Building Infrastructures for Community Engagement at the University of Louisville: Graduate Models for Cultivating Stewardship

From our perspectives at the University of Louisville, we address the need to provide structures for graduate student participation in community-engaged scholarship. Architectures of participation such as the ones we describe in this piece—the Community Engagement Academy and the Digital Media Academy—offer graduate students the opportunity to practice designing and implementing community engagement projects within interdisciplinary and disciplinary sites. The models we provide were designed to make the invisible work of community engagement visible and to create low barriers of entry for graduate students to become stewards of their disciplines as well as stewards of their communities. Such opportunities, we argue, help promote a more capacious view of stewardship, and thus encourage emerging engaged scholars to learn how to act responsibly and wisely in conducting community-engaged research.