Going Public: Civic and Community Engagement

Introduction

131 Introduction Judy Primavera and Hiram E. Fitzgerald The “new scholarship” set in motion by Boyer, Lynton, and the Kellogg Commission is a scholarship of action, a scholarship of practice that takes place both in and with the community. This scholarship of practice challenges higher education’s age-old accepted epistemologies and requires a new set of norms regarding what counts as legitimate knowledge and what methodologies are acceptable means of acquiring such knowledge (Schön, 1995). It is a scholarship that frees the academy from the confinement of its myopic, reductionist , patriarchal, and self-serving scope of intellectual inquiry by offering a more expansive , more egalitarian, and more socially utilitarian model as to how knowledge is defined, communicated, and used. This new scholarship is founded on the premise that the academy is not the sole proprietor or distributor of knowledge (Barker, 2004). Knowledge also originates from and flourishes in the community. Within the framework of this new scholarship, the mission of the academy does not begin and end with intellectual discovery and factfinding . Rather, the academy join forces with the community, and together they use their knowledge and their resources to address our society’s most pressing social, civic, economic, and moral problems (Boyer, 1996). There is no doubt that there have been great strides made in the last 25 years related to the acceptance, implementation, and institutionalization of the scholarship of engagement in higher education. However, universities were much faster to “talk the talk” than they were to “walk the walk.” The stories told in the chapters in part 2 of Going Public are a testimony to the fact that we have moved far beyond the rhetoric of civic engagement to the reality of a very vibrant and change-producing scholarship of practice. The chapters in part 2 are proof that the practice of good scholarship can happen anywhere ; that the acceptable context for scholarship is not limited by geography or setting. The 132 J U D Y P R I M A V E R A A N D H I R A M E . F I T Z G E R A L D scholarship of practice presented here occurs in schools, prisons, museums, nonprofit environmentalinitiatives ,andaMayanWomen’sWeavingCooperative.Theuniversity-community partnerships involved are local, statewide, and international. Finally, as a collective, these stories might be considered models of the new epistemology of how knowledge is defined, acquired, communicated, and perhaps even judged. Each of the chapters tells a “story.” Some contain reports of more traditional “data” and others do not, but again, as a collective, they suggest that the best measure of a “significant result” is not always a statistically derived low p-value. Each of these stories documents the process of positive change; they provide evidence that the “work” that was done by the university and community partners did, indeed, have a significant impact. Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (1997) encourage us to move beyond the convenient practice of counting professional“products” when assessing the value of our work, and that is precisely what these stories illustrate.Working in the real world is messy.When our work takes place in real communities, with real people, living their real lives coping with real social-political-economic issues, a good deal of the “value” lies in the process of how we did what we did, and oftentimes the most valuable product is something that eludes precise measurement. Each of the chapters tells a unique story of community engagement and the scholarship of practice; they tell of our successes, our failures, the unintended consequences , and the questions yet to be answered. More importantly, they tell the stories of how trust was built, how attitudes and behaviors were changed, and how people and communities became empowered. Going public with these stories and others like them is something we should do more of—it “pushes the boundary” of the old epistemology and it brings us one step closer to Boyer’s vision of a civically engaged and civically responsible academy. The Scholarship of Practice A crucial component of the scholarship of practice is the engagement process. The type of mutual trust required for good community engagement to happen is not something that happens overnight, nor is it something that proceeds in a smooth and linear fashion. There are often false starts and bumps to be smoothed over before the “real work” begins. Work in and with the community has a courtship period; in other words, the scholarship of practice typically begins...