1. Scholarship of Engagement
IAM PDW Maynooth
September, 2012
Peter McKiernan
Strathclyde and Murdoch Universities

2. Agenda
• Personal journey: two stories
• Your stories
• So what is SoE?
• Skill sets to success sets
• What projects?
• What questions to ask?

3. Scholarship of Engagement
Involves the Engagement!
Community
Benefits Enhances
the Academic’s
Community Scholarship

4. Differentiating SoE from other
Community Interventions
Involves the Benefits the Involves the Advances
Community Community Academic’s Academic’s
Expertise Scholarship
Volunteering Yes Yes No No
Professional Yes Yes Yes No
Service
Scholarship of Yes Yes Yes Yes
Engagement
Howard, 2008

5. Definition
• The Scholarship of Engagement “requires going
beyond the expert model that often gets in the
way of constructive university-community
collaboration...calls on faculty to move beyond
„outreach,‟...asks scholars to go beyond
„service,‟ with its overtones of noblesse oblige.
What it emphasizes is genuine collaboration: that
the learning and teaching be multidirectional and
the expertise shared. It represents a basic re-
conceptualization of faculty involvement in
community-based work.”
O‟Meara & Rice, Faculty Priorities Reconsidered (2005).

6. Assessing SoE
What do we want to know? How will we know it?
Benefits of Partnership Community Perspective
HE Perspective
Service Sector Perspective
Participation & Collaboration Planning, Decision-Making
Implementation, Management
Communication Within Partnerships
Between Partnerships
Sustainability Organisational Structures
Resource Allocation
Scholarship of Engagement Discovery, Integration, Application,
Teaching & Learning* (Boyer, 1990)
Gelmon, 2003

7. Local not Global
• “The unwitting outcome of a value system
that prioritizes a “cosmopolitan” model of
professionals who circulate in (inter)national
labor markets has been a profession that is
increasingly detached from communities in
which they are situated.”
(Rhoades, 2009)

8. Traditional Views on Scholarship Versus the Scholarship of Engagement
Traditional Scholarship
• Breaks new ground in the discipline
• Answers significant questions in the discipline
• Is reviewed and validated by qualified peers in the discipline
• Is based on a solid theoretical basis
• Applies appropriate investigative methods Is disseminated to appropriate audiences
• Makes significant advances in knowledge and understanding of the discipline
Scholarship of Engagement
• Breaks new ground in the discipline and has a direct application to broader public issues
• Answers significant questions in the discipline, which have relevance to public or community
issues
• Is reviewed and validated by qualified peers in the discipline and members of the community
• Is based on solid theoretical and practical bases
• Applies appropriate investigative methods and Is disseminated to appropriate audiences
• Makes significant advances in knowledge and understanding of the discipline and public
social issues
• Applies the knowledge to address social issues in the local community
Andy Furco, Director of Service-learning Research, UC Berkeley

9. Epistemological Shift
Traditional Academic Engaged Knowledge Generation
Knowledge Generation
Unidirectional Flow An Ecosystem of Knowledge
Of Knowledge
Application Engagement

10. Benefits?
Academics External Partners Discipline/Profession
Students Institutions

11. Lorilee Sandmann
(Georgia Univ)
• The focus of my career in adult, continuing, and higher education has been
developing knowledge that can help solve public problems through the
collaboration of communities and institutions of higher education. This
area of inquiry, scholarship of engagement or “engaged scholarship,” is
typically expressed in community-based service learning, research, and
partnerships. As evidenced below, I am recognized as a national and
international leader and scholarly practitioner in this field of study with
impact in (a) conceptualizing the theory and practice of the scholarship of
engagement, (b) identifying and strengthening major institutional change
processes and systems that promote and institutionalize higher education
community engagement, and (c) building capacity for engaged scholarship
with future faculty, current faculty, and higher education administrators.
My work is advancing the scholarship of engagement theory, knowledge
about engagement through research, application and practice, as well as
leadership and service so that the academy can become more responsive
and relevant to the public good.

12. Mary Beth Lima
(11 Playgrounds built)_
• Make it count!
• P&T is about counting; find out what your dept, college, university
wants
• Create “countable” products
frame your work in the dept, college, and univ missions
• Find ways to engage your colleagues
• If you get to choose external evaluators, pick people that are
familiar with and support community engagement
• Be persistent
• Dare to fail
• Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer
• If you never stepped on anyone’s toes, you never took a walk