Emily M. Janke

Intense, Pervasive and Shared Faculty Dialogue: Generating Understanding and Identifying "Hotspots" in Five Days

Once an institution has chosen to recognize and reward community-engaged scholarship in its university-wide promotion and tenure policy, what are some strategies for aligning unit and department policies as well? This chapter describes the path followed at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro to align policies across all units and departments. Discussed are core strategies used to generate faculty support for community-engaged scholarship in promotion and tenure policy and practice, the themes revealed as a result of a weeklong dialogue initiative, and recommendations for continued improvement.

A Centralized Strategy to Collect Comprehensive Institution-Wide Data from Faculty And Staff About Community Engagement And Public Service

“How do I get faculty and staff to record information about their community engagement and public service activities, partnerships, and contributions?” This article describes one institution’s strategies to collect comprehensive community engagement and public service data through a centralized system. Beyond what metrics to collect, we present insights about who to talk with, questions to prepare, and conversations that will increase participation from faculty and staff to report their activities annually.

Increased Community Presence is Not a Proxy for Reciprocity

Community voice, alongside academic voice, is essential to the core community engagement principle of reciprocity—the seeking, recognizing, respecting, and incorporating the knowledge, perspectives, and resources that each partner brings to a collaboration. Increasing the extent to which academic conferences honor reciprocity with community members is important for many reasons. For example, community perspectives often enhance knowledge generation and potentially transform scholarship, practice, and outcomes for all stakeholders. However, community presence and participation at academic conferences tends to be thin despite best intentions and resources generated to support community partner travel. This article relates the author’s experience in organizing an academic conference and explores the differences between community member presence and truly reciprocal university partnerships between local and academic communities.