ENGAGED COMMUNITIES, CRITICAL CITIZENS: A PEDAGOGY FOR COLLABORATIVELY
DEVELOPING KNOWLEDGE AND SOLUTIONS TO PUBLIC ISSUES
 US higher education institutions mission statements returning to civic
purposes of higher education (AACU, 2008; Furco & Goss, 2001; Musil,
2011)
 Community-engaged scholarship recommended as a practice for
achieving civic outcomes (Boyer, 1996; Campus Compact, 2011).
 Multiple meanings, overlapping meanings (Howard, 2011)
 Lack of clarity
PRESENTATION GOALS
 What definition of community-engaged scholarship integrates the multiple
understandings of this term (and related terms—e.g. public scholarship,
scholarship of engagement) from the literature?
 What pedagogical components are repeatedly recommended by
researchers and practitioners of community-engaged scholarship, public
scholarship, and scholarship of engagement?
PRESENTATION OUTLINE
 Methodology
 Consensus definition
 Six components
 Practical Examples
 UC Berkeley American Cultures Engaged Scholarship program & Cal
Corps Public Service Center
 Critical Community-Engaged Scholarship
METHODOLOGY
 Literature review of articles on:
 community-engaged scholarship
 public scholarship
 active and engaged scholarship
 curricular engagement and outreach and scholarship
 community-based research
 scholarship of engagement
 Definitions and recommendations for action
COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP:
AN INTEGRATION OF TERMINOLOGY
METHODOLOGY “RACE-THROUGH”
 MaxQDA
 Grounded theory
 Coding: openaxialintegrated theory
 Two interpretive communities
1. Colleagues
 Educational research for social and racial justice
2. Community-Engaged Scholarship Practitioners
 Suzan Akin and Megan Voorhees from the Cal Corps Public Service
Center and Victoria Robinson, head of the American Cultures
Engaged Scholarship program at the University of California, Berkeley
A CONSENSUS DEFINITION
Community-engaged scholarship focuses on the application and collaborative
development of knowledge to consequential public issues through authentic,
mutually beneficial partnerships between universities and communities. It
includes:
1) Scholarly investigation of real-life social problems or public issues
2) Real-life social problems and research to address these problems that are defined with
or by the community
3) Community-university partnerships that are collaborative and reciprocal and have
shared authority in defining success
4) Knowledge to solve or improve public issues that is collaboratively developed by
universities and communities
5) The utilization of institutional resources and knowledge to solve these real-life social
problems or public issues
6) Community-engaged research or projects that are related to faculty members’ research
and teaching
A CAVEAT…
 Expand on theoretical definitions of components
 Provide concrete example of each component in practice
 On the one hand…
 Artificial divide of a holistic and synthetic pedagogy
 On the other hand…
 Instructive device for clearly illustrating each component
 Will end with synthetic example
COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP:
COMPONENT 1
 Scholarly investigations of real-life social problems or public issues
 Public issues could come from an array of areas
 Economic development to social or cultural expansion (Stanton et al.,
2007)
 Education and the economy, agriculture and food, access to healthcare,
urban revitalization, conservation of the environment, and natural
resources (The Kellogg Commission, 1999).
 Public issues most relevant to mission, faculty scholarship, and the
surrounding communities
COMPONENT 1: AN EXAMPLE
 UC Berkeley Professor Victoria Robinson’s course: A Comparative Survey of Racial
and Ethnic Groups in the U.S: Towards an Abolition Pedagogy
 Tools and historical background necessary engage in meaningful and informed
debates about race, gender, legal status, crime and punishment in the US
 Tools into practice to consider questions of an abolition pedagogy
 Strives “create genuinely healthy, stable communities that respond to harm
without relying on imprisonment and punishment.” (Critical Resistance, 2012)
 In collaboration with:
 Critical Resistance (local-and national-prison abolition community organization)
 Two student fellows
 Identified public issues:
 Knowledge gap the prison industrial complex (PIC) and grassroots struggles
 Lack of accessibility to existing PIC knowledge
COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP:
COMPONENT 2
 Importance of who defines real-life social problems or public issues
 Either community-identified or collaboratively identified with university
and community members
COMPONENT 2: AN EXAMPLE
 UC Berkeley Professor William Satariano’s course: Introduction to Community
Health and Human Development
 Collaborative syllabus development
 Community Advisory Board - perspectives on key public health issues
 Building on previous relationships….
 Local health departments (Contra Costa County, Alameda County, and San
Francisco)
 A governmental agency—The Department of Maternal and Child Health
Services
 Two local nonprofit organizations
 Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters (CARD)
 Building Blocks for Kids (BB4K)
 Consulted on:
 course content, readings, in-class speakers, panel members
COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP:
COMPONENT 3
 Community-university partnerships that are collaborative, reciprocal, and
mutually beneficial
 Shared authority in defining success
COMPONENT 3: AN EXAMPLE
 Satariano’s course: Introduction to Community Health and Human
Development
 Partnership with Building Blocks for Kids (BB4K—improving the quality of
life for children with health-related needs)
 Course learning goal:
 Students should be able to research and interpret US census data and
apply this information to assessing and addressing factors in
epidemiology
 BB4K writing government grant
 Include a needs assessment of residents in their constituency
 Legitimacy through a university partnership
 Reciprocal and mutually beneficial partnership
COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP:
COMPONENT 4
 Collaborative production of knowledge
 Knowledge-generating tasks are shared with community partners and
university members
 Everyone has a role in public problem-solving
COMPONENT 4: AN EXAMPLE
 Robinson’s course: Comparative Survey of Racial and Ethnic Groups in U.S
 Establishing the knowledge gap on the prison industrial complex
 UC Berkeley Student Fellows in the course: David Melena and Aries Jaramillo
 Three members of Critical Resistance
 Critical Resistance
 Organizing experiences and familiarity with community oral histories
 Identified specific categories of knowledge missing from Wikipedia
 E.g. alternatives to incarceration, three strikes, gender responsive corrections,
and racial profiling
 Students
 Collaborative working groups
 Researched , wrote, revised Wikipedia pages with academic standards for
citations
 New knowledge collaboratively created and publicly available
COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP:
COMPONENT 5
 Use of institutional resources and knowledge to solve real-life public
issues
 Universities rich in:
 library access, technology, research-expertise, and knowledge
 Communities rich in:
 Practical application of theoretical knowledge
 Connecting university resources to community knowledge and/or issues
COMPONENT 5: AN EXAMPLE
 UC Berkeley Art Practice course… need to check in further with professor
of this course before sharing.
COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP:
COMPONENT 6
 Course content and focus related to the faculty member’s scholarship
 Community-based component related to academic content of course
 Community-based component extends faculty member’s research
and/or results in collaborative knowledge production in faculty
member’s area of expertise
COMPONENT 6: AN EXAMPLE
 UC Berkeley Professor Juana María Rodríguez’s course: Queer Theories/Activist
Practices
 Faculty member’s scholarship:
 Intersection of ethnic studies and sexuality
 Identities transformed through language, law, culture, and public policy
 Spaces: Activism-in particular surrounding HIV; immigration law; and cyberspace
 Course content:
 Definitions of activism, community engagement, and social transformation
 Limits/possibilities various interventions—arts, law, advocacy, and direct action
 Community-based component
 Community organizations focused on HIV activism, arts, law, and advocacy
 Collaborative knowledge production: annotated bibliographies
 Extension research: other direction… research deepens course
INTEGRATING COMMUNITY-ENGAGED
SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICAL SERVICELEARNING:
 Many similarities between critical service-learning and community-engaged scholarship:
 Development of authentic relationships with community partners
 Focus on relevant social issues
 Integration of service or community-engagement with course content
 Community-engaged scholarship: A slight shift in emphasis
 Community-engaged scholarship: includes focus of utilizing institutional resources
 Critical service-learning focus on:
 Balancing student learning and service with the community-identified needs/issues
 Community-engaged scholarship focuses on:
 Knowledge application and the collaborative production of knowledge to solve
pressing social issues.
 Progressive shift from locating “social problems” within communities to locating
problems in our democracy
BUILDING ON CRITICAL SERVICE-LEARNING
“Without the exercise of care and consciousness, drawing attention to root
causes of social problems, and involving students in actions and initiatives
addressing root causes, service-learning may have no impact beyond
students’ good feelings. In fact, a service-learning experience that does not
pay attention to those issues and concerns may involve students in the
community in a way that perpetuates inequality …” (Mitchell, 2008, p. 51)
BUILDING ON CRITICAL SERVICE-LEARNING
 Critical service-learning includes unambiguous focus on social justice and the
redistribution of power
 Community-engaged scholarship may focus on similar topics yet critical consciousness
not explicitly-named
 Critical community-engaged scholarship
 Includes the six components
 Building on critical service learning
 Explicit focus on justice
 Development of not just knowledge, but critically-conscious knowledge
 Redistribution of power
 Democratization of classroom (not in 6 components)
 Valuing expertise and work of students
 Knowledge base that comes with bringing diverse experiences into classroom
CRITICAL COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP
 UC Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian: Muslims in America
 Partnerships
 Multiple off-campus community organizations: (e.g. Council on American-Islamic
Relations, Asian Law Caucus, Zaytuna College, Northern California Islamic
Council, Arab Cultural Research Center …)
 On-campus: Muslim Student Association
 Public issue
 Muslim Americans being left out of the public discourse in America
 Course Focus
 Affirm the Muslim community within the fabric of American society
 Document US-Muslim community narratives in systematic ways
CRITICAL COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP
 Blurring the boundaries of university and community
 Course Twitter Feed
 Council on American-Islamic Relations tweets a link to their article on Dutch
politician Geert Wilders  in-class discussion topic
 Feedback from community organization
 Access to information on Muslims in America limited  Bazian posts all
lectures on iTunes for free download (utilize university resources)
 International conference, Islamophobia Production and Redefining a Global
“Security” Agenda for the 21st Century
 Addressing public issue
 Students develop websites that “Document the history of Muslims in America”
 45 webpages now publicly available
CRITICAL COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP
 Bazian’s Research Agenda
 to use education as a tool for empowerment
 to counteract the structures in place which prevent Muslim Americans
from reaching their full humanity and citizenship in American life
 Collectively--webpages of students, policy recommendations and articles
from community organizations, and online and in-person dialogue on
current events deepens, shapes, and informs Bazian’s research agenda
 Reciprocally—twitter feeds, webpages, publicly accessible lectures, and
conference sessions—are building the knowledge base on Muslims in
America
IN CONCLUSION
 Higher education institutions re-committing to civic purposes
 Train graduates for leadership positions with power and influence in our
society (Gutman, 1987), thus crucial prepare citizens for just democratic
participation
 Community-engaged scholarship—is frequently recommended as a
practice for achieving civic-engagement outcomes (Boyer, 1996; Campus
Compact, 2011).
 Synthesize consensus of recommendations from the literature
 Working definition of community-engaged scholarship with six
components
 Possible future direction—critical community-engaged scholarship
 Future researchers should deconstruct AND reconstruct this definition
THANK YOU
Cynthia Gordon
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Ed.D. expected May 2013
UC Berkeley, American Cultures Engaged Scholarship
Graduate Research Assistant
Email: cynthia_gordon@mail.harvard.edu