Engagement in the Disciplines: Strategies for Supporting Departmental Coherence
by Kevin Kecskes
Citation:
Kecskes, K. (2008). Engagement in the Disciplines. The Department Chair, Vol 18, No 3,
16 – 18. Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).
When Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and
Universities (AAC&U), presented the organization’s new report, College Learning for
the New Global Century, at the 2007 national conference she whispered something with
loud overtones. When describing the four essential learning outcomes for the 21st century
she remarked that it was time for the best integrative teaching, learning, and research
strategies to “move into the departments; working with the general education curriculum
is no longer sufficient.” Piquing faculty’s (and students’ and community partners’)
interest with an engaged department strategy has promise for enhancing academic unit
coherence. Indeed, revisiting and refreshing the departmental vision and mission to align
with broader community-based social, technological, and economic development issues
is a superb way to respond to an increasingly important question: What is the public
purpose of your unit?
Understanding Departmental Engagement
An engaged department is one that regularly collaborates for the express purpose of
leveraging disciplinary expertise toward positive public or civic ends. Informed by
participation in one of National Campus Compact’s Engaged Department Institutes and
the excellent work of Wergin (2003) and Battistoni, Gelmon, Saltmarsh, Wergin, and
Zlotkowski (2003), the Center for Academic Excellence at Portland State University
(PSU) implemented an Engaged Department Program in 2001. Combining a review of
the literature with the insights borne from working with 20 PSU departments on
engagement initiatives, we developed a list of key characteristics of an engaged
department. If departments periodically evaluate their regular activities using the four
lenses offered in Table 1, this emerging rubric can help inform practitioners about the
unit’s level of engagement and illuminate areas of excellence and topics for
enhancement.
Table 1. Characteristics of Engaged Departments: Four Perspectives
Unit Perspective
Mission: The academic unit has a mission statement that includes civic engagement as a
goal.
Leadership: The chair or other faculty leaders in the unit provide advocacy and support
for engagement activities.
Visibility: The department publicly displays the collective commitment to civic
engagement (on web sites, in promotional brochures, etc.).
Collaboration: The unit plans collectively and shares best practices.
Resource development: The unit pursues external resources to fulfill collectively
determined, community-based, or civic engagement goals.
Inventory: The unit maintains an inventory of faculty members’ community-based
research and service-learning teaching activities.
Assessment: The unit tracks students’ civic learning outcomes.
Faculty Perspective
Common understanding: Faculty in the unit individually and collectively understand why
the department is involved in community-based activities.
Rewards: Faculty in the unit are rewarded for their civic engagement efforts.
Research: Faculty in the unit are encouraged to pursue research initiatives that are
applied or that have a clearly defined application in a community setting.
Articulation to student/community partners: Faculty in the unit regularly articulate to
students (in courses, catalogues, and during advising) and to community partners why the
department is involved in community-based activities.
Student Perspective
Common understanding: Students in the major understand why the faculty/unit is
involved in community-based work or other engagement activities.
Clarity of purpose: Students in the major understand why they are involved in
community-based work and other civic or political engagement activities.
Inclusion: Students in the major have (some) regular and structured opportunities for
providing input into unit-related decisions (e.g., faculty/staff hiring, curricular changes,
etc.).
Leadership: Students in the major have multiple formal and informal opportunities (e.g.,
service-learning courses and community-based research) to develop civic leadership
skills.
Community Perspective
Common understanding: Community partners understand why the faculty/unit is
involved in community-based activities.
Clear expectations: Community partners understand their role in relation to the academic
unit.
Interaction: Community partners interact with the unit by visiting classes, serving as
adjunct faculty members, and so on.
Connection: Community partners attend departmental meetings.
Collaborative planning and action: Community-based projects, including servicelearning courses and community-based research efforts, are designed with community
partner input.
Note. Adapted from Battistoni et al., 2003; Kecskes, Gelmon, and Spring, 2006; Wergin, 2003.
Departmental Engagement in Action: Applied Linguistics
The Department of Applied Linguistics at PSU has been involved in several rich and
long-established partnerships that exemplify successful departmental engagement. For
many years the faculty have been working with Portland Community College to run a
large English as a Second Language (ESL) Lab School, as well as supporting after school
and evening programs for families at several Portland public school sites.
Coinciding with PSU’s engaged department initiative in 2001, the department
began substantially increasing its engagement activities with Atkinson Elementary
School. The multifaceted engagement efforts are supported by a faculty leader and
involve eight faculty members and more than 120 students per year.
By focusing efforts on this one elementary school, the department intensified its
community contributions and allowed students and faculty to build on their experiences.
A selected faculty member shepherded the department’s partnership with Atkinson and
convened unit faculty and Atkinson teachers at meetings that inspired ideas that later
turned into classroom and research projects and practicum experiences. Without this unitlevel point person, the number and scope of ideas that came to fruition would have been
significantly limited.
Supporting and Sustaining Departmental Engagement
Our work supporting departmental engagement and contributing to the national dialogue
around engaged scholarship has led to the following recommendations for three distinct
campus cohorts: 1) senior academic officers, 2) department chairs/faculty leaders, and 3)
community service directors/staff of service-learning or civic engagement offices.
Senior-level administrators
•
Institutionalize: Central office support and budgetary allocation should be
commensurate with the desired institutional impact.
•
Make it count: Acknowledging and supporting the academic legitimacy and
importance of this work can accelerate efforts.
•
Shine the light: Spotlight successes via formal and informal mechanisms (e.g., annual
awards ceremonies, attending departmental meetings, incorporating messages into
campus-wide communications).
•
Incentives can work: Provide resources, especially to support release time for a
faculty point person or other unit-wide staff who have responsibility for supporting
and tracking processes and outcomes.
•
Be a connector: Help faculty to see broad overlaps in understandings regarding
community engagement so more individuals recognize that they can be part of
something larger while remaining faithful to their specific disciplinary
understandings.
•
Ask the right questions: Remind everyone of the broadest purposes of higher
education. Ask how units are creating knowledge that builds healthy and safe local
and worldwide communities.
Department chairs/faculty leaders
•
Take stock, synergize: Develop an inventory of extant engagement efforts among
departmental faculty, staff, and students (Kecskes, 2004).
•
Make time: Provide time in departmental meetings to discuss and clarify terms,
highlight successes, problem solve, and plan for partnership initiatives.
•
Notice, appreciate: Notice and take advantage of success by spotlighting excellence
in unit publications and public relations materials.
•
Students as assets: Identify and work with students who can tell their stories to
potential funders, other departments, and future students.
•
Find money: (Re)Allocate resources in support of a departmental point person.
•
Envision expanded community partner roles: Provide regular opportunities for key
community partners to collaborate on curriculum and program development.
•
Evaluate: Encourage and support documentation and assessment.
•
Ask the right questions: Unit leaders can encourage conversations about commitment
to the explicit public purposes of the discipline.
Community service directors/service-learning support staff
•
Define: Define departmental engagement broadly and remain open to significant
definition variation among departments.
•
Listen for discipline-specific needs: Provide resources and support as deans, chairs,
and departmental faculty define their needs.
•
Understand first: Seek first to understand disciplinary propensities, and then help
faculty members recognize how community engagement can help them attain
individual and collective outcomes.
•
Encourage communication: Provide departmental case studies and offer to facilitate
unit-wide discussions concerning salient topics.
•
Not for everyone: Expect fall out. No two departments will proceed along exactly the
same pathways, and some may not proceed much at all.
•
Remember the service-learning triad: Help faculty, students, and community partners
understand their various roles and the interdependence of their activities.
•
Support scholarship: Help faculty to identify publication outlets regarding their unit
development.
•
Shine the light: Highlight successes whenever possible.
•
Keep raising the stakes: Regularly challenge everyone to create greater impacts, seek
greater inter- and intra-connectivity, and explore deeper teaching, learning, and
applied research methodologies.
Conclusion
Focusing institutional efforts to support unit-level coherence around civic engagement
themes can lead to increased activity and depth of community-based teaching, learning,
and research. Engaging departments can help colleges and universities become
increasingly connected to local, regional, and global communities and demonstrate
relevance to legislators and taxpayers about the critical role higher education plays in
democratic societies. AAC&U President Geary Schneider portends the future of higher
education: more connected, more global, more integrated, and more focused on work in
the disciplines and in departments.
Kevin Kecskes is director of Community-University Partnerships at Portland State
University. This article is adapted from Chapters 1 and 15 of the author’s book, Engaging
Departments: Moving Faculty Culture From Private to Public, Individual to Collective
Focus for the Common Good (Anker, 2006). Email: kecskesk@pdx.edu
References
Battistoni, R. M., Gelmon, S. B., Saltmarsh, J. A., Wergin, J. F., & Zlotkowski, E.
(2003). The engaged department toolkit. Providence, RI: Campus Compact.
Kecskes, K. (2004, Summer). Engaging the department: Community-based approaches to
support academic unit coherence. The Department Chair, 15(1), 7–9.
Kecskes, K., Gelmon, S. B., & Spring, A. (2006). Creating engaged departments: A
program for organizational and faculty development. In S. Chadwick-Blossey & D. R.
Robertson (Eds.), To improve the academy: Resources for faculty, instructional, and
organizational development (pp. 147–165). Bolton, MA: Anker.
Wergin, J. F. (2003). Departments that work: Building and sustaining cultures of
excellence in academic programs. Bolton, MA: Anker.