Putting Democratic Engagement to Work on Campus: A conversation with John Saltmarsh, co-editor of To Serve a Larger Purpose: Engagement for Democracy and.

Putting Democratic Engagement to Work on Campus: A conversation with John

Saltmarsh, co-editor of To Serve a Larger Purpose: Engagement

for Democracy and the Transformation of Higher

Education (2011)American Democracy Project

2012

• Is the civic engagement movement changing higher education?

• Is higher education (as it exists) changing the civic engagement movement?

Questions catalyzing the Kettering Colloquium (2008):

• Why has the civic engagement movement in higher education stalled and what are the strategies needed to further advance institutional transformation aimed at generating democratic, community- based knowledge and action?

• Is the civic engagement as it is practiced on campuses changing higher education or is higher education changing the way that civic engagement is being practiced?

• What would need to happen for civic engagement as it is practiced in higher education to be more democratic?

Matthew Hartley, John Saltmarsh, and Patti Clayton (2010) Is the civic engagement movement changing higher education? British Journal of Educational Studies. Vol. 58, No. 4, Dec., 391 406.‐

British Journal of Educational Studies

To Serve a Larger Purpose:

Education for Democracy and the Transformation of Higher Education

Saltmarsh, J., Hartley, M. eds. (2011) Temple University Press

What do we mean by Democratic Engagement?

Democratic engagement is grounded in relationships that are based on the democratic values of task-sharing and lay-participation (collaboration, reciprocity, and co-creation between academics and non-academics) and is accomplished through facilitating the creation of a wider public culture of democracy.

Isn’t all engagement democratic?

Engagement “requires going beyond the expert model that often gets in the way of constructive university-community collaboration…calls on faculty to move beyond ‘outreach,’…asks scholars to go beyond ‘service,’ with its overtones of noblesse oblige. What it emphasizes is genuine collaboration: that the learning and teaching be multidirectional and the expertise shared. It represents a basic reconceptualization of…community-based work.”

O’Meara and Rice, Faculty Priorities Reconsidered (2005).

Why not just call it “civic engagement?”

“…presents the risk that the term can say everything and nothing at the same time. Additionally, the lack of a clear definition can leave some campuses and their leaders with the impression that they are ‘doing engagement,’ when in fact they are not.”

Stepping Up as Stewards of Place (2002)

Civic Engagement in Peer-Reviewer Articles

“Civic engagement is ready for the dustbin…like other buzzwords, civic engagement means so many things to so many people that it clarifies almost nothing.” Ben Berger (2009)

Why does it matter that we frame our work around democratic engagement?

Implications for

1. Partnerships2. Faculty and Staff Practice3. Institutional culture and change

Institutional Environment

Epistemology

Curriculum

Transdisciplinarity

Pedagogy

Learning Outcomes

Research

Knowledge Creation

Structures, Policies, and Culture

Our work has attempted to do two things:

• provide a framework of democratic engagement as a way to focus attention on the purposes and processes of engagement practices and the implications of democratic engagement for changing institutions; and

• link engagement practice to institutional change, examining the kinds of engagement practices that perpetuate/reinforce the status quo and the kinds of engagement practices that compel change.

Technocratic

• Engagement in this sense reflects the dominant academic culture of higher education, often characterized as “scientific,” “rationalized,” “objectified,” or “technocratic,” meaning that the approach to public problems is predominantly shaped by specialized expertise “applied” externally “to” or “on” the community, providing “solutions” to what has been determined to be the community’s “needs.”

Democratic

• The norms of a culture of democratic education are determined by values such as inclusiveness, participation, task sharing and reciprocity in public problem solving, and an equality of respect for the knowledge and experience that everyone contributes to education and community building. These democratic processes and purposes reorient civic engagement to what we are calling “democratic engagement.”

Civic Engagement(Focus on Activity and Place)

Democratic Civic Engagement(Focus on Purpose and Process)

Community Relationships

Partnerships and mutuality Reciprocity

Deficit-based understanding of community Asset-based understanding of community

Academic work done for the public Academic work done with the public

Knowledge production/research

Applied Inclusive, collaborative, problem-oriented

Unidirectional flow of knowledge Multi-directional flow of knowledge

Epistemology

Positivist/scientific/technocratic Relational, localized, contextual

Distinction between knowledge producers and knowledge consumers

Co-creation of knowledge

Primacy of academic knowledge Shared authority for knowledge creation

University as the center of public problem-solving

University as a part of an ecosystem of knowledge production addressing public problem-solving

Political Dimension

Apolitical engagement Facilitating an inclusive, collaborative, and deliberative democracy

Outcome

Knowledge generation and dissemination through community involvement

Community change that results from the co-creation of knowledge

Comparing Civic Engagement Frameworks

First-Order Change Second-Order Change

Aim is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of what is done - to make what already exists more efficient and more effective.

Aim is to alter the fundamental ways in which organizations are put together. These changes reflect major dissatisfaction with present arrangements.

Does not disturb the basic organizational features, or substantially alter the ways in which faculty and students perform their roles. Those who propose first-order changes believe that the existing goals and structure are both adequate and desirable.

Second-order changes introduce new goals, structures, and roles that transform familiar ways of doing things into new ways of solving persistent problems.

Does not require changes that alter the culture of the institution, those which require major shifts in an institution’s culture—the common set of beliefs and values that creates a shared interpretation and understanding of events and actions.

Is associated with transformational change, defined as change that (1) alters the culture of the institution by changing select underlying assumptions and institutional behaviors, processes, and products; (2) is deep and pervasive, affecting the whole institution; (3) is intentional; and (4) occurs over time.

Focuses on institution-wide patterns of perceiving, thinking, and feeling; shared understandings; collective assumptions; and common interpretive frameworks are the ingredients of this ‘invisible glue’ called institutional culture.

Transformation through change in institutional culture.

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Pervasive

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[Saltmarsh & Clayton. (2011). Adapted from Eckel et al (1998).][Graphic by K. Buchner]

Six propositions that offer possibilities for constructive action

1. Transformative change requires a broad-based consensus about purpose

2. The democratically engaged university entails co-creating a different kind of educational experience with its students

3. Leadership should model democratic values4. Graduate education must be realigned to promote a larger

public purpose5. Evolving perspectives on knowledge generation must be

validated6. Institutions must provide resources for faculty professional

development for democratic civic engagement

The Learning Paradigm

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

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

Instructional Paradigm

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

Learning Paradigm

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

“Collaborative Paradigm”

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

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

Elicit student discovery and construction of knowledge

Collaboratively discover and construct knowledge

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

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

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

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

Teachers classify and sort students

Teachers develop every students’ competencies and talents

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

Instructional Paradigm

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

Learning Paradigm

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

“Collaborative Paradigm”

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

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

Elicit student discovery and construction of knowledge

Collaboratively discover and construct knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Syracuse University is committed to longstanding traditions of scholarship as well as evolving perspectives on scholarship. Syracuse University recognizes that the role of academia is not static, and that methodologies, topics of interest, and boundaries within and between disciplines change over time. The University will continue to support scholars in all of these traditions, including faculty who choose to participate in publicly engaged scholarship. Publicly engaged scholarship may involve partnerships of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, creative activity, and public knowledge; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address and help solve critical social problems; and contribute to the public good.”

Putting Democratic Engagement to Work on Campus

• A Dean of liberal arts college uses the Democratic Engagement White Paper for discussion at Dean’s Council meeting.

• The director of a community engagement center at a public urban university uses the White Paper for professional development for staff.

• The staff of a community engagement center at a private research university uses the White Paper to guide the revision of criteria for for awarding funding to faculty for community engagement projects.

Higher Education Leader

“I have just finished reading your article … It resonates very well with my own thinking and is very relevant for our South African context. I am the Chairperson of the South African Higher Education Community Engagement Forum (SAHECEF). For the next Board Meeting of this national organisation … I am suggesting that the Board Members (representing 23 public universities and 1 private) read your article. I shall introduce it and then ask for discussion. I cannot agree more with your emphasis on the need for democratic process and purpose.”

Director, Academic Community Engagement

“What is most interesting to me about this thread is that it supports a claim in the Democratic Engagement White Paper: by continually focusing on the implementation of activities, we remove our attention from the bigger purpose and process that engagement seeks. In struggling with naming conventions and categorization, we turn our attention away from a larger issue: the normative epistemology of the academy is that we produce and disseminate knowledge and perform services “for” needy communities. The critical question is, How are communities included in the teaching and research activities of the academy so that we are truly producing knowledge and generating solutions “with” communities?”

Community Partner, Community Arts Organization

“I think your team’s 2009 Democratic Engagement white paper is the clearest I’ve read defining the engagement problem for higher education. It quickly translates to my field, which is a testament to its clarity. For example, the five barriers apply with equal force when I substitute democratic arts for education. I think this is significant for what it says about the condition of our democracy.”

Foundations“While several new studies and reports joined those we identified in the 2006 report in calling for a renewed vision of American higher education dedicated to preparation of an engaged citizenry, others raised serious questions about the movement’s effectiveness to date. Most noteworthy among these is the “Democratic Engagement White Paper,” published in February 2009 by the New England Resource Center for Higher Education.

Their conclusion that the “dominant epistemology of the academy runs counter to the civic engagement agenda” is valid but their assessment of the state of the movement as “fragmented and compartmentalized” is, in my view, unduly pessimistic.”

Ford Foundation, Liberal Education and Civic Engagement (2009)

Discussion Questions 1. What would change in your engagement practice so that it

would be more democratic?2. Where is democratic engagement situated in relation to the

core values of the campus? 3. What would need to change at your institution for democratic

engagement to become central to its culture and practices?4. Where does democratic engagement connect with other

institutional priorities and innovative initiatives? Can you identify and describe examples of integration of these projects and goals with each other and into the fabric of the institution?

5. Where do you see momentum or openings to push for this kind of change? Who are potential allies? Where are the possibilities for collaboration? What might be strategic priorities for action?

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VII

VIII

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3-Dimensional Model

(“Johnson Cube”)President Melvin

Johnson, Tennessee State University

[Saltmarsh & Clayton (2011)][Graphic by K. Buchner]

Pervasive

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Integrated

low high

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Integration and Change

Full participation is a way of expressing the connections between what is on many of our campuses essential but often disconnected institutional priorities. Full participation is about integrating the priorities of• diversity and inclusion• public engagement• and the success of underserved students

said somewhat differently, it is about integrating• collaborative ways of generating knowledge• active and collaborative teaching and learning• and student success

Full Participation means…

that everyoneregardless of identityor position (students, staff, and faculty)would have the opportunity to reap the full benefits and to fully contributeand be able to thrive to learn in college.

Full Participation

Full participation is employed as a way of conceptualizing the intersections of student and faculty diversity, community engagement, and academic success as a nexus for the transformation of communities on and off campus.

Campuses advancing full participation are engaged campuses that are both in and of the community, participating in reciprocal, mutually beneficial partnerships between campus and community

The Architecture of the Public Engagement Knowledge/Learning Regime

Creating change though practices, structures, policies, and organizational cultures that integrate institutional commitment to

• Public Engagement• Diversity and Inclusion• Student Success

Discussion Questions• How does work involving your institution bring together

the practices of diversity/equity/inclusion and public scholarship/civic engagement?

• How is work relating to diversity/inclusion and public scholarship/civic engagement situated in relation to the institutional priorities of your campus?

• How is this work supported, rewarded, and shared?• How would your institution have to be transformed for

these values to become central to its culture and practices?

• Where do you see momentum or openings to push for this kind of transformation? Who are potential allies? Where are the possibilities for collaboration?

www.fullparticipation.net

Academic Capitalism and the New Economy

• An academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime

• A public good knowledge/learning regime

Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoads, 2004

Knowledge/Learning Regimes

Academic Capitalism• “Values privatization and profit

taking in which institutions, inventor faculty, and corporations have claims that come before those of the public.”

• “Knowledge is constructed as a private good, valued for creating streams of high-technology products that generate profits as they flow through global markets.”

Public Good• “Characterized by valuing

knowledge as a public good to which the citizenry has claims.”

• “The Cornerstone of the pubic good knowledge regime was basic science that led to the discovery of new knowledge within academic disciplines, serendipitously leading to public benefits.”

Academic Capitalism and the New Economy

• An academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime

• A public good knowledge/learning regime

• A public engagement knowledge/learning regime

Public Engagement Knowledge/Learning Regime

Involves partnerships of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, creative activity, and public knowledge; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address and help solve critical social problems; and contribute to the public good.

Public Engagement Knowledge/Learning Regime

Conceptualizes ‘community groups’ as all those outside of academe and requires shared authority at all stages of the research process from defining the research problem, choosing theoretical and methodological approaches, conducting the research, developing the final product(s), to participating in peer evaluation.

Civic Engagement(Focus on Activity and Place)

Democratic Civic Engagement(Focus on Purpose and Process)

Community Relationships

Partnerships and mutuality Reciprocity

Deficit-based understanding of community Asset-based understanding of community

Academic work done for the public Academic work done with the public

Knowledge production/research

Applied Inclusive, collaborative, problem-oriented

Unidirectional flow of knowledge Multi-directional flow of knowledge

Epistemology

Positivist/scientific/technocratic Relational, localized, contextual

Distinction between knowledge producers and knowledge consumers

Co-creation of knowledge

Primacy of academic knowledge Shared authority for knowledge creation

University as the center of public problem-solving

University as a part of an ecosystem of knowledge production addressing public problem-solving

Political Dimension

Apolitical engagement Facilitating an inclusive, collaborative, and deliberative democracy

Outcome

Knowledge generation and dissemination through community involvement

Community change that results from the co-creation of knowledge

Comparing Civic Engagement Frameworks

Engagement as a “core value” for the university of the 21st century

Engagement implies strenuous, thoughtful, argumentative interaction with the non-university world in at least four spheres: setting universities’ aims, purposes, and priorities; relating teaching and learning to the wider world; the back-and-forth dialogue between researchers and practitioners; and taking on wider responsibilities as neighbours and citizens.

Association of Commonwealth Universities

Community Engagement as a Core Value

Improved Teaching and Learning

Advancing Knowledge

Connecting to the Community

The Civic Mission of Higher Education

PublicEngagement

Knowledge/learningRegime

Advancing Knowledge

• “…the pursuit of knowledge itself demands engagement. Increasingly, academics in many disciplines are realizing that their own intellectual territory overlaps with that of other knowledge professionals working outside the university sector…Knowledge is being keenly pursued in the context of its application and in a dialogue of practice with theory through a network of policy-advisors, companies, consultants, think-tanks and knowledge brokers as well as academics.”

Association of Commonwealth Universities

Redefining higher education for the 21st century

Located squarely between the neoliberal, market driven, highly privatized university and the need for universities to more effectively address social issues and improve the human condition are the issues of community engagement, publically engaged scholarship, and university-community partnerships.

Contact

John SaltmarshNew England Resource Center for

Higher Education (NERCHE)[email protected]: 617-287-7743

“Science outreach needn’t be just reaching out, but also pulling in. In this age when new forms of communication facilitate dialogue rather than broadcast, being a good innovative scientist should mean occasional interaction with a wide variety of people in a wide variety of disciplines. When people discourage science outreach, I think they hold a mistaken caricature of what outreach is (as merely broadcasting, instead of dialogue), but also, they perpetuate a needlessly limited and conservative view of science, as progress in isolated niches rather than a fundamentally multidisciplinary exercise.”

Laurie Ross, Learning Cultural Humility Through Critical Incidents and Central Challenges in

Community-Based Participatory Research, Journal of Community Practice, 2010

Six Norms of Publically Engaged Scholarship(Cultural norms of the Public Engagement Knowledge/Learning

Regime)

• Norm 1. Participatory Epistemology• Norm 2: Collaborative research• Norm 3: Scholarly artifacts as publications• Norm 4: Non-academic knowledge experts

(peers)• Norm 5: Transdisciplinarity• Norm 6: The tenure clock

Norm 1. Participatory Epistemology

Community engaged scholarship (sometimes referred to as action research, participatory action research, or community based participatory research (CBPR),) is grounded in an epistemological position recognizing that knowledge and expertise are widely distributed, that new knowledge is generated by connecting academic knowledge with community-based knowledge, and that knowledge generation accounts for who holds knowledge and for whom social research should be undertaken. Community engaged scholarship as a participatory epistemology employs a range of methods: quantitative and qualitative methods, interviews, case studies, surveys, pre- and post-tests, regression analysis, and coding as research methods.

The Production of KnowledgeTraditional academic knowledge generation Engaged knowledge generation • the dominant position in

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

• problem-centered, trans-disciplinary, heterogeneous, hybrid, demand-driven, entrepreneurial, network-embedded, collaborative.

Gibbons et al., 1994

A Continuum of Research

Basic Applied Engaged

Norm 2: Collaborative research

• Collaborative knowledge generation is associated with the norm of collaborative authorship, and most publically engaged research is co-authored, often with non-academics.

National Council on Public History at the 2012 Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting

• … The vast majority of senior scholars, used to reading footnotes, don’t know how to peel away the layers of an exhibition or digital project to see the dense archival basis of the work. In fact, the three traditional categories – teaching, colleagueship and scholarship – can merge and blur when colleagues don’t know how to “read” or take seriously publicly engaged work. Things can get even worse when the case leaves the department.

• Public historians are often hired by departments who genuinely want them, and who think civically engaged scholarship is valuable. But because review processes are designed for books and articles, these candidates are not infrequently told by well-meaning colleagues to put off their public work until the book and articles are complete, or they actually have to do more: mount exhibitions, websites and other tangible projects and write.

• Public history is collaborative, and collaboration is not a universal value in a field that celebrates the individual labor of the monograph.

Norm 3: Scholarly artifacts as publications

• Community engaged scholarship is associated with the norm that in along with traditional scholarly products, scholarly artifacts consist of publications that are not in peer-reviewed journals – publications such as evaluation reports and technical reports.

Publication and Peer Review “Documentation must be open to a more eclectic

array of materials in order to treat newer forms of scholarship fairly. This would mean including more genres of published and unpublished work…It is important to recognize that appropriate and credible reviewers may be found not only among fellow specialist and current students but also among former students, clients, non-academic authorities, and practitioners in the field.”

Glassick, Huber, Maeroff, Scholarship Assessed (1997)

Documenting Engaged Research• In addition to traditional criteria for research (e.g., publications, peer

review, grant funding, significance to the discipline), documenting participatory action research warrants additional types of evidence (relevance to community, communication of finding with stakeholders, impact on community issues, etc.)

• With Engaged Research there is a broader collection of stakeholders (e.g.,

community partners) who can provide evidence beyond discipline-based or profession-based peers about the significance and impact of the research. The faculty member needs to demonstrate how the work has contributed to a body of knowledge not only for the discipline or profession (e.g., peer reviewed publications) but also for the community (e.g., through effective communications that were appropriate for different audiences).

Norm 4: Non-academic knowledge experts (peers)

• Research done with and for community-based organizations may be best evaluated by non-academics, raising the issue of who is a peer in the peer-review process of community engaged scholarship, acknowledging that non-academics have knowledge and expertise essential to assessing the quality and impact of certain scholarly products.

Publication and Peer Review “Documentation must be open to a more eclectic

array of materials in order to treat newer forms of scholarship fairly. This would mean including more genres of published and unpublished work…It is important to recognize that appropriate and credible reviewers may be found not only among fellow specialist and current students but also among former students, clients, non-academic authorities, and practitioners in the field.”

Glassick, Huber, Maeroff, Scholarship Assessed (1997)

Norm 5: Transdisciplinarity

Community engaged scholarship is predominantly transdisciplinary by nature, since social issues in communities are not defined by disciplines. Thus the norms of community engaged scholarship are such that transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary journals are the most appropriate academic venues for academic peer-review publication and dissemination.•

Norm 6: The tenure clock

• a norm for community engaged scholarship is that it takes more time than traditional scholarship, in part because of the negotiated nature of the research problem, questions, methods, and products, and also because of the timeframe needed for collaborative processes.