Conceptualization of the Scholarship of Engagement in Higher Education: A Strategic Review, 1996-2006

Abstract

During the past decade, the generalized concept of the scholarship of engagement has evolved. Once a broad call for higher education to be more responsive to communities, it is now a multifaceted field of responses. This article describes the evolution of the term; then, to clarify the “definitional anarchy” that has arisen around its use, it explores the past decade’s punc-tuations in the evolutionary progress of the concept. Finally, it calls for moving beyond descriptive, narrative works to more critical, empirical research as well as policy analysis and intro-duces the possibility that the next punctuation will be the devel-opment of engaged scholarship’s own theory. The Beginning of a Movement “... the academy must become a more vigorous partner in the search for answers to our most pressing social, civic, economic and moral problems, and must reaffirm its his-toric commitment to what I call the scholarship of engage-ment. ” Ernest Boyer (1996, p. 11) E mbracing Ernest Boyer’s challenge for higher education to “reaffirm its historic commitment to... the scholarship of engagement ” has, over the past decade, led to broader con-ceptualizations of academic scholarship itself and, thus, a stronger integration of faculty research and student learning into the life of communities outside the academy. Educators who define their work within the national scholarship of engagement movement tend to draw from service-learning pedagogy, community-based participatory research, public scholarship, and other intellectual arenas as a set of powerful strategies for collaboratively generating knowledge and practices to alleviate social problems affecting com-munities (Bringle, Games, and Malloy 1999). Within this movement, “scholarship of engagement ” now references such a wide variety of activities in higher education that confusion often results from the use of the term. This article seeks to clarify the resulting “defini-tional anarchy ” in the field.