Creating the Character, Culture, and Craft of Engagement

Abstract

Because faculty members and staff create majors and minors in service-learning, public engagement, civic work, and related areas, it is important that they understand community engagement in context, that is, how it works on specific campuses, depending on the organizational culture, norms, mission and, of course, relationships, both within and outside the institution. As Furco and Miller (2009) document, there are multiple measures of the extent to which community engagement has been institutionalized on campuses. Just as important, however, is the way in which community engagement has been implemented and how it is characterized and understood on campus. In this chapter, I report on community engagement at Bryant University, an organization with a long history and strong tradition as a business school. I examine how service-learning was “branded” and conceptualized in our new sociology major, illustrating how we developed the character, culture, and craft of engagement. Finally, I propose some lessons we learned that might provide guidance to other campuses considering developing a service-learning major within a discipline.