NERCHE Announces the Recipient
of the 2008
Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement
“. . . [T]he domain of knowledge has no one-way streets. Knowledge does not move from the locus of research to the place of application, from scholar to practitioner, teacher to student, expert to client. It is everywhere fed back, constantly enhanced. We need to think of knowledge in an ecological fashion, recognizing the complex, multifaceted and multiply-connected system by means of which discovery, aggregation, synthesis, dissemination, and application are interconnected and interacting in a wide variety of ways.” Ernest Lynton, “Knowledge and Scholarship” (1994)
For Ernest Lynton, the generation of new knowledge requires engagement, and the act of engagement situates academics squarely within the public culture of democracy. Engagement, as he describes it in the passage above, seeks to bring community partners into collaborative public problem-solving along with academics with shared authority over the direction of research and mutual deference between academics and those outside the academy in the conduct of scholarly work.
No college or university exists apart from very “real” world challenges of persistent poverty and prejudice, a degraded environment, disparities in heath care, and an educational system that continues to operate on an uneven playing field. When public problems such as these are viewed from a position of disengaged expert knowledge, then their solutions will lack the necessary authenticity to bring about sustainable change. The scholarly work of 2008 recipients of the Lynton Award and the Citation for Distinguished Engaged Scholarship exemplifies how community engaged scholarship helps higher education better fulfill its academic and civic missions.
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This year we are pleased to present the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement to Michelle Dunlap from Connecticut College.
The 2008 recipient of the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement, Michelle Dunlap, associate professor of human development at Connecticut College, understands that scholarship of integrity is grounded in formal obligations and long-term commitments met though fully engaged citizenship in the communities in which one lives and with which one works—neighborhood and college alike. Describing her theory of practice, she writes, “I believe that until opportunity and equity have been reached for all people—until social challenges such as poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia have been eliminated—until we all have equal access to education and some semblance of socioeconomic stability—until then, a scholar’s life, career, teaching, research, and service is not their own. But rather, our life belongs to the community.”
In her work with the Southeastern Connecticut Mental Health System of Care (SEMHSOC), Michelle calls upon her own networks in underserved communities to arrange dialogues between SEMHSOC members and individuals from the most underserved communities in the area in order to help the agency improve services to children of color. Her approach to education does not draw value distinctions between academic and nonacademic expertise. A director from the Connecticut Department of Children and Families testified to Michelle’s skills at engaging “a community, the Department, a foster family, and DCF children in a process that brought about a solution which decreased the animosity and poor relationships that had developed.” As part of this work, a research team made up of six undergraduate students, a Connecticut College alum, and a community youth is working collaboratively to collect and analyze data in a study geared toward gaining a better understanding of the personality and demographic variables that are associated with favorable and unfavorable opinions of minority family communication and discipline among professionals who work with minority families. The research team will also collaborate on conference presentations and scholarly publications emerging from this work.
Michelle has supervised nearly 1,400 students as they have engaged in service learning in the “racially and socio-economically eclectic community” that surrounds the college and in which she lives. Students’ journals become a tool to help them navigate through cultures which are different from their own, as they assess their learning and emotional growth. With the assistance of an undergraduate research assistant and with the permission of the students, Michelle analyzed students’ journals and produced a widely-read booking the field of service learning, Reaching Out to Children and Families: Students Model Effective Community Service.” Her most recent publication (forthcoming, spring 2009) is a book co-authored with S. Evans, C. Taylor, and D. Miller, African Americans and Community Engagement in Higher Education: Perspectives of Race in Community Service, Service-Learning, and Community Based Research (NY: SUNY Press).
Praise from the president of Connecticut College illustrates the value placed on her and her work within the college community: “Professor Dunlap is an exemplar of the kind of teacher/scholar we prize at Connecticut College because she so aptly expresses the college’s mission in her work and person. Our mission affirms that ‘Connecticut College educates students to put the liberal arts into action as citizens in a global society.’”
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NERCHE is pleased to honor the work of both Rose-Marie Chierici and Ann Feldman with Citations for Distinguished Engaged Scholarship.
Rose-Marie Chierici, associate professor of anthropology at SUNY-Geneseo, has undertaken long-term development work in Haiti that ranges from grassroots engagement with peasant organizations, village cooperatives, and women’s groups, to a formal partnership with the Haitian Ministry of Health to organize, manage, and fund a comprehensive health care system for the city of Borgne, in one of the country’s most impoverished regions. The latter is no small feat in such a volatile country. In her view, engaged scholarship involves “a commitment to social justice and a willingness to examine structures of inequality.” Much of Rose-Marie’s work is accomplished collaboratively with the resilient people in the villages of Haiti—her “partners and colleagues,” and with the involvement of students who work alongside community groups. Her students function as academic partners in research and scholarly work. Indeed, the provost at SUNY-Geneseo cites the growth and development of Rose-Marie’s students as evidence of her successful scholarship: “Some of these students are currently faculty members who have chosen the path illustrated by Dr. Chierici. Others are in various stages of their undergraduate or graduate programs, but they all speak to what it meant to have Rose-Marie as a mentor.” One wrote, “Dr. Cheirici taught me by example that only by listening to community members and valuing that knowledge and experience can one participate in positive changes and improvements, a lesson often forgotten in development circles.”
Ann Feldman, associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has developed a four-course community-based writing curriculum that has, in the words of the vice provost for undergraduate affairs, “literally built a culture of teaching writing through real-world writing experiences. That is, the writing in the program is the engaged activity—it is not simply and as commonly used—a means of communicating what you did during your engaged activity.” The Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program (CCLCP) is the embodiment of Ann’s goals as an engaged educator and scholar. She writes, “As I argue in my new book, Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University, my goal has been to make students better writers, which, to me, means situated writers. Such writers are motivated by the particular context in which a piece of writing is called for, conceptualized, produced, and delivered.” The program, in which students design and produce writing projects that are beneficial to their community partners, is carried out through the collaborative efforts of faculty, graduate students, and community members—who function as both co-teachers and co-planners—and is rigorously assessed each year. A community partner attests to the mutual learning that results from working with writing students from the program: “…we not only have developed better written materials, but have also benefited from the insights of dynamic external perspectives.” The institutional impact of the program has been significant. CCLCP “has permanently changed the shape of the teaching of writing throughout the entire university, enlivened contacts between the university and the city, and cultivated a new ethos of intellectually intense community involvement,” writes her department head. He continues, attesting to the program’s impact on the university, “[I]n four years, Dr. Feldman has brought CCLCP from a relatively marginal to an absolutely central position among UIC’s respected and valued undergraduate programs.”
The presentation of the 2008 Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement will take place at the annual conference of the Coalition for Urban Metropolitan Universities (CUMU), “Building Bridges to Regional Stewardship,” hosted by Northern Kentucky University and the University of Cincinnati, on October 19, 2009 at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center.
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