Higher Education Community-Engaged Scholarship (CES)
Academic Explanation of CES:
Fundamentally, engaged scholarship is committed to transforming higher education by realizing a shift from positivist epistemologies that privilege “expert-driven, hierarchical knowledge generation and dissemination” (Saltmarsh & Hartley, 2011, p. 16) to those of constructivist epistemologies that privilege subjective, contextual co-creation of knowledge within partnerships that are crafted between campuses and communities. Schon (1995) states, “if [engaged] scholarship is to mean anything, it must imply a kind of action research with norms of its own, which will conflict with the norms of technical rationality–the prevailing epistemology built into the research universities” (p. 26). He describes the enactment of engaged scholarship as an epistemological battle between practices based in constructive reflection and those based in technical rationality (p. 35).
Building on Dewey’s pragmatism (Saltmarsh, 2008; Zlotkowski, 2011), the scholarship of engagement has broadened as a pedagogy that informs the core missions of teaching, research and service in higher education. “The new philosophy emphasizes a shift away from an expert model of delivering university knowledge to the public and toward a more collaborative model in which community partners play a significant role in creating and sharing knowledge to the mutual benefit of institutions and society” (Weerts & Sandmann, 2008, p. 74). Saltmarsh (2010) identifies the radical nature of such a shift: “We seek to change our classrooms, but we also seek to change institutional structures and cultures that delegitimize new forms of knowledge creation and different ways of knowing” (p. 332).
How the Overton Institute is supporting CES:
The Board of Directors of the Overton Institute is comprised of educators. Our Chairperson is a retired distinguished K-12 literacy educator and administrator. Our Board members include:
· Two members who have created successful engaged-scholarship programs at research universities and who are now consulting in organizational development, and
· two of whom are experienced human service professionals in various capacities in community organizations and agencies.
We are interested in championing the principles and processes of CES with educators and community partners who are partnering to share “risks, responsibilities, resources, and rewards” (Himmelman, 2019) to address their mutual social justice concerns. We accomplish our CES objectives through workshops, training, and consultation with CES partners, based on the principles of Relational Communication, using Narrative Inquiry methodology.
References
Himmelman, A.T. (2019). Working together to build bridges from service to justice. Unpublished manuscript.
Saltmarsh, J. (2008). Why Dewey matters. The Good Society, 17(2), 63-68.
Saltmarsh, J. (2010). Changing pedagogies. In H. E. Fitzgerald, C. Burack, & S. D. Seifer (Eds.), Handbook of engaged scholarship: Contemporary landscapes, future directions, 1, (pp. 331-352). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.
Saltmarsh, J., & Hartley, M. (2011). Democratic engagement. In J. Saltmarsh, & M. Hartley (Eds.), “To serve a larger purpose”: Engagement for democracy and the transformation of higher education (pp. 14-26). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Schon, D. A. (1995). Knowing-in-action: The new scholarship requires a new epistemology. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 27(6), 26-34.
Weerts, D. J., & Sandmann, L. R. (2008). Building a two-way street: Challenges and opportunities for community engagement at research universities. The Review of Higher Education, 32(1), 73-106.
Zlotkowski, E. (2011). Civic engagement on the ropes? In J. Saltmarsh, & M. Hartley (Eds.), “To serve a larger purpose”: Engagement for democracy and the transformation of higher education (pp. 217-237). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.