Faculty Role Integration and Community Engagement: Harmony or Cacophony?

Abstract

Colleges and universities that aim to sustain or expand community partnerships and institutionalize civic engagement face important faculty challenges. Faculty adoption of community-based pedagogies and research approaches, in turn, faces important practical and conceptual barriers, as engagement activities appear in competition with expected teaching, research, and service roles. Semi-structured interviews with 29 faculty members at one private liberal arts college, all of whom engaged in teaching, research, and/or service in their local community within a broadly supportive institutional environment, explored whether and how faculty achieved integration among teaching, research, and community engagement roles within local expectations for high teaching and research achievement. Findings reveal three faculty orientations toward integration of teaching, research, and community partnerships—an “integrated” view, an “if only…” view, and a “non-integrated” view. Faculty development strategies that seek intentional integration of these three roles may facilitate and improve faculty research and teaching and institutional impact in the community.