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Peer Review, Spring 2003
The Faculty Role in Civic Engagement
By Edward Zlotkowski, senior faculty fellow,
National Campus Compact, and professor of English, Bentley
College, and Dilafruz Williams, professor of educational
policy, foundations, and administrative studies, Graduate
School of Education, Portland State University
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Recently, a group of Oklahoma college students submitted
to their state legislature a "Civic Engagement Resolution"
in which they addressed, among other things, "grievances
regarding issues of the political agenda and process, public
education's priorities and [their] own civic ignorance
. . . " They suggested that for their generation "politics"
implied "words such as greed, intimidation, complex,
power, money, and authority," and that
these implications help account for their widespread alienation
from the political process. As future leaders, they demanded
that their civic education be taken much more seriously than
has recently been the case. Specifically, with regard to higher
education, they noted that "the mission of [their state's]
higher education institutions should be to educate future
citizens about their civic as well as their professional duties."
Hence, they urged Oklahoma higher education institutions to
"prioritize and implement civic education in the classroom,
in research, and in services to the community."1
Few would consider Oklahoma and its students a bastion of
radicalism. Rather, the students' statement indicates
the broad degree to which higher education is perceived as
having failed to formulate and implement "an updated
version of itself as a participant in the life of civil society,
as a citizen of American democracy" (Sullivan 2000,
21). It is this failure that Russ Edgerton, former president
of the American Association for Higher Education, had in mind
when he noted that "all in all, there is a growing,
daunting list of 'new literacies' that Americans
need to learn to be effective citizens" (1997, 37).
Such literacies, in turn, suggest that the very way in which
the academy has defined its responsibilities is dangerously
incomplete. As the faculty advisory committee of the University
of Utah's Lowell Bennion Center points out, "foundational"
and "professional" knowledge do not mark the limits
of what the academy is obliged to teach. There exists a third
category--"socially responsive" knowledge--that,
especially of late, has become an issue of pressing concern.
Higher education is at a crossroads. At few moments in
our country's history have so many questioned the
importance and relevance of higher education to contemporary
society. . . .Why does the task of educating our students
to be good citizens now require that we pay more attention
to socially responsive knowledge? To begin with, the needs
that now challenge society are significantly different than
those that have faced us in the past . . . forc[ing] us
as academicians to no longer assume we can perform our teaching
role without paying close attention to the impact of that
role on the communities that surround us. And these questions
simply cannot be addressed only by instilling traditional
and professional knowledge in our students . . . (University
of Utah 1998, J-1-5, original emphasis).
In other words, contrary to what many faculty may believe,
even foundational or traditional knowledge--the province
of liberal learning as traditionally understood--will
not, in and of itself, result in the kind of civic literacy
the country now needs. In our time, we must reinvent liberal
and professional education and make socially responsive knowledge
a key component of every college student's education.
Nor can we reserve such concern for our colleagues in student
affairs.
Faculty Attitudes
As the Utah faculty statement goes on to note, "simply
providing opportunities for volunteer service will not enable
universities to meet the social demands of the coming decades.
The transmittal of socially responsive knowledge needs to
be integrated broadly into the entire educational enterprise"
(1998, J-5). But such a demand immediately runs up against
a very disturbing finding. According to a recent survey of
faculty attitudes conducted by the Higher Education Research
Institute (1999), faculty are indeed "increasingly likely
to believe that American colleges and universities are committed
to involving students in community service." However,
"there has been essentially no change in faculty's
own commitment to 'instill in students a commitment
to community service' and to 'prepare students
for responsible citizenship.'" Faculty attitudes,
it would seem, are clearly implicated in the "grievance"
raised by the Oklahoma students.
And yet, how are our students to prepare for "their
civic as well as their professional duties" if faculty
continue to refuse to be involved? Few faculty would support
the marginalization of other competencies fundamental to their
students' futures. One can well imagine what would happen
if an institution suggested making writing skills a matter
of individual student choice! As the writing across the curriculum
movement has demonstrated, the achievement of real literacy
skills requires not only effective composition courses but
also substantive writing assignments in other disciplines.
And yet, until quite recently, even political scientists shied
away from civic engagement as a core faculty responsibility.
As the American Political Science Association Task Force on
Civic Engagement (1998, 636) confessed, "We believe
political education in the United States is inadequate across
the board. We believe that we who have chosen to teach politics
as our profession bear major responsibility for addressing
this problem."
Major, perhaps, but not exclusive. The task force went on
to identify ways in which its members could respond, and its
bottom-line recommendation would seem to speak to the academy
as a whole: "Teach the motivation and the competence
to engage actively in public problem solving." All of
these--motivation, public issues, and problem solving--are
areas many faculty ignore in favor of the traditional delivery
of conceptual maps and disciple-based information. And yet,
as Battistoni (2002) has demonstrated in Civic Engagement
Across the Disciplines, teaching students "the motivation
and the competence to engage actively in public problem solving"
need not be foreign to any area of the curriculum. While the
terminology that captures such engagement may differ widely
from one academic area to the next, each area does have its
own nomenclature and its own traditions. Terms such as "social
responsibility," "social justice," "connected
knowing," "public scholarship," "public
science," and "healthy communities" all
speak naturally to different academic constituencies. Hence,
they can use them to integrate civic engagement in an effective,
non-obtrusive way.
Faculty Initiatives at Portland State University
Portland State University (PSU) is among a growing number
of institutions where the intention to address civic responsibility
and engagement is made explicit in its academic endeavors.
Almost a decade ago, PSU launched a significant initiative
of comprehensive institutional transformation by aligning
its curriculum, undergraduate and graduate academic programs,
promotion and tenure guidelines, and collaborative community
outreach to reflect its commitment to a newly defined "urban"
mission. Each academic quarter, hundreds of students and dozens
of faculty across a wide range of disciplines (from Freshman
Inquiry to Senior-Level Capstones) participate in the Portland
metropolitan communities to address real-life community problems.
Larger numbers of community partners also co-teach with faculty.
The university and the community appear to be well connected
in engaging one another.
And yet, in 1999, a number of faculty indicated that they
also wanted to develop a campus culture that critically examined
its work of engagement. Of course, individual course assessments
provide student data on the impact of such work. But for these
faculty, a campus-wide discussion of the intellectual and
theoretical underpinnings of civic engagement--especially
as it relates to democracy--was also needed. To this
end, the office of community-university partnerships, which
reports to Academic Affairs, organized two initiatives: Study
Circles and a Monthly Breakfast Series.2 Each study circle
drew six to eight faculty members from different disciplines
to discuss books on topics related to higher education's
civic responsibilities. Various faculty participants offered
to facilitate these discussions, and the experience of bringing
multiple disciplinary perspectives to bear on a single topic
of concern was among the most beneficial outcomes.
The Monthly Breakfast Series, which is still going
strong, attracts fifty to one hundred people per session.
These events are designed to bring together faculty, administrators,
community partners, and staff from Student Services to discuss
and celebrate the work of civic engagement across disciplines,
programs, and communities. Each participant who signs up for
a breakfast is given a reading that serves to focus that month's
discussion. The series began with broad questions such as:
"How can higher education foster democracy?" and
"In what ways do our teaching and learning practices
on this campus cultivate a sense of civic responsibility among
students?" In some instances, guest speakers have helped
kickoff the discussions. In other instances, panels of community
partners have brought to bear perspectives that provoked faculty
to reexamine long-held assumptions and understandings.
As was mentioned above, the university has also sought to
integrate civic engagement and community-based activities
into its promotion and tenure guidelines. For example, the
traditional tripartite set of faculty responsibilities is
described as "research," "teaching,"
and "community outreach," thus making explicit
the university's commitment to professional public service.
Following Boyer, it also defines the term "scholar"
in a way that recognizes the "application" of
knowledge as an activity as valuable as its "discovery."
Indeed, even PSU's understanding of teaching deliberately
invites innovations such as community-based work, and "encourages
publishing in pedagogical journals or making educationally
focused presentations at disciplinary and interdisciplinary
meetings that advance the scholarship of teaching and curricular
innovations or practice."
Self-efficacy
In Faculty at Work: Motivation, Expectation, Satisfaction,
Blackburn and Lawrence (1995, 281) report that, in their study
of factors that affect faculty motivation, "self-efficacy
. . . mattered more than any other variable in any category.
It was significant in 26 instances at one time or another
in every institutional type and academic discipline."
Initiatives such as those described above are important because
they encourage faculty to come together across their disciplinary
and community boundaries to read and share their work, to
discuss ideas, and to ground that work in new theoretical
and conceptual contexts. In this way, they promote professional
development opportunities that both supplement and complement
the faculty's more traditional discipline-specific training.
By helping faculty gain a new, collective understanding of
their university's mission and its relationship to academically-based
civic engagement, they enhance the faculty's sense of
self-efficacy while also inculcating a new appreciation of
the importance of reciprocity and inclusivity.
It is, ultimately, just this kind of experience that will
have to become normative if our students' demand that
they be prepared for "their civic as well as their professional
duties" is to be addressed seriously. If our colleagues
from the American Political Science Association (1998, 636)
are correct and the current level of political engagement
is "so low as to threaten the vitality and stability
of democratic politics in the United States," we cannot
begin too soon.
Footnotes
1 The full text of the "Oklahoma Students'
Civic Engagement Resolution" is available online at
www.okhighered.org/campus-compact/civic%20engagement%20resolution.pdf.
2 For a more detailed version of these undertakings,
see: Dilafruz R. Williams and Daniel O. Bernstine. 2002. Building
capacity for civic engagement at Portland State University:
A comprehensive approach. In Maureen E. Kenney et al., eds.
Learning to serve: Promoting civil society through service
learning. Norwell, Massachusetts: Kluwer Press, 257-276
References
American Political Science Association Task Force on Civic
Education. 1998. Expanded articulation statement: A call for
reactions and contributions. PS: Politics and political
science, 31(3): 636.
Battistoni, Richard M. 2002. Civic engagement across
the disciplines. Providence, RI: Campus Compact.
Blackburn, Robert T. and Janet H. Lawrence. 1995. Faculty
at work: Motivation, expectation, satisfaction. Baltimore,
MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Edgerton, Russell. 1997. Higher education white paper.
Unpublished paper for the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). 1999. National
norms: 1998-1999 HERI faculty survey report. Los Angeles,
CA: UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
Sullivan, William M. 2000. Institutional identity and social
responsibility in higher education. In Thomas Ehrlich, ed.
Civic responsibility and higher education. Phoenix,
AZ: American Council on Education and Oryx Press.
University of Utah. 1998. Educating the good citizen: Service-learning
in higher education. In Edward Zlotkowski, ed. Successful
service-learning programs: New models of excellence in higher
education. Bolton, MA: Anker, J-1 - J-13.
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