Abstract
This chapter argues feminist pragmatist philosophy, transdisciplinarity, and the current movement towards public engagement offer a fruitful vision, pathway, and set of strategies for catalyzing collaborative teaching and learning within the academy. Given the authors’ commitment to a reflective praxis of engagement, it also documents our collective attempt to put these commitments into practice at our own institution. We conclude by highlighting the need for creative and collaborative advocacy efforts designed to not only reimagine the academy but also enact structural, procedural, and cultural changes.
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Notes
- 1.
See Robert Frodeman , Sustainable Knowledge: A Theory of Interdisciplinarity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Ketevan Mamiseishvili and Vicki J. Rosser, “Examining the Relationship between Faculty Productivity and Job Satisfaction,” Journal of the Professoriate 5, no. 2 (2011): 101–132.
- 2.
Paul Williams, “The Competent Boundary Spanner,” Public Administration 80, no 1 (2002): 103–124.
- 3.
Public engagement efforts harness transdisciplinary tools to engage all stakeholders (instructors, staff, students, and community partners) in the co-creation and enactment of knowledge . Nicholas V. Longo and Cynthia M. Gibson, “Collaborative Engagement: The Future of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education,” in Publicly Engaged Scholars: The Next Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2016): 65.
- 4.
Transdisciplinarity, as the movement between one’s home base and the community, requires educators engage “many perspectives to frame questions, explore options, and develop and then apply solutions to challenges.” Judith A. Ramaley, “The Changing Role of Higher Education: Learning to Deal with Wicked Problems,” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement 18, no. 3 (2014): 111.
- 5.
KerryAnn O’Meara, “Legitimacy, Agency, and Inequality: Organizational Practices for Full Participation of Community-engaged Faculty,” in Publicly Engaged Scholars: The Next Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2016): 104.
- 6.
See Danielle Lake, “Jane Addams and Wicked Problems: Putting the Pragmatic Method to Use,” The Pluralist 9, no. 3 (2014): 77–94; Ramaley, “The Changing Role of Higher Education;” and Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155–169.
- 7.
Matthew Hartley and John Saltmarsh, “Civic Engagement and American Higher Education,” in Publicly Engaged Scholars: The Next Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2016): 36.
- 8.
Bonnie L. Keeler, Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Anne D. Guerry, Prue F.E. Addison, Charles Bettigole, Ingrid C. Burke, et al., “Society is Ready for a New Kind of Science—Is Academia?” BioScience 67, no. 7 (2017): 591.
- 9.
American Association of University Professors, “Background Facts on Contingent Faculty,” aaup.org , https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts. (accessed August 21, 2017).
- 10.
John Saltmarsh, Dwight E. Giles, Elaine Ward, and Suzanne M. Buglione, “Rewarding Community-Engaged Scholarship,” in New Directions for Higher Education (2009): 25–35 and John Saltmarsh, Emily M. Janke, and Patti H. Clayton, “Transforming Higher Education Through and for Democratic Civic Engagement: A Model for Change,” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning: The SLCE Future Directions Project (2015): 122–127.
- 11.
The concept of collaborative engagement is not new within the academy ; it is part of a movement that has been increasingly gaining support, both from the top-down and the bottom-up within the university.
- 12.
See Marcia Baxter Magolda, Making their Own Way: Narratives for Transforming Higher Education to Promote Self-Development (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2007); and Longo and Gibson, Publicly Engaged.
- 13.
Ignoring the lessons derived from employing our theories on the ground is a dangerous mistake just as failing to reflect on how our theories tend to shape our reality is also often a dangerous mistake. In moving between theory and action on the world, there is more opportunity for flexible responses to changing conditions and thus more opportunity for fruitful growth and transformation.
- 14.
Judy Whipps and Danielle Lake, “Feminist Pragmatism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2016).
- 15.
Aaron Stoller, “The Theory Gap in Higher Education,” Research in Education 96, no. 1 (2015): 39–45.
- 16.
John Dewey , MW 1:38.
- 17.
John Dewey , LW 12:502. Dewey’s writings also illuminate why academic institutions so often fail to cope with change and adapt to current crises, let alone collaborate with one another or with the public . On this note, he also detects the role underlying habits play in stymying our efforts at effective change.
- 18.
Celia Bardwell-Jones and Maurice Hamington, eds., Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism (New York: Routledge, 2013).
- 19.
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 182.
- 20.
See Roger Koppl, “The Social Construction of Expertise, Society 47, no. 3 (2010): 220–226.
- 21.
David Kolb , Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 182.
- 22.
Ibid., 162.
- 23.
Parker Palmer , The Courage to Teach. Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 13.
- 24.
Ibid., 17.
- 25.
Grace Lee Boggs and Ossie Davis, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 140.
- 26.
Ibid., 136.
- 27.
Frank Fischer, Citizens, Experts and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000), 38.
- 28.
Faculty culture generally encourages an insular focus on “‘my courses,’ ‘my scholarly agenda,’ ‘my students,’ and even ‘my community partner(s).’” See Kevin Kecskes, “Collectivizing our Impact: Engaging Departments and Academic Change.” Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement 6, no. 3 (2015): 58.
- 29.
For example, tenure and publication processes encourage deep but often narrow knowledge construction and thus often offer only partial perspectives. They do this by narrowing the pool of other people scholars are in dialogue with (most often subspecialists) and by honoring technical and abstract language. While such an approach may be effective for understanding technical issues and resolving complex equations, it does not create spaces and opportunity to consider the larger purpose of one’s work nor its possible application.
- 30.
John Saltmarsh and Matthew Hartley, “The Inheritance of Next-generation Engagement Scholars” in Publicly Engaged Scholars: Next-generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education, edited by Margaret A. Post, Elaine Ward, Nicholas V. Longo, and John Saltmarsh (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2016) 15–33.
- 31.
Gary Rhoads, Judy Marquez Kiyama, Rudy McCormick, and Marisol Quiroz, “Local Cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitan Locals: New Models of Professionals in the Academy,” Review of Higher Education 31, no. 2 (2008): 215.
- 32.
See Baxter Magolda, Making their Own; Vicky Gunn, “Constraints to Implementing Learning Partnership Models and Self-authorship in the Arts and Humanities” in The University and Its Disciplines: Teaching and Learning Within and Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries, edited by Caroline Kreber (New York: Routledge, 2009) 169–178.
- 33.
Post and Ward, Publicly Engaged.
- 34.
Robert J. Nash, Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2004) 57.
- 35.
See Hartley and Saltmarsh, “Civic Engagement” and Longo and Gibson, “Collaborative Engagement.”
- 36.
Saltmarsh and Hartley, “The Inheritance of Next Generation,” 25.
- 37.
Gunn, “Constraints to Implementing,” 172.
- 38.
However, there are research fields and methodologies where these spheres have merged, such as participatory action research , sustainability science , and transdisciplinary research . See Katja Brundiers, Arnim Wiek, and Braden Kay, “The Role of Transacademic Interface Managers in Transformational Sustainability Research and Education,” Sustainability 5 (2013): 4614–4636. doi: 10.3390/su5114614.
- 39.
See Dan Berrett, “Tenure Across Borders: Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration Get Formal Recognition in New USC Guidelines for Promotion,” in Inside Higher Ed, (July 11, 2011); Julie Thompson Klein and Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, “Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Work: Framing Promotion and Tenure Practices and Policies,” in Research Policy 46 (2017): 1055–1061.
- 40.
O’Meara refers to this as a practice of “legitimacy surveillance” and considers the common practice of warning or advising engaged scholars “to spend less time on engaged work and more time on traditional scholarship to move up in systems of academic legitimacy,” (98) as problematic, particularly when such warnings are accompanied by concerns about rigor and complexity. This same concept and practice can be applied to collaborative research where an individual scholar’s contributions may be questioned or doubted. See O’Meara, “Legitimacy, Agency, and Inequality.”
- 41.
Rosemary Rushmer, “Responsive Research—Simple, Right? The AskFuse Case Study.” Integration and Implementation Insights, July 11, 2017, https://i2insights.org/2017/07/11/responsive-research-askfuse-case/. (accessed August 16, 2017).
- 42.
Rosemary Rushmer, Janet Shucksmith, and The Fuse Knowledge Exchange Group KEG, “AskFuse Origins: System Barriers to Providing the Research that Public Health Practice and Policy Partners Say they Need, Evidence and Policy (2016). http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tpp/ep/pre-prints/content-evp_108. (accessed August 16, 2017).
- 43.
Gunn, “Constraints to Implementing.”
- 44.
Ashley Finley, “A Brief Review of the Evidence on Civic Learning in Higher Education.” Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2012, https://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/crucible/CivicOutcomesBrief.pdf.
- 45.
Klein and Falk-Krzesinski, “Interdisciplinary and Collaborative.”
- 46.
King and Kenson, 2002, p. 109.
- 47.
Allen F. Repko, Rick Szostak, and Michelle P. Buchberger, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies. (Los Angeles, California: SAGE, 2014).
- 48.
Saltmarsh, Hartley, and Clayton define such work as “inclusive, collaborative, and problem-oriented work in which academics share knowledge generating tasks with the public and involve community partners as participants in public problem-solving” (“Transforming Higher Education,” 9).
- 49.
Valerie Brown, “Preface: Transdisciplinarity: A Way of the future?” in Transdisciplinary Research and Practice for Sustainability Outcomes, edited by Dena Fam, Jane Palmer, Chris Riedy, and Cynthia Mitchell, (New York: Routledge, 2017) xxii–xxiv.
- 50.
Brian Ó Donnchadha, “Creating a Systematic Approach for the Reflective Practice of Service-learning Academics through the Development of Communities of Reflective Practice,” Doctoral Dissertation, (National University of Ireland, 2012).
- 51.
Robert D. Reason, Patrick T. Terenzini, and Robert J. Domingo, “Developing Social and Personal Competence in the First Year of College,” Review of Higher Education 30, no. 3 (2007): 271–299; Emily M. Janke and Jennifer M. Domagal-Goldman. “Institutional Characteristics and Student Civic Outcomes,” Research on Student Civic Outcomes in Service Learning: Conceptual Frameworks and Methods, edited by Julie A. Hatcher, Robert G. Bringle, and Thomas W. Hahn (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2017), 261–281.
- 52.
Frodeman , Sustainable Knowledge, 61.
- 53.
Pew Faculty Teaching and Learning Center, “Faculty Learning Community Participation Grant,” Grand Valley State University, Last modified July 29, 2017, http://www.gvsu.edu/ftlc/faculty-learning-community-participation-grant-168.htm. (accessed August 16, 2017).
- 54.
Post and Ward, Publicly Engaged.
- 55.
Office for Community Engagement, “Engaged Department Initiative,” Grand Valley State University, Last modified February 14, 2017, https://www.gvsu.edu/community/engaged-department-initiative-74.htm. (accessed August 16, 2017).
- 56.
Office for Community Engagement, “Civic Action Plan,” Grand Valley State University, Last modified April 24, 2017. http://www.gvsu.edu/community/civic-action-plan-105.htm. (accessed August 16, 2017).
- 57.
New England Resource Center for Higher Education, “Carnegie Community Engagement Classification,” nerche.org , http://www.nerche.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=341&Itemid=618. (accessed August 16, 2017).
- 58.
U.S. Census Bureau. “Quick Facts: Michigan.” July 1, 2016. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MI/PST045216. (accessed August 16, 2017); Institutional Analysis, “GVSU Quick Facts: 2016–17,” Gvsu.edu, http://reports.ia.gvsu.edu/quick_2016_02JUN17.html. (accessed August 16, 2017).
- 59.
See Brundiers, Wiek, and Kay, “The Role of Transacademic Interface Managers.”
- 60.
Alfred Montero, “Pathways” Carleton College , Carleton.edu, Last modified August 26, 2016 https://apps.carleton.edu/pathways/. (accessed August 16, 2017).
- 61.
Stoller, “The Theory Gap in Higher Education.”
- 62.
Carrie Williams Howe, Kimberly Coleman, Kelly Hamshaw, and Katherine Westdijk, “Student Development and Service-learning: A Three-phased Model for Course Design,” The International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement 2 (2014): 44–62.
- 63.
We also recommended the establishment of a set of standards to qualify community partners to teach such a class through “tested experience,” thereby satisfying the Higher Learning Commission’s faculty guidelines; see Higher Learning Commission, “Determining Qualified Faculty through HLC’s Criteria for Accreditation and Assumed Practices: Guidelines for Institutions and Peer Review,” Higher Learning Commission, 2016, http://download.hlcommission.org/FacultyGuidelines_2016_OPB.pdf.
- 64.
See Nicholas V. Longo, Abby Kiesa, and Richard Battistoni, “The Future of the Academy with Students as Colleagues,” in Publicly Engaged Scholars: The Next Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2016): 197–213.
- 65.
Amy Driscoll, “Carnegie’s Community-Engagement Classification: Intentions and Insights,” Change 40 (2008): 40.
- 66.
Ibid.
- 67.
Ibid., 41.
- 68.
Farrah Jacquez, Elaine Ward, and Molly Goguen, “Collaborative Engagement Research and Implications for Institutional Change,” in Publicly Engaged Scholars: The Next Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2016) 104.
Acknowledgement
The successful outreach efforts of this learning community and the recommendations shared here emerged from the hard work and commitment of many people thinking and acting together. We would like to thank our learning community colleagues for their time, creative ingenuity, flexibility, tenacity, and courageous activism working towards changing our campus climate. We would also like to thank those who read and made invaluable feedback on numerous drafts of this chapter, including Dawn Rutecki, Gloria Mileva, and Ellerie Ambrose.
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Lake, D., McFarland, A., Jennrich, J. (2018). Remaking the Academy: The Potential and the Challenge of Transdisciplinary Collaborative Engagement. In: Stoller, A., Kramer, E. (eds) Contemporary Philosophical Proposals for the University. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72128-6_10
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