Carolina Center for Public Service - Public Service and Engagement at Carolina

Other Engagement Definitions

“By embracing public engagement, Carolina can sharpen and strengthen its service. The University should be responsive to community concerns and build strong and lasting community partnerships while integrating service more fully into its teaching and research missions. Working collaboratively and with coordination to achieve maximum efficiencies, the University should engage communities throughout the state by inviting them to share their needs and how the University might help and learn from them. … The University should conduct partnered and participatory research and provide continuing and non-degree educational programs for North Carolina businesses, non-profits and governments in economic and community development, based on the needs defined by the leaders in those organizations.”

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Academic Plan (2003)

 

“Outreach and engagement occur when scholarship is applied directly for the public good and when the relationship between partners is reciprocal and mutually beneficial.”

Michigan State University, Office of Outreach and Engagement

 

“By ‘community engagement’ we mean applying institutional resources (e.g., knowledge and expertise of students, faculty and staff; political position, buildings and land) to address and solve challenges facing communities through collaboration with these communities. … Community engagement is not necessarily scholarship.”

Community Campus Partnerships for Health

 

“Engagement is defined as a meaningful and mutually beneficial collaboration with partners in education, business, and public and social service. It involves using:

That aspect of teaching that enables learning beyond the campus walls;

That aspect of research that makes what we discover useful beyond the academic community; and

That aspect of service that directly benefits the public.”

Ohio State University

 

“Engagement is the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.”

Committee on Institutional Cooperation, Committee on Engagement

 

“By engagement, we refer to institutions that have redesigned their teaching, research, and extension and service functions to become even more sympathetically and productively involved with their communities, however community may be defined.”

National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges

 

“Community Engagement describes the collaboration between institutions of higher education 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

 

“Engagement – in which institutions and communities form lasting relationships that influence, shape, and promote success in both spheres – is rare. More frequently, there is evidence of unilateral outreach, rather than partnership based on mutual benefit, mutual respect, and mutual accountability.”

Kellogg Foundation

 

"The publicly engaged institution is fully committed to direct, two-way interaction with communities and other external constituencies through the development, exchange, and application of knowledge, information, and expertise for mutual benefit.”

American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU)
Task Force on Public Engagement

 

“The scholarship of engagement means connecting the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic and ethical problems.”

Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professorate

 

“Conscious efforts to bring the resources and expertise at our institutions to bear on community, state, national and international problems in a coherent way … Moving beyond outreach and public service to a new conception of ‘engagement’ with the community (however defined) in ways that serve both institutional and community needs.”

Renewing the Covenant: Learning, Discovery and
Engagement in a New Age and Different World
(Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities)

 

“Seven guiding characteristics seem to define an engaged institution. They constitute a seven-part test of engagement. 1) Responsiveness … 2) Respect for partners … 3) Academic neutrality … 4) Accessibility … 5) Integration … 6) Coordination … and 7) Resource partnerships…”

Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution
(Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities)

 

Scholarship Defenitions

“Scholarship is teaching, discovery, integration, application and engagement; clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation, and reflective critique that is rigorous and peer-reviewed."

Linking Scholarship and Communities: The Report of the Commission on Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Health Professions,
Community Campus Partnerships for Health

 

“Scholarship of discovery: ‘traditional’ research and the process and intellectual excitement that comes from generating a new idea Scholarship of integration: serious disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together, and bring new insight to bear on original research
Scholarship of application: scholarly service—one that both applies and contributes to human knowledge
Scholarship of teaching: a dynamic endeavor . . . not only transmitting knowledge but transforming and extending it as well"

Boyer

 

Engaged Scholarship Definitions

“Co-creation and application of knowledge, a relationship that increases both partners' capacity to address issues. Outreach and engagement also provides university scholars with new information for publications and other communications that reflect the realities outside the laboratory. Such new knowledge can sometimes be incorporated into future research and teaching and applied in new settings.”

Michigan State University, Office of Outreach and Engagement

 

"Community-engaged scholarship is scholarship that involves the faculty member in a mutually beneficial partnership with the community. By ‘community-engaged scholarship’ we mean ‘teaching, discovery, integration, application and engagement that involves the faculty member in a mutually beneficial partnership with the community and has the following characteristics: clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation, reflective critique, rigor and peer-review."

Community Campus Partnerships for Health

 

The mutually beneficial collaboration between the University of New Hampshire (New Hampshire’s land, sea and space grant University) and external partners for the purpose of generating and applying relevant knowledge to directly benefit the public.

University of New Hampshire

 

Engaged scholarship

1. is participatory and values the community partners as collaborators.
2. benefits the community partners (e.g., agencies, neighborhoods, clients) in ways that ar identified by them and others as being significant and effective.
3. Furthers the scholarship of the faculty member in ways that are recognized by others as having academic impact as well as community impact.

Memorandum, Indian University-Purdue University

 

"Scholarship is teaching, discovery, integration, application and engagement that has clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation, and reflective critique that is rigorous and peer-reviewed." Community-engaged scholarship “involves the faculty member in a mutually beneficial partnership with the community.”

Community Campus Partnerships for Health

 

“The National Review Board considers the Scholarship of Engagement as a term that captures scholarship in the areas of teaching, research, and/or service. It engages faculty in academically relevant work that simultaneously meets campus mission and goals as well as community needs. In essence, it is a scholarly agenda that integrates community issues. In this definition community is broadly defined to include audiences external to the campus that are part of a collaborative process to contribute to the public good.”

The Scholarship of Engagement

 

Community Campus Partnerships for Health's Definition

Click here to visit the Community Campus Partnerships for Health's overview of the field of community-engaged scholarship (CES) including defining key terms, outlining assessment standards, reviewing the support for and barriers to promoting CES and discussing current efforts underway in promoting CES in academic institutions and other organizations. Click here to visit the definition's section.