University Times

If the University is to succeed in meaningful, sustainable community engagement, “We have to get the right people here and mobilize their efforts right away. And once we have attracted and involved these people, we must have the infrastructure necessary to support them and the policies that are going to keep them here,” keynote speaker Lina Dostilio told nearly 70 Pitt faculty members at a recent idea exchange on academically-based community engagement.

The first-ever forum of its kind drew nearly 70 faculty members to the William Pitt Union Sept. 25 for an afternoon that included roundtable discussions, a networking reception and a poster session that featured more than 30 examples of Pitt faculty members’ community engagement work.

*

Academic community engagement has a solid history with documented positive effects. “So, why do we struggle as a field? And how do we move this forward?” asked Dostilio, a faculty member in education at Duquesne University and director of Duquesne’s academic community engagement initiatives. Dostilio’s keynote: “The Research University in the Public Sphere: Community-oriented Teaching and Scholarship,” drew on her more than 15 years of work in consulting and community engagement.

“Why do I consult with so many campuses who are struggling to figure out how to institutionalize community engagement in their core functions of teaching and research?” And why do institutions with strong programs fail to effect cultural and systemic change? she asked.

She characterized the problem as threefold:

• “We do not induct students and faculty into the academy in a way that prioritizes community engagement.

• “We have not developed the policies and infrastructure that are necessary to sustain and deepen community involvement over time.”

• And we’ve missed the forest for the trees, favoring more community engagement over depth of civic involvement.

*

The positive impacts of service learning on college student learning had been well documented by the dawn of the 21st century. Community-based participatory research had gained a foothold across a broad range of fields including environmental science, sociology, health science and social work. Public and private funding sources were incentivizing community-based university partnership centers.

By 2000, “Community-campus engagement, — be it volunteerism, service learning, community-based research or community-based partnerships — had been pulled from the periphery to the mainstream of higher education,” Dostilio said.

“Most campuses had a volunteerism office and a proliferation of student-led community service initiatives. There were at least a few faculty on each college campus using service-learning pedagogy,” she said.

“We need to recognize that a student who graduated in 2000 is likely to have a community engagement experience at an institution of higher education,” she said, adding that today’s junior faculty members are products of that environment.

“Faculty are walking in the door having familiarity with this and wanting to do more of it,” Dostilio said. “We really need to get a sense of how to welcome, induct and mobilize those folks right off the bat.”

In addition, women and faculty of color are more likely to choose forms of community-engaged teaching and research, she said, adding that community-oriented faculty members are more likely to build their disciplinary expertise as a way to effect change, rather than to view it as a means unto itself.

“Those same faculty are more likely to seek out interdisciplinary opportunities for that same reason. It has the ability to effect change,” Dostilio said.

“If we want to attract vibrant diverse faculty who are more eager to collaborate across disciplines, they are going to expect that community engagement is a pathway available to them,” she said.

The incoming generation of faculty is eager to get started, she said. “They don’t want to wait. They’re ready. And they can do it. … They’re really good at this work.”

She said they also are likely to vote with their feet, moving on to work in other sectors if they can’t fulfill their desire to change the world in academia.

“We need to acknowledge that if we don’t have sufficient policies and infrastructure to support and retain their involvement, we will lose them.”

One signal of an institution’s commitment is the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching elective classification for community engagement, which requires an extensive institutional self-study. Only 361 institutions across the United States have the classification.

“It is the only national recognition of the degree to which an institution has threaded community engagement through every aspect of the institution: academics, student development, business and management, overall orientation to the community.”

The classification indicates to incoming faculty: “‘If you come here you will be supported at a level that shows we’re serious about this,’” Dostilio said. It tells students: “‘This is the next stop on your continuum of civic development,’” and it validates to community partners that an institution is “in it for the long haul,” she said.

“It is the gold standard.”

Dostilio said a recent study of institutions that had earned the classification found that nearly all had centers to support community engagement work. Most often situated in academic affairs, such centers focus on tracking, assessment, evaluation and research related to community engagement work.

“They play a critical role in coordinating greater institution-wide commitment to community engagement,” she said. “In other words, they are influencers. They influence institutional change.”

Part of that change comes through policy development, including new policies that govern faculty review.

“It’s difficult to create a campus culture of community engagement when there are no clearly articulated incentives for faculty to prioritize this work,” she said.

New policies needed

Community engagement is “pretty counter-normative” to higher education, particularly in institutions where high value is placed on solitary work that’s reviewed by peer experts, she said. “If we don’t have policies that make it safe, and make it encouraged and make it accessible, we’re really going to struggle to keep faculty members involved,” she said.

Community-based research projects may require a longer timeline, may rely on assessment by peer experts outside academia and may be disseminated beyond traditional scholarly outlets.

Nevertheless, excellent community-engaged teaching and research is rigorous, it is able to withstand scrutiny by peers and it contributes to the construction and dissemination of knowledge, Dostilio said.

Proponents of policy revision as it relates to faculty rewards are “not at all suggesting that community-engaged teaching and research be privileged above, or greater than, other forms of scholarship, but that at least we create a format in which community-engaged scholarship is legitimate: It’s among the options available to us,” she said.

Faculty must step up to advocate for the necessary infrastructure and new policies, she said.

“It’s about grassroots change that also has support of top-level leadership. It’s a bottom-up/top down, both-and approach,” Dostilio said.

Depth over breadth

While the number of community-engaged courses and community-based research projects has increased exponentially, “We most often see charitable forms of service and really apolitical forms of this work,” Dostilio said, reiterating, “We’ve missed the forest for the trees.”

She said, “The reasons why we pursue community-engaged teaching and research are that it enhances students’ disciplinary and civic learning. It keeps our scholarship current and relevant … and it positively contributes to our local communities,” she said.

“We do this work because it makes the world better. … We do this so that we can address the systemic issues causing poverty, environmental degradation and discrimination and a general narrowing of who is effectively able to participate in our public decision-making processes.”

Dostilio argued that attention to the civil goals that animate community-engaged teaching and research has been lost. “There are a number of institutions that are ever-intent on going with ‘numbers of students and days of service,’ ‘numbers of bags of trash picked up’ and ‘numbers of service opportunities and service-learning classes.’

“Those are helpful metrics to understand the broadening of this work,” she said. “But as we attend to broadening, we also have to attend to the deepening of our impact.”

Advice for advancing

In closing, Dostilio offered 10 recommendations for advancing the University’s civic engagement:

• The University should pursue the Carnegie classification and join groups such as The Research University Civic Engagement Network and the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities.

“Those three will provide the opportunity to have institutional reflection and to interact with peers who are struggling in the same contexts,” she said.

• Tell the story of Pitt’s community engagement throughout the recruitment, hiring and induction of faculty and enrollment of students — and mobilize people quickly when they join the University community.

• “Think about building infrastructure in your academic affairs division that can coordinate and support these efforts,” she said.

• Develop ways to measure the outcomes of engaged teaching and research, including student learning, faculty productivity and impact on the community.

• Address faculty reward policies and align what is articulated as important with the activities that actually are rewarded, she advised. And, if reward policies can’t be changed, creating models for fitting community-engaged work into those indicators  — in ways that portray it as rigorous and disciplinarily relevant, seminal and peer reviewable — is a must.

• Develop principles that emphasize attention to civic development and guide research toward best practices in community engagement.

• “It’s very smart for you to think about making investments in the development of infrastructure in authentic assessment and generously to support faculty development across the spectrum of faculty who might do this work,” she said.

• “It’s important to initiate conversation about the continuum of our students’ civic development and how the civic purposes of higher education map with what we’re already doing.
“We’ve got these disparate programs, learning experiences and initiatives. We need to map those and try to figure out at a degree program level, at a school level and at an institutional level: Are we actually creating continuums for civic development?”

• She said the University is perhaps the most sought after institution in the region among civic and community leaders who seek to collaborate. It should play to that strength and apply broad University expertise toward community projects and problem solving, she said. “I think that being able to onramp faculty into those larger multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary opportunities is really important,” she added.

• And, Dostilio said, the University already is engaging in one of the most important factors by connecting individuals who already are involved in the area of community engagement.

“Because this work is counter-normative, and because it’s very solitary, you need to be able to provide an organizing space for people,” she said.

“You’ve got to build community amongst the institution’s early adopters — and you’re already doing that,” she said.

Roundtable discussions

Some common themes emerged from roundtable discussions in which participants pondered the challenges and opportunities for greater University-community engagement; how Pitt could more effectively support faculty in community engagement work; and how the University community’s collective impact might be enhanced.

Many saw the need for a University-wide investment in this area, recommending a centralized office clearinghouse and website to coordinate efforts, connect people with opportunities and raise awareness of the work that’s going on.

Some recommended inventorying current opportunities and existing expertise, and finding ways to strategically connect newcomers on campus with people already engaged in work in their areas of interest.

Others suggested finding ways to engage students early, with some advocating for making community engagement a degree requirement.

*

The Sept. 25 Academically Based Community Engagement Idea Exchange stemmed from the University Honors College’s community engagement initiative and was supported by the Office of PittServes, the Office of Community and Governmental Relations and a committee of faculty from social work, business, education and nursing.

School of Social Work faculty member Tracy Soska, chair of community organization and social action concentration chair, called the event “an opportunity for faculty to network around our common engagement work and learn and deepen how we connect service work to our teaching and our research.”

He said the idea exchange “is really an important step in furthering this collaborative dialogue and a chance for strengthening our faculty work with our public service through our teaching and research — hopefully as a center of excellence here at our University.”

Paul Supowitz, vice chancellor for community relations, told faculty that the idea exchange reaffirms the importance of these efforts University-wide. He added that the timing is ideal, given the strategic planning that is underway.

“There couldn’t be a better time to have this kind of conversation,” Supowitz said, noting that academically based community engagement supports, promotes and informs all five of Pitt’s strategic goals: academic excellence; research impact; strengthening communities; building foundational strength; and embracing diversity and inclusion.

“Everywhere you look there are good things happening in this realm,” he said, citing as examples Pitt’s partnerships in the Hill District and Homewood neighborhoods, its contributions toward broadening access to public data via the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center and an upcoming multi-university forum on campus on the subject of addressing underage drinking.

“There are countless examples of the engagement that exists around us. That means that there are countless opportunities for us, for our students and for our communities,” he said.

*

The service learning idea exchange proceedings can be viewed at https://pitt.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=04089756-14f3-4e16-95ec-869c2a0cbe1d.

Other resources are posted at www.honorscollege.pitt.edu/abce.

—Kimberly K. Barlow