John Saltmarsh

Indicators of Engagement

As institutions of higher education reshape their organizational and administrative structures and functions in alignment with community-based education and civic renewal, there has emerged a framework for the “engaged campus.” This essay traces the emergence of the engaged campus in the late 20th century as the developments in service-learning converged with widespread recognition of a national crisis defined by civic disintegration. Working from the conceptual framework of an engaged campus, the authors identify and provide current examples of ten critical “indicators” of community and civic engagement that indicate that an institution is establishing the essential foundations for engagement.

Is the Civic Engagement Movement Changing Higher Education

ABSTRACT Evidence has emerged that the civic engagement movement in US higher education may not be fulfilling its transformative potential, having lost sight of its core democratic purposes. Civic engagement conceptualised only in terms of activity and place – programmes in communities – may be easily accommodated to prevailing technocratic practices. For the civic engagement movement to challenge and change higher education, it must promote democratic processes and purposes – and pursue institutional change strategies aimed at realigning the work of the academy to serving democracy.

Current Practice and Infrastructures for Campus Centers of Community Engagement

On many campuses, community engagement centers emerged out of student affairs, further developed as units of academic affairs, and in both cases were focused on “service” as the organizing purpose, whether community service or service learning. Community “engagement” has recently been framed as reciprocal, two-way relationships (as articulated in the Carnegie Community Engagement classification, in the “Democratic Engagement White Paper” [Saltmarsh et al., 2009] as “publicly engaged scholarship” as articulated in the report Scholarship in Public [Ellison and Eatman, 2008], and in other recent framings). This is in contrast to what has historically been characterized as a one-way, charitable, noblese-oblige, expert-driven, service relationship. The reframing of community engagement has challenged those who are leading and staffing existing structures to think about their work, and their operations, differently.

Co-Constructing Knowledge Spheres in the Academy: Developing Frameworks and Tools for Advancing Publicly Engaged Scholarship:

Publicly engaged scholarship (PES) has emerged as a powerful force, yet institutional policies and cultures have often inhibited its acceptance in the academy. This article considers the benefits of PES for higher education as well as the obstacles to its enactment. It identifies the college level as a critical site for change and offers a rubric for institutional change agents to use to assess support for community engagement at the college level and identify avenues for further progress. The authors also grapple with tensions inherent in promoting PES at institutions that have historically served as agents of domination and oppression.

Rewarding Community-Engaged Scholarship: A State University System Approach

The need for new and revised structures to reward new forms of scholarship is being examined nationally and globally. It is also being examined on campuses that make up the University of Massachusetts system, all which are classified by the Carnegie Foundation for Community Engagement. This paper reports on the collective exploration by the five campuses of the University of Massachusetts to understand whether the existing academic policies sufficiently and appropriately rewarding community engagement and publically engaged scholarship enact the core mission of the University of Massachusetts to effectively generate knowledge, address social issues, and fulfill its academic and civic purposes.