Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty

 
  Lynton booklet cover
  Download a copy of the
Lynton Award Profile (PDF)
   
"In short, the 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)
 

The annual Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty recognizes a faculty member who connects his or her teaching, research, and service to community engagement. The Lynton Award is designated as an award for early career faculty who are pre-tenure at tenure-granting campuses or early career--within the first six years--at campuses with long-term contracts. (See below for information on the Thomas Ehrlich Award for senior faculty.)

Ernest Lynton framed faculty scholarly activity as inclusive, collaborative, and problem-oriented work in which academics share knowledge-generating tasks with the public and involve community partners as collaborators in public problem-solving. The core value of reciprocity involves "true partnership, based on both sides bringing their own experience and expertise to the project."

Community engagement describes the collaboration between faculty and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.

-- Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

The Lynton Award emphasizes engaged scholarly work across the faculty roles. The scholarship of engagement (also known as outreach scholarship, public scholarship, scholarship for the common good, community-based scholarship, and community engaged scholarship) represents an integrated view of the faculty role in which teaching, research, and service overlap and are mutually reinforcing, is characterized by scholarly work tied to a faculty member's expertise, is of benefit to the external community, is visible and shared with community stakeholders, and reflects the mission of the institution. In addition, NERCHE conceptualizes scholarly engagement in terms of social justice embedded in democratic ideals.

To learn more about the history of the Ernest A. Lynton Award, click here.

To learn more about the 2012 Lynton Award recipient, click here.  To learn more about past recipients, click here.

National Faculty Awards for Civic Engagement:

For faculty committed to civic and community engagement, there are two major national awards: the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty, from NERCHE, and the Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award, from Campus Compact. Both awards value community collaboration as well as institutional impact and honor engaged scholarly work across the faculty roles of teaching, research, and service.We encourage nominations for early career faculty (pre-tenure or early career at institutions with renewable contracts) for the Lynton Award and nominations for senior faculty (post-tenure or middle-to-late career at institutions without tenure) for the Ehrlich Award. Please share information about the awards with your colleagues.