have done this because we believe in campus/community collaboration, and have noted an increasing interest amongst students in merging what they do inside and outside of the classroom.

Increase Campus Engagement in Global Issues- Participatory Media

Since 9/11, students around the world have used technology to further deliberative democracy. Most universities now have videoconference labs and student groups have already begun to utilize them to host conversations. For example, Americans for Informed Democracy² can host a forum on America’s foreign policy towards Africa with participants in Indiana, California, Mali and Ghana. Also, online forums like Global Voices Online have been created to create a community of ‘bridge bloggers’, those who are talking about their country to a global audience. This helps balance global media coverage, which has long ignored nuanced issues in much of the developing world. Engaging in these conversations, both inside and outside of the classroom, will create a more informed global citizenry.

Increase Collaboration on Practitioner Projects- Open Source Production Model

The open source movement uses internet based tools to provide useful, free knowledge and tools through the collaboration of many people giving their time and expertise. We should recognize in this movement a powerful new form of service learning. The most prominent open source tool is Wikipedia, the biggest and most accessed encyclopedia in the world. Many fields use open source technology to improve practical, public knowledge. There is a wiki for best practices in international development, a free wiki tourism guide, as open source media, commercial and health products.

If research institutions should ‘develop knowledge for the improvement of communities and society’³ educators should make the classroom a place to begin that contribution by encouraging student contribution to open source tools.

Increase Student Preparation for Tackling Global Challenges- Classroom/(Global) Community Collaboration

Students feel a strong desire to contribute to solving international problems. However, neither the Paul Farmeresque life of the Peace Corps nor simply giving $20 to UNICEF appeals to them. Smart, skill oriented students need outlets to collaborate with their counterparts in the developing world to solve these problems. Universities, who can equip students with the practical skills to take on these challenges, are beginning to create programs that allow students to plug into solving global issues.

Programs that address these needs are emerging in vivid variety. Global Youth Partnership for Africa’s⁴ Student Global Ambassador program brings talented American students with specific interests to Uganda for a two-week program to engage and learn from talented young Ugandan social entrepreneurs. Then, the Americans return home and through technology continue to collaborate on various projects. Also, Northwestern University is developing a hybrid program fusing classroom knowledge, service learning and international volunteering. This program provides practitioner training, community awareness and fundraising skills for one semester and then provides placement in a skill-specific project in the developing world for a second semester.

Each of these three areas has exciting opportunities for growth, and surely each category could be a paper in itself. The goal of this overview is to provide a bird’s eye view of the potential of these new tools, and introduce service learning professionals, educators and students to new communication tools that will alter the way we contribute to public knowledge, engage in service learning and enhance deliberative democracy.

¹ The Empowerment Age: Why the Internet Matters. Situation Analysis by EchoDitto, Inc. A 2004 Year End Report back

² www.aidemocracy.org back

³ Campus Compact. Wingspread Declaration on the Civic Responsibilities of Research Universities back

⁴ Full Disclosure: Josh Goldstein is Associate Director and Jeremy Goldberg is Executive Director of GYPA. back

It is natural for those scholars and practitioners who are interested in the effectiveness of civic engagement programs in colleges to think about results in quantitative, “head count” terms. We talk about how many people vote, or participate in political parties, or join in community improvement campaigns. There is, I find, less attention to the quality of those engagements. I think this is unfortunate.

There are at least two reasons for this focus on quantitative measures. One is that quantity is much easier to define and measure than quality. It’s far easier to find out how many people attended a meeting than to assess the quality of the discussion that took place, or the quality of individual contributions to the discussion. It’s easier to find out how many of a college’s graduates lead civic organizations than to find out how good they are as leaders. This is a perfectly good reason to track these quantitative measures and indeed there is good reason why we should want to see numbers like these go up. High levels of democratic participation, whether in voting, in community affairs or in political activity are good for society and low levels of participation can put democracy in jeopardy. But of course the fact that quality matters, doesn’t mean it is all that matters.

I suspect there is a second reason for the focus on the “countable”, one of a very different kind. This is a sense that focusing on the quality of civic engagement is itself undemocratic and unacceptably elitist or judgmental. It’s easy to feel this discomfort: imagine a discussion not of whether somebody voted, but of “how well” they voted — or claiming that college graduates are not only more likely than others to vote, but that they actually vote “better”. John Stuart Mill in fact argued that persons with more education should get more votes than those with less — a proposition that to modern eyes appears (rightly) both self-serving and shockingly undemocratic.

Yet I think that if we limit our appraisal of civic engagement to head counts, we miss out on something important. After all, if college is, in important measure, about expanding students’ capacities for critical thinking, analytical reasoning and effective expression, we should be concerned that those qualities show up in the public lives of our students, and not only in their work lives and private leisure. And when we think about designing programs in colleges that aim to promote civic engagement, I think we want those programs to encourage the application of these developed capacities to problems and issues of civic life.

If these more qualitative dimensions of civic engagement are to be pursued purposefully by colleges, there are two big problems to address. First, we have to find ways to appraise the quality of civic engagement that are, so to speak, “content neutral” — that don’t simply define quality in terms of our own particular political values or prejudices. And second, we have to find constructive ways to “operationalize” these qualitative aspects — to actually measure how well colleges promote high quality civic engagement.

Neither of these problems is easily solved, and all I aim to do here is to get them squarely on the table and perhaps to offer some starting points in thinking about them.

Let me turn first to this issue I am calling “content neutrality” or “impartiality”, bracketing for now the question of whether we can observe or measure the qualities I am going to describe. Tempting as it may be, we can’t simply say that voting for the “wrong” candidate is ipso facto low-quality civic engagement. To begin to get a purchase on quality, we have to somehow get behind the bare act of voting (or of showing up at a political rally) to learn more about the basis for the act undertaken. I think we can identify three elements that contribute to the quality of a civic or political action or decision (of which the third is controversial). In shorthand, these are information, reasons, and empathetic imagination.

Information is easiest. What is the informational basis of the voter’s choice (or of the participant’s contribution at a community meeting)? What did she know about the candidates’ positions, past voting records, honesty? What was the informational basis of her intervention at the community meeting? Had she read the newspaper articles on the matters under discussion; were the claims she made in her remarks consistent with the known facts?

Yet facts alone are not enough. It’s possible to have a great deal of information and still reason poorly. No doubt it is a fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger could bench press more weight than his opponent in the California governor’s race. But it would be hard to conceive of an argument that would make that a reason to vote for him. And someone who voted for him for that reason would not exhibit a high quality of civic engagement. This is a trivial example, but there is plenty of evidence from campaign commercials that candidates (or their handlers) believe that people often base their voting decisions on poorly reasoned arguments. And, of course, when people join in community meetings or political discussions, the quality of their reasoning is more directly on display.

To be sure, judging the quality of a person’s reasons for his or her position is less of a black-and-white matter than judging knowledge of relevant facts (which admittedly is not itself entirely free of dispute). We are less likely to encounter pure logical fallacies in people’s political arguments than we are matters like overgeneralization, excessive weighting of particular pieces of evidence, reliance on claims that are poorly supported by evidence, and so on. Rather than simple mistakes, these are failures of judgment. Some might argue that we cannot fairly evaluate the quality of reasoning in cases where the evidence is not dispositive, but I don’t think that is right. Indeed, as Derek Bok argues in Our Underachieving Colleges, teaching students to arrive at reasonable conclusions in ambiguous cases is one of the most important things for colleges to do, and one at which they often fail badly.

It is more controversial to suggest that “empathetic imagination” is a proper standard for appraising the quality of civic engagement.¹ Suppose someone votes in favor of a public project that will benefit him and his friends modestly at the price of great harm to others in the town whom he doesn’t know peronsally or care about. His knowledge of the facts is impeccable and his instrumental reasoning from them is accurate. He is entirely willing to acknowledge that these other people will be hurt severely, and he will say that he just doesn’t care. Is it justifiable to claim that his civic engagement is flawed? Some might worry that such a judgment is no more than a prejudice displayed by “bleeding heart liberals” against their “hard-headed” conservative counterparts.

I don’t think that’s the case. The argument sketched above, “this is good for me and I don’t care about you,” is not one that could be persuasive to those harmed by the proposed project if made in a democratic forum. When making arguments in the public forum or when acting as a citizen (as in voting), one should seek to argue or act in ways that are reasonable from everyone’s point of view (or as Thomas Scanlon has put it, to act or reason in a way that no one who was motivated to find agreement could reasonably reject). To believe that the public sphere is simply one more arena in which to pursue one’s private interest is a fundamental misunderstanding and displays a low quality of civic engagement. That this is the case is indicated by the fact that people almost never publicly make arguments of this kind (“vote for this because it is good for me” — they will at least gesture in the direction of claiming that the harm to others is less, or the gain to them is greater, than might appear. Now the capacity to grasp how a proposed policy or electoral outcome will affect others requires is the capacity to “put oneself in another’s shoes”, a capacity that requires not only sound reasoning, but “empathetic imagination”. Valuing this quality in appraising civic engagement is not, I think, simply a political prejudice but a proper standard that is in the relevant sense impartial. Indeed thoughtful conservatives generally argue that policies that seem to neglect the interests of the disadvantaged really are in their long run interest (or at least serve social interests that outweigh the individual costs, when viewed impartially).

If these sketchy remarks make it at least plausible that we can define quality in civic engagement, and in some measure sort out its dimensions, what are the prospects for measuring it? Here I think my main point is that measurement should be understood in a much broader way than is commonly done. We often think of measurement as inherently numerical and, even more ambitiously, as being consistent with an interval scale like temperature, in which it is meaningful to compare the difference between a change from 0 to 10 degrees and one from 80 to 90 degrees. It’s important not to be a prisoner of such a narrow understanding of measurement and to recognize that one can meaningfully speak of measurement whenever items can be ranked in terms of “better” and “worse”. It is better to aim for measures of things we really care about than to confine ourselves to those items that can be measured with (an often specious) precision. As Amartya Sen observed in the context of the somewhat analogous problem of measuring the standard of living, “it is better to be vaguely right than to be precisely wrong”.

That said, are there realistic prospects for gauging the quality of civic engagement generally and, more specifically, for relating measures of quality to the character of educational experiences? It’s easiest to see the possibility of measurement for the first of the three categories I reviewed, information. There are, for example, surveys of the kinds of information people access regularly about newspaper reading and radio listening, for example. There have also been studies of civic knowledge, seeing what samples of citizens know about the legal structure, governmental institutions and such².

Good measures of the quality of political reasoning and especially of empathetic understanding are considerably harder to envision. It would be hard to get them from pencil and paper surveys or multiple choice questions, which can be useful in learning what information citizens know. The most plausible way to gather evidence about these dimensions of civic activity would be through extended interviews or possibly through observation of people participating in civic and political discussions. It is conceivable that such inquiry could be conducted on a scale that would shed some light on the distribution of quality of political reasoning in a broad sample of the American population, but it doesn’t seem very likely. It is much more plausible that an individual college or universities, or a group of colleges, could engage with groups of current students or alumni to learn something about how their college experiences influenced the ways they came to political judgments and to decisions about action. My arguments earlier in this paper suggest that it is possible to bring qualitative judgments to bear in appraisal of these judgments and decisions. Although there are many difficulties in relating such evidence to particular features of the college experience, but such projects may be worth considering.

There are some very important pitfalls to be aware of in judging the quality of citizens’ political reasoning. As Meira Levinson observed in a recent essay on deliberative democracy, judgments of the reasonableness of citizens’ political views and arguments must be sensitive to the fact that basic background assumptions and factual beliefs differ widely across groups in a racially and economically divided society like that of the United States. African Americans, for example, for whom the history of the Tuskegee experiments is much more salient than it is for White Americans, are likely to be much more inclined to attribute bad motives or conspiratorial intent to American medical practices than are Whites. Widely differing experiences create quite different starting points for members of different groups. This reality certainly complicates but does not, I think, preclude responsible assessment of the quality of civic engagement across members of different social groups.

I have tried to argue here that judgments about the quality of civic engagement can in principle be made in defensible ways and to suggest that such judgments could and should play a role in the evaluation of college’s efforts to promote civic engagement. In saying this, I don’t mean to downplay the worth of quantitative measures of civic engagement. I feel sure that more is better. I only want to argue that better is better too. As Barbara Holland said in responding to my proposal for this paper, “The ultimate measure of success is rewarding lives for individuals, and healthy communities composed of “engaged” and interactive residents.” We cannot achieve success, measured in this way, without attending to the quality of the engagement we foster.

¹ My comments here are influenced by Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity. back

² The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) has sponsored such studies. See for example the studies reported in CIRCLE’s newsletter (June 2006). back

Last week — it is early July as I write? — I found myself in one of the textile mills that once formed the economic heart of Lewiston, Maine. The mills began closing in the 1970s, but now, after two decades of abandonment, the long brick buildings are being reclaimed by businesses and non-profits. I was visiting Museum L-A, a grass-roots initiative dedicated to creating a museum of labor and industry in Lewiston-Auburn — for the purposes of both cultural preservation and downtown renewal. At Bates College, where I direct the Harward Center For Community Partnerships, we have collaborated with Museum L-A for two years on a series of oral history and archival research projects. The partnership holds a special pleasure for me as a cultural historian and American Studies scholar. Over the past six months, I have worked with a team of students to research and script a traveling exhibit on the world of Lewiston millworkers from the Depression to deindustrialization. It will serve, I hope, as, a kind of “rough cut” for the larger story the permanent Museum will tell.

Today I am here to see Rachel Desgrosseilliers , Executive Director of Museum L-A; we meet amidst the photographs, union records, company newsletters, looms, and letters that she and others have carefully saved from the dumpster. The museum is open two mornings a week, but it is still more an attic than an exhibition-space, containing the raw material for a local museum with more than local meaning. Rachel has shown me the latest treasure, a manilla envelope of memorabilia given by Roland Gosselin, an elderly veteran of Bates Mill. There are family photos of parents and grandparents (all three generations worked in the mills) and of M. Gosselin in uniform during World War II; there are snapshots of the St. Jean-Baptiste Day parade floats he was famous in Lewiston for designing. Then I take a little breath with the kind of geeky thrill that only the adventures of research can bring. I have pulled out an invitation to a formal banquet from 1966. On the back is written, “Best wishes, Maurice Chevalier.”

When my academic career turned toward civic engagement in the late 1990s, Campus Compact had been leading the movement for more than a decade. Over those twenty years, I would argue, three of its accomplishments (by no means, its only ones) have been especially consequential for our movement. First, Compact mobilized a broad, visible, national coalition of academic leaders to renew the commitment of American higher education to the goals and skills of democratic citizenship. Second, Compact created an infrastructure of offices, staff, and programs that enabled colleges and universities to turn that commitment into practice?most of all, the practice of undergraduate service-learning. And finally Compact nurtured a stunning spread of service-learning pedagogy and course development among the faculty grass-roots. If this were a PowerPoint presentation, I’d distill these accomplishments in three numerical bullet-points: 975 (member presidents), 31 (state affiliates), and 22,000 (estimated faculty who currently integrate community work into their teaching).

Of course success has exposed new issues and catalyzed new debates about the next twenty years. Barbara Holland and Elizabeth Hollander rightly argue that the embedding of civic engagement more deeply across academic institutions remains one of our key unfinished tasks. We are well into a period of reflection and experimentation, it seems to me, about the values, programs, and practices that such embedding would entail. Recent Compact initiatives explore problem-based learning and departmental engagement as models that move beyond the atomized courses and student placements of early service-learning. John Saltmarsh and Harry Boyte, among others, seek to reframe academic engagement from a discourse of community service to one of civic learning and citizen action. Other voices (I count myself among them) have urged a parallel reframing of the core practices of the movement from course- and semester-based service-learning to longer-term, more sustained and integrative partnerships. Such multi-year “collaboratories,” as we call them at Bates, would be co-created by academic and community partners and grounded in the assumption that each collaborator brings resources, needs, plans, and critical reflection to the project. Their criteria of success would include not only public benefit “out there,” but also educational innovation “in here”: new courses (including those taught and team-taught by community practitioners), new curricular clusters and pathways, new interdisciplinary formations, new research questions, new scholarly projects informed by, and in turn informing, the public work.

It is this last issue that I want to underscore. If we are to embed engagement more deeply across academic institutions over the next twenty years, surely one core goal must be to take seriously, more seriously than we have, the intellectual and scholarly generativity of public work. Neither the mainstream professoriat nor even engaged faculty, I would argue, have truly committed ourselves to the academic (not only pedagogical) value of civic engagement. We have practiced community collaboration as a transformative medium of student learning much more intently than we have pursued it as a transformative medium of scholarly and artistic production. We dispatch our students to places like Museum L-A, where they do extraordinary work with and for our community partners. Yet too often we do not go ourselves, not with our own vocation of knowledge-making and meaning-making in mind. And so we do not bring to our public work our particular gifts as scholars and artists: intellectual curiosity, analytical subtlety, research craft, doggedness, passion, and playfulness.

This is one reason, it seems to me, that civic engagement remains marginal to faculty cultures (both institutional and disciplinary) and model pathways of academic careers. Until we trust (and demonstrate) the intellectual value of civic engagement, we will unwittingly collude in that marginalization; and we will hobble our efforts to embed the institutional changes that Holland and Hollander advocate. What’s more, we will shortchange our partners, depriving them of the full measure of our attention. And by missing the opportunity to include them in our community of inquiry, we deprive ourselves of the questions and discoveries that they catalyze — deprive ourselves of the encounter with Maurice Chevalier. It is because of Bates’ partnership with Museum L-A, after all, that I was able to open M. Gosselin’s envelope; it is because of my academic vocation that I can help make sense of what was inside.

How is it that Roland Gosselin came to have a card signed by the famed cabaret singer Maurice Chevalier? Even before pulling it out, I knew part of the answer; several interviewees had boasted about Chevalier’s appearance at the centennial banquet of Bates Mill. Yet the invitation itself, with its heavy stock, embossed script, and scrawled autograph, added layers of meaning to the fact of the visit; it made clear the cultural ambition of the Twin Cities’ Francophone community in its heyday and the pride with which its achievements are recalled today. As M. Gosselin knew in bringing it to the Museum, the card added gravitas, the aura of the real object, to our planned exhibition. George Washington slept here; Maurice Chevalier sang here.

Yet for me, the heft of the document involved more than just the authenticity with which it invested our story-telling. The card raised complex interpretive questions about the interaction between local community and mass culture, about the distinctively ethnic and regional ways in which people lived a supposedly homogenizing modernity. Was Chevalier’s appearance in Lewiston part of a Francophone geography that linked Quebec, Franco-America, France, and other places in a common cultural archipelago? Did it point to the penetration of mass culture into Maine milltowns, or conversely to the distinctive agency of “provincial” places within the landscape of celebrity and entertainment? (It was about just the same time that Muhammed Ali defended his world heavyweight title in Lewiston.) Were Franco-Mainers paying homage to Chevalier, to the influence of Hollywood, Paris, and Manhattan? Or was the singer paying his dues to the local worlds within which he had to seek a following?

These are an academic’s questions, far from the concerns of Roland Gosselin and Rachel Desgrosseilliers. They are provoked by my peculiar position on the borderlands, so to speak, between my community partners and my scholarly colleagues. The civic engagement movement needs to inhabit those borderlands not only for teaching and public problem-solving, but also (or rather consequently) for scholarly work. If the story of M. Gosselin’s card shows us anything, it is that community collaboration provokes academics to see new connections, ask new questions, hear critiques of old paradigms. In making our partners part of our community of inquiry, we can return the favor, giving back new contexts and understandings. The researcher’s lens can be diminishing and reductionist, we know. Yet if framed by an ethics of collaboration, it can also be illuminating, empowering, and bracing. In the particular case of M. Gosselin’s card, it seems to me, a cultural historian can challenge a received picture of Lewiston and the Franco-Maine experience as local, provincial, insular, and defensive — a picture shared by both its critics and its partisans. Chevalier’s autograph suggests a different reality: a complex weaving of local and global, ethnic and cosmopolitan. A Francophone mill community celebrated its resilience in the global economy with a long-lived French star, mobilizing his urbanity for its own local purposes.

As this story suggests, pursuing engaged scholarship does not mean focusing primarily on what Ernest Boyer called “the scholarship of engagement.” To be sure, rigorous research into the process, methods, and outcomes of community engagement is essential to our work, and venues like the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning have been invaluable in catalyzing and disseminating it. Over the next twenty years, we will need more such sites: other journals, regular convenings, forums for theory and debate. And yet I would argue that the full promise of public scholarship will come not with the maturing of a professional apparatus dedicated to community-based teaching and research (as useful as that will be). It will come when we have disseminated a commitment to the intellectual generativity of civic engagement across the whole domain of Boyer’s “scholarship of inquiry,” making knowledge about the world in new ways by making it for and with public collaborators.

I hope it is clear that what I am not advocating is the academicization of the civic engagement movement, a coup d’etat by the research professoriat. Nor am I calling for a model of the public dissemination or translation of scholarship, for the dispensing of academic wisdom or critique out (or down) to the lay public in bite-sized morsels. To the contrary: if we are to heed Holland and Hollander’s call to deeply embed engagement in faculty careers and scholarly practices, it will mean institutionalizing new kinds of careers and practices. We will want to evolve not only new and rigorous models of tenure and promotion, but also a host of smaller-scale practices that lie under the rock of the tenure question: new habits by which research projects are intuited, conceptualized, undertaken, and ended, new opportunities to fund community-based research and train students to take part in it. We will want to create times and spaces for reflective conversation with community interlocutors about the intellectual implications of our partnerships. We will want to experiment with new genres of writing and new practices of assessment and critique. We will want to revisit the ethics of research, amending policies — for instance, those on intellectual property and human subjects — that presume the autonomy of the research scholar and the passivity of the research subject. (“Roland Gosselin” and “Rachel Desgrosseilliers” are not pseudonyms but the names of actual partners and peers, whose story I tell with their permission.)

Indeed the risk of embracing the intellectual importance of civic engagement is not that it will challenge academic practice too little, but it may seem too much. It asks faculty to reconceive the social compact that governs our labor and our access to resources, making public engagement not a goal of every scholar’s work but a legitimizing commitment of our institutions. And so it is important to remember, as we undertake the long march that Holland and Hollander advocate, that engaged scholarship will be a joy as well as a responsibility, calling on us to be playful, exploratory, curious, and rigorous. Anyone who has taught a service-learning class knows the exhilaration that our students express when “get out of the bubble,” as the saying goes, activating their liberal learning in the practice of public life. We too will be energized by closing the circuit between our intellectual vocation and our civic life.

A few days after my meeting at Museum L-A, I drive to Canton, Maine, a town some twenty miles north of Lewiston, at the invitation of Sue Gammon, the leader of a local citizens’ committee. Canton has suffered from job losses and repeated floods in the past decade. It received federal and state funding to relocate dozens of families from the flood plain of Whitney Brook to the town’s upland hills; at the same time, it seeks ways of reversing the area’s economic decline by redeveloping the flood plain as an environmental and educational resource. Sue wants to know how Bates College might help. “Maybe we can create a recreational corridor or an environmental education center,” she tells me on a drive through town. “What do you think?” I do not know and tell her so, but I start making a list of colleagues — an environmental economist, an archaeologist, a hydrologist — to contact.

Educating students about the ideas and methods of public engagement has largely focused on undergraduates. With progress on that front well underway, we propose that the ambitions of the public engagement movement should be extended to graduate students. This is a challenging prospect, because most graduate students — with the strong encouragement of their faculty advisors — concentrate on their disciplinary studies and research. However, there are many reasons to turn in this direction. Graduate students have said that the want to know more about the public aspects of their disciplines. In some fields, and along some lines of inquiry, research requires collaboration with community partners. Experience with community partnerships can widen the range of employment options outside academia or in non-Research 1 universities. Finally, public support for research universities may be enhanced when faculty and students attend to the public implications of their scholarship.

In select disciplines and interdisciplinary programs, attention to the ideas and methods of public engagement may become integrated into the curriculum. In order to incorporate public engagement training into the broader fabric of graduate education — without unduly adding to the time requirements for progress toward a degree — we propose that public engagement become part of the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) or research ethics training that our institutions routinely provide to graduate students. Most RCR training presumes disengagement from research subjects, leaving a void for those seeking to define standards of ethical conduct between university-based researchers and community partners. A focus on the practice of engaged research, particularly its ethical aspects, would substantially enrich RCR training, making it less legalistic and more connected to broader societal concerns. Ethical aspects of publicly engaged research include IRB issues; formulating, reviewing, and publishing research in ways meaningful to community partners; addressing the imbalances of power that usually attend university-community partnerships; compensating partners for their time and effort; and attending to the potential uses and consequences of new knowledge.

In order to encourage the integration of public engagement issues into research ethics, it will be important to develop and disseminate suitable pedagogical material throughout graduate education, a project in its own right. This requires sensitivity to the diverse intellectual and professional settings in which engaged research is practiced, developing case studies responsive to specific disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, and formulating institutional strategies for connecting offices of research, graduate education, and community engagement with graduate programs in the interest of preparing students to employ best practices in engaged research and the scholarship that stems from it.

Because science and technology (and the mathematics that undergird them) so permeate modern society, it is not hard to generate STEM examples worthy of discussion. There are some obvious examples of how science and society have interacted in very public ways, such as the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb, and the Asilomar Conference that led to a self-imposed moratorium on recombinant DNA research until the dangers could be better assessed. From earlier days one has the attempts to reliably determine longitude (engagingly recounted in Dava Sobel’s book of that name) so as to make the oceans safe for trading voyages, and Michael Faraday’s work on electricity and magnetism. (There are two versions of what occurred when Prime Minister Gladstone visited Faraday’s lab and asked what use his research might be. In one version, Faraday is reported to have replied “What use is a baby?” In the other version, “Someday you’ll be able to tax it.”)

These are major developments that have had profound influences on society. They provide rich material for discussion, but that we should probably focus more of our attention on examples of more immediate local significance, in which STEM graduate students might participate directly. These could include:

• Discussing patents and technology licensing by universities
• Developing internships and volunteering in science museums
• Arranging K-12 school visits to talk about science and engineering
• Mentoring younger college students from underrepresented groups
• Making contact with local industries through departmental seminars
• Developing engineering designs for people in need (e.g., water purification)
• Studying toxicology and environmental justice issues
• Developing nutritional awareness programs in poor communities
• Discussing legal and ethical issues in the biological and health sciences
• Discussing the economic and political ramifications of renewable energy sources

It’s important to consider these and similar examples in the light of the definition of engagement adopted by the CIC Committee on Engagement and the parallel NASULGC/CECEPS:

Engagement is the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.

CIC Committee on Engagement and the parallel NASULGC/CECEPS

Most science and engineering projects are motivated at least in part by public and private concerns (e.g., when research is sponsored by NIH or private industry), and there is usually little question that they hold the potential to enrich research, enhance curriculum, and address critical societal issues. It’s less clear — though a strong case can be made if we take the trouble to articulate the connections — that scientific research could contribute to the preparation of educated, engaged citizens; and that it strengthens democratic values and civic responsibility through its very practice (see Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values). And, of course, definitions of “the public good” are often contentious these days. But such contentions provide rich opportunities to discuss public engagement in the context of the STEM disciplines with our graduate students.

This list of potential engagement topics needs to be followed up with some reflections about the ethical issues that should be touched upon in teaching grad students about engaged research in the STEM disciplines. Especially important are issues that might arise in working with publics in some kind of partnership.

In the health sciences, ethical concerns about the protection of human subjects are paramount. Not only do regular Institutional Review Board (IRB) concerns have to be satisfied for university researchers, but if work is done in collaboration with a community organization, then those community members who are involved in the research should also have proper training in human subjects protection and data privacy issues. In addition, there’s active debate whether special IRBs, with more than the (usually token) complement of community members, should be appointed to oversee community-based work.

If graduate students take internships with companies, intellectual property (IP) rights are a particular concern. Presumably the IP developed during an internship belongs to the company, but care needs to be taken not to inadvertently transfer IP developed at the university. As debates over the use of indigenous ethno-botanical knowledge for the development of pharmaceutical products reminds us, the ethics of intellectual property are complex and nuanced. Graduate education should be more than an overview of intellectual property law; it must embrace deeper questions such as: Who owns knowledge? Who has the right to disseminate it? Benefit from it? And what are the ethical obligations of researchers who seek to acquire knowledge that fundamentally resides within communities, particularly communities that are disadvantaged in relationship to the universities or corporations that seek to capitalize upon it.

The most frequent ethical concerns in scientific research, in addition to human or animal subjects and intellectual property, are fraud, plagiarism, and authorial conflicts. These could become manifest in public partnerships, particularly with non-academic community partners who may not know all of the canons of data integrity, who may not appreciate the complexities of citing the work of others, and who may not realize the responsibilities accruing to authorship. (On the other hand, academic researchers may be dismissive of the valid claim of community partners to be coauthors.) Taking the trouble to teach about these concerns could be useful not only for the community partner but also for the academic partner who can learn a lot from the process of teaching.

Professor Naomi Scheman, of University of Minnesota?s Philosophy Department, has emphasized the question of community trust in research results: Why should university researchers be trusted when they’re researching things of particular importance and sensitivity to a community, and the community is not given the opportunity to learn about, question, and shape the research. These situations could easily arise in environmental toxicology projects, for example, where studies of local accumulations of toxins could raise concerns about viability of scarce housing stock, accusations of irresponsible parenting, etc. One can argue that in such situations, academic researchers have an ethical as well as a practical responsibility to involve community partners deeply in the conceptualization, execution, and analysis of the research. Tools for resolving conflicts that arise in the process of widespread consultation need to become an explicit part of the graduate curriculum.

Programs that use the professional expertise of students to help communities, such as civil engineering students working on a water purification project in a needy rural community, of course need to exercise all the responsibility and ethical standards of practicing professionals. Yet deeper issues remain largely unexamined in most project-based community work stemming from universities, particularly with regard to the long-term obligations of university-community partnerships and effective strategies for mitigating inequitable power relations between partners.

These concerns about the ethics of engaged research are not limited to scientific, technical, and professional fields. In recent years, oral historians have led the charge against subjecting their research to review by Institutional Research Boards, distinguishing its purposes from standard protocols in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. This campaign led to the exemption of oral history from official IRB oversight, yet significant ethical issues remain for those who collect life histories, including issues of copyright, potential harm to interviewees stemming from the dissemination of research findings, access to information, and other matters. Professional societies, such as the Oral History Association, have formulated ethical guidelines for the practice of oral history research but these remain outside the curriculum of most graduate programs in history, unless they explicitly focus on its public dimensions. Training in the ethics of engaged research is needed to ensure that graduate students and future faculty cultivate the professional judgment needed to successfully navigate these issues.