Why an Engaged Scholarship Toolkit for Research Universities?
What Is Engaged Scholarship in a Research University Context?
Salient Values of Engaged Scholarship in a Research University Context
Invitation to Contribute to the Toolkit
Welcome to the Research University Engaged Scholarship Toolkit! Your visit to this website reflects your interest in engaged scholarship. We invite you to investigate the materials identified and join us as we build a movement to advance community-engaged scholarship (also called public scholarship or community-based research) at research universities in the United States and beyond.
We plan to continue to develop the Toolkit over the next months as new resources and feedback are brought to our attention. Thus, we seek your input. Please forward your suggestions for resources on engaged scholarship appropriate for research university faculty and administrators that should be included in the Toolkit to Timothy Stanton (tstanton {at} stanford(.)edu) and Jeffrey Howard (JHOWAR15 {at} depaul(.)edu) with the reference and rationale for including it.
This project grew out of the third annual gathering of research-intensive university representatives committed to advancing community engagement and community engaged scholarship in research universities. While the discussions at prior meetings of this group at Tufts University and UCLA included community engagement, e.g., involving students in service-learning, the third meeting at the University of North Carolina (February 2008) was devoted to community engaged scholarship. At that meeting, the group took the name, The Research University Community Engagement Network or TRUCEN.
Research universities are unique. They produce most of the latest and cited research, prepare the next generation of college and university faculty, have extensive library and research facilities, serve as models for other higher education institutions, and are often referred to as the envy of the higher education world.
While their strength is research, generally speaking these universities have lagged behind other higher education institutions such as land-grant universities in organizing and systematizing partnerships with communities to ameliorate social ills. Nevertheless, research universities are in an admirable position to advance community engaged scholarship; indeed this may be their contribution to the community engagement movement with the greatest potential. But to do community-engaged research well requires new understanding, practice, and epistemology that is qualitatively different than that prioritized in traditional scholarship. To gain recognition and reward for community engaged scholarship at research universities requires new ways of documenting and evaluating this work. This Toolkit contains resources that address these matters.
We have four purposes in developing this Toolkit:
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To add clarity to the meaning and conceptualization of community-engaged scholarship in a research university contextTo provide a rationale for why to do it and resources on how to do it well;To provide tools and assistance for faculty at research universities to document engaged scholarship for reward and promotion (i.e., how to get credit for it); andTo provide tools and assistance for enabling the assessment of engaged scholarship (i.e., for faculty reward and promotion).
This Toolkit has three audiences:
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Faculty looking to develop their knowledge, skills, and values related to engaged scholarship, as well as those curious about and considering pursuing engaged scholarship;Administrators looking to develop their knowledge and skills related to engaged scholarship and/or strengthen campus capacity to evaluate such work for reward, promotion, and tenure; andGraduate students looking to undertake professional pathways involving engaged scholarship.
What Is Engaged Scholarship in a Research University Context?
In 1990, Ernest Boyer, then President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, wrote Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. In this influential book, he suggested broadening the view of scholarship from just discovery of knowledge to also include integration of knowledge, application of knowledge, and teaching. In his 1996 article in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Public Service and Outreach (now the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement), he coined the term “scholarship of engagement” to represent work across the four scholarship models that would involve engagement with communities for the benefit of communities. For Boyer, scholarship of engagement applied to the scholarship of discovery, integration, application, and teaching.
In developing this Toolkit, we have taken a narrower view of engaged scholarship that is relevant to research universities in particular, which value knowledge production (discovery, integration, and application) and dissemination. In this research university-specific view, engaged scholarship refers to faculty projects satisfying three criteria: (1) involves a community, (2) benefits a community, and (3) advances the faculty member’s scholarship.
This narrower conceptualization fits with Boyer’s scholarships of discovery, integration, and application, but not with the scholarship of teaching, which may not address public or community issues and to involve or directly serve off-campus communities, and tends to be less valued in the faculty reward system in research universities. Similarly, while the larger engaged scholarship movement promotes community member review of faculty members’ engaged scholarship, the materials in this Toolkit do not yet include resources that address this aspect of community-university partnerships. We look forward to the day when there are research university examples and publications that analyze these community-sponsored contributions, which we can include. Therefore, the Toolkit’s materials are biased toward non-teaching scholarship (though many refer to teaching, too) and scholarship reviewed by faculty peers only.
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Engaged scholarship includes discovery, application, and integration, but not teaching;Engaged scholarship is carried out with and in the community, and not just on the community;Genuine partnerships draw on assets of all parties;There is (indigenous) knowledge in the community that can be tapped to advance knowledge; andOnly faculty peers are qualified to review engaged scholarship for faculty review and reward.
There are fourteen sections to the toolkit:
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What Is Engaged Scholarship?How Does Engaged Scholarship Compare with Traditional Scholarship?Why Do Engaged Scholarship?How To Do Engaged Scholarship WellExemplars of Engaged ScholarshipRationales for Giving Engaged Scholarship Standing in Review, Promotion and Tenure (RPT) ProcessesEvaluation Criteria for Assessing Engaged Scholarship in RPT ProcessesTenure and Promotion Portfolio ExemplarsDemonstrating Quality and Impacts of Engaged ScholarshipTenure and Promotion Portfolio ExemplarsOriginal EssaysJournals That Focus on Engaged ScholarshipNational Resources for Promoting and/or Carrying Out Community-Engaged Research in a Research University ContextAnnotated Bibliographies
Included in this toolkit are original essays written by leading scholars of engaged scholarship based mostly in research universities. These scholars were invited to address a topic of their own choosing related to this work in a research university context. These essays have been placed in the respective section most appropriate based on their content as well as in their own clustered section (section 12). Some resources are listed in multiple sections as appropriate.
Timothy K. Stanton is Director of the Overseas Studies Program in Cape Town, South Africa and Visiting Senior Fellow at the John Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities in the School of Education at Stanford University. Prior to joining the Gardner Center Stanton founded and directed the Scholarly Concentration in Community Health and Public Service at Stanford’s School of Medicine. He helped found and served as Associate Director and Director of Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service from 1985-1999. Stanton provides research and planning assistance to The Research Universities Civic Engagement Network (TRUCEN) as Engaged Scholar for Campus Compact. As Special Consultant for California Campus Compact he led a project focused on graduate studies and civic engagement.
Stanton has published numerous articles on service-learning and engaged scholarship, and a book, Service-Learning: A Movement’s Pioneers Reflect on its Origins, Practice, and Future. With Jon Wagner (UC Davis) he recently authored Educating for Democratic Citizenship: Renewing the Civic Mission of Graduate and Professional Education at Research Universities.
Jeffrey P. Howard is Assistant Director for Academic and Faculty Development at DePaul University’s Irwin W. Steans Center for Community-based Service Learning & Community Service Studies. Formerly he was Associate Director for Service-Learning at the University of Michigan’s Edward Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning, where he was responsible for faculty development, publications, communications, and the Center’s service-learning portfolio of academic and co-curricular service-learning initiatives. He has taught, conducted research, and published work on academic service-learning for 31 years.
Howard is the founder and editor of the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, a peer-reviewed journal that recently expanded its purview from academic service-learning to engaged scholarship, with a circulation of about 1,000, and co-editor of Academic Service-Learning: A Pedagogy of Action and Reflection, published by Jossey-Bass. He is a member of the National Review Board for the Scholarship of Engagement Project, the Board of Directors for Michigan Campus Compact, The Research University and Civic Engagement Network, and HENCE (Higher Education Network for Community Engagement). He wrote the Service-Learning Course Design Workbook, underwritten by a grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service, which he has used for faculty development workshop at more than 40 colleges and universities throughout the U.S. Most recently he was part of the writing/editing team for “New Times Demand New Scholarship,” a publication deriving from The Research Universities and Community Engagement Network that seeks to advance research universities’ role in higher education civic engagement. He is a past recipient of the Michigan Campus Compact Lifetime Achievement Award, and recently joined Campus Compact’s Consulting Corps.
While we are confident that the materials contained in this toolkit will further visitors’ thinking about engaged scholarship, we are less confident that we haven’t missed important resources. If in reviewing the materials in this toolkit you discover an important reference oversight, please contact Timothy Stanton (tstanton {at} stanford(.)edu) and Jeffrey Howard (JHOWAR15 {at} depaul(.)edu) with the reference and rationale for including it as a resource.
Stanton, T. & Howard, J. (2009). Research University Engaged Scholarship Toolkit. Boston: Campus Compact. http://www.compact.org/initiatives/civic-engagement-at-research-universities/trucen-overview/.
This project would not have been possible without the support of Campus Compact, which co-sponsored the gatherings of TRUCEN representatives and has underwritten this Toolkit. In particular, we acknowledge the extraordinary leadership and vision of Maureen Curley, president, and Julie Plaut, director of academic initiatives, at Campus Compact, without whose support this Toolkit would have remained a footnote in the last TRUCEN meeting’s minutes. We also appreciate the TRUCEN member representatives who have contributed to the thinking represented in this Toolkit and graciously agreed to review the content. We appreciate as well the contributions of others in this field, who generously agreed to have their work included. Finally, we are grateful to the authors of the original essays contained in this Toolkit, all of whom are engaged scholars par excellence on whose shoulders the rest of us stand.
