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The Future Landscape
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
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409 The Future Landscape Theodore R. Alter Looking forward, what are the new ideas, what are the new perspectives, what are the new initiatives, that hold promise for positively shaping the future landscape and promise of engaged scholarship and community-university engagement? In this section, several such ideas, perspectives, and initiatives are described and discussed in broad concept and rich detail, provoking thinking, stretching understanding, and illuminating opportunity. Robert Bringle and Julie Hatcher, both at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis , focus on students and engagement in higher education. They note that engagement with communities adds value to the extent that it enriches student learning and fosters their personal and professional development. Bringle and Hatcher examine trends in student engagement over time through coursework and out of class, and then explore ways to enhance the civic engagement of college students going forward. Jeri Childers and Ted Settle, both from Virginia Tech, detail their experience to date in designing, implementing, and evaluating an initiative for developing highly effective university engagement leaders for the twenty-first century. They tell the story of piloting Virginia Tech’s Engagement Academy for University Leaders and outline key lessons learned from this experience that they are using to strengthen their Engagement Academy—lessons valuable to anyone interested in building and sustaining similar initiatives and strengthening academic leadership for engagement in the future. Angela Allen and Tami Moore, professors at Michigan State University and Oklahoma State University, respectively, address what may be the most important issue for leveraging long-run change in higher education with respect to strengthening community-university partnerships and engaged scholarship. Their focus is on developing emerging engagement T H E O D O R E R . A L T E R 410 scholars who will provide academic and administrative leadership in our institutions of higher education in the future. Allen and Moore discuss the origins, evolution, and early experience with the relatively new and innovative Emerging Engagement ScholarsWorkshop (EESW). The purpose of the annual EESW is to provide graduate student and early-career scholars substantive opportunity to explore the implications of engagement for their research and teaching, to better understand engaged scholarship and how it might be reflected in and strengthen their work, and to develop and strengthen networks with other emerging and experienced engaged scholars. Frank Fear, Michigan State, in his chapter titled “Coming to Engagement: Critical Reflection and Transformation,” provides an intellectually rich, thought-provoking, moving, and forward- looking contribution to our understanding of engaged scholarship. Professor Fear writes from an autoethnographic perspective, wherein individuals rely on personal experience and deep personal reflection to help illuminate the particular foci of their inquiry. In this chapter, grounded in his experience, Fear reflects critically on engagement practice with the purpose of informing scholarly understanding, which, in turn, can be used to improve the practice of engagement. He makes no claims to truth, necessarily; but he does raise our consciousness and insight into the potentially powerful contributions of engaged scholarship and engagement to personal as well as organizational and community development. Completing this section on the “future landscape” of engaged scholarship, Professor James Powell at Salford University in the United Kingdom describes experience at his university with what he and his colleagues call “Academic Enterprise” (AE), an approach and mindset that make an imperative of sharing knowledge and expertise between the university and its external stakeholders, business, government, and community, to foster socially inclusive wealth creation. The AE approach encourages and assists faculty and staff to be more enterprising in sharing their individual knowledge and expertise in the context of this shared wealth-creation process. Powell also details a model, based on more than two hundred cases of successful, mutually beneficial community-university engagement, involving four skills critical to enterprising behavior on the part of academic faculty: business acumen, individual performance, social networking intelligence, and foresight enabling skills. Powell shows how this model can be used to strengthen the enterprising behavior of faculty. ...