Engaged Research and Practice

“[This volume] highlights research and practice within the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good to demonstrate how engaged scholarship can have a direct impact on local, state, and national communities. By giving examples of engaged scholarship at these varying levels of community, Engaged Research and Practice provides snapshots of engagement at different scales, thus advancing a concept of engaged research that moves beyond working with a local neighborhood or a non-profit organization. These chapters provide examples of organizational change at the institutional level and state and national initiatives all informed by or part of engaged research for the public good.”

Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement

"The centerpiece of this important book is the case for how engaged research and scholarship revitalizes campus commitments to the public good. Making this case positions publicly engaged scholarship as a potent alternative to the neoliberal logic of privatization in ascendency in higher education. Engaged Research and Practice clarifies what commitments to the public good look like on the ground, on campus and in communities, and offers hope for a more socially just and democratic vision of higher education."

John Saltmarsh, Professor of Higher Education - University of Massachusetts

“Generous public and private investments made the U.S. postsecondary education system the envy of the world, and now it is pay-back time. By championing the kinds of engaged, actionable inquiry described by the contributors to this book, colleges and universities can help strengthen the fraying social fabric plaguing many local communities, promote equity, and remedy injustice, changing our world for the better.”

George D. Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor of Higher Education Emeritus - Indiana University

From the Foreword:
“READ this book! The essential messages among the pages are not the first or final words regarding higher education's special relationship with the society that created and supports it. Sit with it. Put it down and pick it up again later. It shifts perspective kaleidoscopically; what you see depends on where you stand at any given moment. The messages encourage reflections, as all good work should do. Argue with the perspectives outlined in the following pages. Curse and correct the messages. But don't leave the messages and their reflections be....Doing so begins the end of engagement and signals the irrelevance of scholarship. Engaged scholarship begs for engagement. Not necessarily agreement or blind fidelity...but stringent and earnest engagement.
If nothing else, this collection calls higher education to question, again, its claim to relevance at a time in American society when neoliberal and commercial objectives of higher education are winning out over the broader life sustaining objectives of justice, knowledge, compassion and community."

Tony Chambers

Series Foreword - Edward P. St. John
Foreword - Tony Chambers
Acknowledgments

PART ONE: Introduction to Engaged Research and Practice
1. Engagement for the Common Good: Situating the National Forum’s Work, Betty Overton
2. Scholarship and Activism on Behalf of Higher Education’s Public Good Mission: An Organizational Context. John C. Burkhardt

PART TWO: Engaging the Community Level
3. Conflating Community Means With Organizational Ends: Strengthening Reciprocity in a Multisector Higher Education Access Partnership, Elizabeth Hudson
4. Community Agency and College-Going Culture: The Use of Participatory Action Research, Esmeralda Hernandez-Hamed
5. Collaborative Approaches to Community Change: The Complexities of Power, Collaboration, and Social Change, Penny A. Pasque
Refl ective Narrative: Finding Voice in Communidad, Estefanía López
Refl ective Narrative: Making Herstory: Inside and Outside the Walls of Academia, Lena M. Khader
Refl ective Narrative: The Education Of A Fontanero, Jessica L. Cañas

PART THREE: Engaging the Institutional Level
6. Challenges to Diversity: Engaged Administrative Leadership for Transformation in Contested Domains, Cassie L. Barnhardt
7. Access Points to the American Dream: Immigrant Students in Community Colleges, Kyle Southern, Teresita Wisell, and Jill Casner-Lotto
8. Organizational Transformation for Catalytic Social Change, Lara Kovacheff -Badke
Refl ective Narrative: A View From the Hyphen Bridging: Theory and Practice, Will Cherrin
Refl ective Narrative: A Journey of Social Consciousness and Action From Teaching Assistantship and Service-Learning Experiences, Megan B. Lebre
Refl ective Narrative: The Impact of Research Involvement on My Own Understanding of Educational Equity, Briana Akani

PART FOUR: Engaging Policy Discussions at the State and National Levels
9. Undocumented Student Access to Higher Education: Focused Efforts at the Federal and Institutional Levels, Kimberly A. Reyes, Aurora Kamimura, and Kyle Southern
10. “The Problem With Our Students . . . Is That Their Families Don’t Value Education”, Magdalena Martinez
11. Linking State Priorities With Local Strategies: Examining the Role of Communities in Postsecondary Access and Success in Michigan, Nathan J. Daun-Barnett
Refl ective Narrative: Ashley Smith’s Journey, Ashley Smith
Refl ective Narrative: Growing, Learning, and Bringing Back, Amicia Gomez Bowman
Refl ective Narrative: Undocumented Students, Chengchen Zhu

PART FIVE Concluding Thoughts on Engaged Research and Practice
12. Refl ections: Lessons Learned and Next Steps, Betty Overton

Contributors
Index

Betty Overton

Betty Overton is a Professor of Clinical Practice in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE) and the Director of the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good. Betty is active in higher education, serving on the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Universities (NCA), the board of the American Association of Higher Education & Accreditation (AAHEA), and the editorial board of Liberal Education, published by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).

Penny A. Pasque

Penny A. Pasque is professor in Educational Studies, director of the QualLab, and director of Qualitative Methods in the Office of Research, Innovation and Collaboration (ORIC), College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University. Pasque is editor of The Review of Higher Education (with Dr. Thomas F. Nelson Laird). RHE is considered one of the leading research journals in the field and is the official journal of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.  

Her research addresses complexities in qualitative inquiry, in/equities in higher education, and dis/connections between higher education and society. She works with qualitative methodologies as well as studies qualitative methodologies that work toward social justice and educational equity. Pasque’s research has appeared in over 100 journal articles and books, including in The Journal of Higher Education, Qualitative Inquiry, The Review of Higher Education, Peabody Journal of Education, Diversity in Higher Education, Cultural Studies<->Critical Methodologies, among others.

Her books include Qualitative Inquiry in Higher Education Organization and Policy Research (with Lechuga, Routledge), Qualitative Inquiry for Equity in Higher Education: Methodological Innovations, Implications, and Interventions (with Carducci, Kuntz & Gildersleeve, Jossey-Bass), Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures (with Cannella & Salazar Pérez, Left Coast Press), American Higher Education Leadership and Policy: Critical Issues and the Public Good (Palgrave Macmillan), Empowering Women in Higher Education and Student Affairs (with Nicholson, Stylus), Transforming Understandings of Diversity in Higher Education (with Ortega, Burkhardt, & Ting, Stylus) and Engaged Research and Practice (with Overton & Burkhardt, Stylus).

Currently, she’s editor for the “critical & social justice” section of the upcoming Routledge Encyclopedia (Salvo & Ulmer, eds.), writing a chapter / reviewing for a Handbook on Critical Approaches (theory and methods) to education research (Young & Diem, eds), a co-PI on an epistemic injustice research project (with Leslie Gonzales, Michigan State University) and collaborating with former students on the RED-DIRT Indigenous Research project (Dr. Corey Still, Breanna Faris & Monty Begaye).

John C. Burkhardt

John C. Burkhardt has directed the National Center for Institutional Diversity since 2013. He also is a professor of clinical practice in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan and serves as special assistant to the provost for university engagement. He was the founding director of the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good, which he led from 2000 to 2013. From 1993-2000 he was program director for leadership and higher education at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, where he led several major initiatives focused on transformation and change in higher education and participated in a comprehensive effort to encourage leadership development among college students.