Community-University Engagement E-Book

Tami L. Moore

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B ASHE-ERIC Report Series (AEHE)
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 230

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

As the emphasis on economic development through community-university engagement intensifies, educators and policy makers must learn to think differently about the engagement process. This is particularly true when a narrowly defined group of leaders sets the engagement agenda, and those who are traditionally underrepresented continue to be marginalized in the conversations about their own futures. Emphasizing the importance of community as a context for engagement and building strong relationships over time, Moore calls on institutional leaders to intentionally facilitate broad participation by all members of a community in discussions about how and in what direction the community will develop. This is the second issue of the 40th volume of the Josse-Bass series ASHE Higher Education Report. Each monograph is the definitive analysis of a tough higher education issue, based on thorough research of pertinent literature and institutional experiences. Topics are identified by a national survey. Noted practitioners and scholars are then commissioned to write the reports, with experts providing criical reviews of each manuscript before publication.

Leseprobe

ASHE Higher Education Report: Volume 40, Number 2

Kelly Ward, Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, Series Editors

Community–University Engagement: A Process for Building Democratic Communities

Tami L. Moore

Community–University Engagement: A Process for Building Democratic CommunitiesTami L. Moore ASHE Higher Education Report: Volume 40, Number 2 Kelly Ward, Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, Series Editors

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Cover image by © Milalala/iStockphoto.

ISSN 1551-6970 electronic  ISSN 1554-6306  ISBN 978-1-118-91745-9

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Advisory Board

The ASHE Higher Education Report Series is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), which provides an editorial advisory board of ASHE members.

Ben Baez

Florida International University

Amy Bergerson

University of Utah

Edna Chun

University of North Carolina Greensboro

Susan K. Gardner

University of Maine

MaryBeth Gasman

University of Pennsylvania

Karri Holley

University of Alabama

Adrianna Kezar

University of Southern California

Kevin Kinser

SUNY – Albany

Dina Maramba

Binghamton University

Robert Palmer

Binghamton University

Barbara Tobolowsky

University of Texas at Arlington

Susan Twombly

University of Kansas

Marybeth Walpole

Rowan University

Rachelle Winkle-Wagner

University of Nebraska – Lincoln

CONTENTS

Executive Summary

Foreword

Overview

Reframing Engagement

The Emergence of a Field of Study

Using Theory to Advance Community–University Engagement

The Role of Place in Engagement

A Roadmap

Community as Place

Placemaking

Driving the Economy

Reconciling Competing Roles: The Anchor Institution Mission

Directions for Future Research: Institutional Change

Community as Classroom

Intended Outcomes of (a) Higher Education

Teaching and Learning for Civic Engagement

Community Experiences of Civic Engagement

Directions for Future Research: Institutional Purpose

Community as Research Context

(Community-) Engaged Faculty Work

The Impact of Engaged Faculty Work on Communities

Encouraging Engaged Scholarship

Directions for Future Research: Institutional Culture

Implications and Recommendations

Recommendations for Realizing the Civic Imperative of Higher Education

Moving Engagement From Outcome to Process

References

Recent Titles

Advert

Name Index

Subject Index

About the Author

About the ASHE Higher Education Report Series

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter

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Executive Summary

The interaction between universities and the communities they serve has been a topic of concern for scholars, university administrators, and community leaders since the founding of the earliest colleges in the American colonies during the 17th century. In the 1980s, attention returned to these interactions as communities across the United States experienced urban decay, economic decline, and a variety of related social problems. Thought leaders in higher education and beyond once again positioned colleges and universities as important partners to work with local leaders in addressing the various social, economic, and environmental issues facing communities. This interaction, termed engagement by Ernest Boyer (1996) of the Carnegie Foundation, became a very important goal in and of itself, as university leaders worked diligently to position their institutions as engaged in what was considered at the time the very important work of solving social problems and improving the economic well‐being of communities. Earning the engaged moniker marked an institution, its faculty, and its students as committed to partnering with local communities to address serious community issues.

University presidents and provosts still encourage students, faculty, and administrative professionals to engage with the community today. Students interact with community members through volunteer and community service projects as well as course‐based service in community‐based agencies providing real‐world experience with concepts presented through course materials, termed service‐learning by teachers and scholars. Faculty members, who have been among the primary actors in the engagement movement, use service‐learning in their teaching, and pursue community‐engaged research agendas. Administrative professionals represent their university in a wide variety of formal and informal initiatives aimed at advancing cultural and social well‐being, and economic development goals.

When university actors interact with communities through different kinds of activities, administrators, faculty, and students operate in ways that implicitly frame community as classroom, laboratory, or locale; each of these frames has material consequences for all members of the community in terms of their access to power and resources. Further, not all interactions between university actors and the surrounding community they inhabit are engaged. This is to say that the term engagement connotes specific approaches to relationship building and partnerships. The most widely accepted working definition of engagement emphasizes two values, mutuality and reciprocity. Many higher education institutions provide outreach programs and cultural festivals, such as those detailed in this monograph; these are university programs planned for and delivered to audiences external to the institution without much involvement of community members in determining the goals or approaches to the programming. Research conducted in communities is not necessarily designed or implemented with the input of community members. Community‐engaged research is distinguished from community‐based research in that the former includes direct involvement of community members in the design and implementation of the research beyond their typical role as participants in or observers of community‐based scholarship. Many students provide service to community organizations, such as participating in a Habitat for Humanity home build, without considering the connections between the service and the curriculum of their major field of study. In service‐learning, as the saying goes, everyone serves and everyone learns. Community organizations can be partners in the service, and important teachers in the college students’ learning process, although they are also sometimes passive recipients of service. Community organizations passively receiving services from students is a characteristic of service, but not of engagement. In contrast, engaged relationships are time and resource intensive to establish and maintain. The culture of community organizations is different than that of higher education institutions. These and other elements challenge university actors’ good intentions, making long‐term relationships uncommon in community–university engagement in recent decades, and creating tensions between achieving university goals and living an engagement ethos as a member of the regional community.

To address these issues, higher education actors—administrators, faculty, and students—need to reunderstand the process by which engagement occurs. Each of these constituents must also reconsider the role of communities in community–university engagement. By rethinking these key points, the university actors reevaluate the importance of engaging with all members of the community rather than primarily the well educated and wealthy, and as a result, prioritize a shared vision for community development reflecting the needs and hopes of all residents. Fear, Rosaen, Bawden, and Foster‐Fishman (2006) call this new approach “coming to critical engagement” (p. xii). We might also use Saltmarsh and Hartley's (2011) term “democratic engagement” (p. 14) to identify the goal of such a reunderstanding of the values of democratic education: “inclusiveness, participation, task sharing and reciprocity in public problem solving, and an equality of respect for knowledge and experience that everyone involved contributes to education and community building” (p. 17).

Making the shift from instrumental engagement—engaging for the sake of being engaged—to critical, or democratic, engagement is imperative because prioritizing the university's goals continues to marginalize those who are already traditionally underrepresented in conversations about community. One way to move toward democratic engagement is to embrace an engagement ethos that intentionally facilitates broad participation from all demographic groups in discussions about how and in what direction the community should develop in the future, and the resulting initiatives. Through this monograph, I aim to examine this history, call questions that must be answered to continue our commitment to engaging with communities, and finally offer recommendations for doing so.

Foreword

Increasingly, higher education is seen by many as serving a private good (i.e., the beneficiaries of college are those who enroll and graduate). This focus on the private gain of those who attend college has led many state legislatures to decrease public support for higher education and has been credited with the shift from scholarships to loans (the stated logic—if individuals benefit, then why shouldn't they pay?). The balance between whether higher education serves the public or the private good is certainly a topic open to a lot of debate and speculation. But, the two goals don't necessarily have to conflict. Higher education can serve as both a private good and a public good at the same time. Focusing on the role of higher education in contributing to the public good, one can clearly point to the historic and contemporary mission of most colleges and universities. Serving the public, whether that be the local community through town‐gown initiatives or the state or regional level or even community defined at the national or international level, is clearly part of the focus and intent of most not‐for‐profit institutions of higher education. While which community is served varies by institutional type, the idea of serving the public good has long been a goal and focus of many institutions of higher education. How best to meet this goal of serving the public and whether institutions of higher education are going about this in the “right” way is certainly a topic open for debate. Addressing these questions is the focus of this monograph, Community–University Engagement: A Process for Building Democratic Communities by Tami L. Moore.

This monograph clearly and succinctly helps the reader to understand how institutions of higher education can best serve the public good. Focusing primarily on the role of research universities, the monograph explores the means by which these institutions serve their communities. For example, sometimes the interaction is through community service projects, sometimes it is through curricular efforts (e.g., service-learning projects), and sometimes it is through research projects. The monograph focuses on the range of who participates in these activities, as some projects are undertaken by students, some by administrative staff, and some by faculty members. In this monograph, Moore explains the difference between working with a community and being truly engaged with the community. The latter is her focus. The monograph artfully articulates how important it is for institutions of higher education to go beyond merely connecting to their communities in order to really serve the public good. The best forms of community interaction, she argues, are reciprocal and call for the community itself to play an active role in the relationship beyond being just the recipient of “help.” The monograph explains that to call itself an engaged institution, colleges and universities must work with communities as partners rather than just seeing the community as passive recipients of service. The monograph does an excellent job of explaining the theoretical concepts of engagement and place and reciprocity to better explain to a variety of university constituents how best to be true to the democratic ideals of community engagement. Written for a variety of audiences—from administrators, to faculty members, to policy makers, to community leaders and community members—this monograph articulates a vision for how serving the community could and should look.

The monograph itself represents a solid blend of the prior research literature, pertinent theoretical perspectives as well as concrete examples of community engagement in action. Organized in the format of a traditional research project, the monograph frames a research problem, walks the reader through the relevant literature on various sub‐topics relevant to community engagement, and then concludes with suggestions for ways institutions and researchers can learn from this prior literature. The result is a monograph that blends research, theory, and practice into a coherent whole that helps a variety of audiences better understand how institutions of higher education can better fulfill their promise of serving the public good. This monograph is a must read for faculty members who wish to make their research and teaching more relevant to the public, for administrators who oversee community service and service-learning programs, and for community organizers who want to understand why institutions of higher education operate as they do.

Overview

This monograph examines the primary ways university faculty, students, and administrators have interacted with the residents and elected officials of geographic areas where they are located, and the effect of those interactions on the various participants. The interactions can be framed in three ways, emphasizing community and economic development, student learning, or faculty research objectives, respectively. By highlighting each of these goals/motivations, I am emphasizing the important role that social and geographically defined place plays in the interactions of universities and the communities they serve. Institution type matters in the study of higher education in general, because institutional mission and the conditions of operation vary, for example, among research universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. This monograph focuses on community interaction at four-year research institutions, and primarily those classified by the Carnegie Foundation as doctorate-granting universities. The discussion targets administrators who work in colleges and universities, as well as their partners who are community leaders, elected officials, and staff members in municipal and nongovernmental organizations. To a lesser extent, the monograph also addresses an audience of scholars and practitioners in higher education administration, cultural studies in education, cooperative extension, regional studies, urban and rural planning, K–20 education, community or rural sociology, and geography.

The organization of this monograph replicates, intentionally, the sections of a research proposal. In the first chapter, I frame a research problem, review the evolution of the related body of scholarship, and explain the role of place in community–university engagement as it informs the monograph. Three chapters review the literature related to interaction between community and university. In the second chapter, community is treated as neighborhood, a place where diverse groups of people live and work. The literature reviewed in the third chapter reflects an understanding of community as classroom, where university students connect the college curriculum with the lived experiences of community members. In the fourth chapter, I consider writings about faculty acting as scholars/researchers, working with members of communities conceptualized as laboratory or research context; this body of scholarship includes research findings, as well as discussions about how the engaged institution might evaluate/reward faculty doing engaged scholarship. The third and fourth chapters examine understandings of community as a setting for intellectual activities by faculty and their students. University administrators, faculty, and students are all actors in the region, partnering with others to change conditions within the community. Each of the literature review chapters concludes by highlighting an issue in need of further examination as one moves from thinking of engagement as an outcome in and of itself to understanding engagement as a process for interacting within communities to achieve democratic aims. The fifth chapter reviews the implications of continuing to operationalize community–university engagement as an outcome in and of itself, rather than a process by which university actors engage with community members to realize the civic imperative of higher education. The recommendations highlight possible changes in behavior/practice, as well as empirical research topics holding promise for advancing engagement as a process rather than simply an outcome.