First, we have “How Should Higher Education Help Us Create The Society We Want?” by Winona State University students. Recently, Winona State, an IA member campus, hosted the inaugural civic summit of the National Issues Forum and ACP Deliberative Dialogue Initiative. The group received special permission from the Kettering Foundation to be the first to use their issues guide. The summit was held in honor of WSU’s retiring president, Judith Ramaley, who is a tireless advocate for higher education and its civic mission.  President Ramaley serves as a member of the ACP’s President’s Council, and is a long-time supporter of IA and member of IA’s Tenure Team Initiative on Publicly Engaged Scholarship. High school and college students, university faculty and staff, community members, higher education experts, media editors and journalists, local law enforcement, and business people all participated in the successful, student-run event. Click here to read all about it.

Second, Harry Boyte (another long-time IA supporter and former board member) and Blase Scarnati have an op-ed in The Huffington Post, titled, “Building Democracy Colleges: A Different Kind of Politics.” The piece argues that the higher-education reform movement can take lessons from the freedom movements of the last century, saying, “We need changes different than incrementalism, wishful calls for ‘all of us to get along,’ or fracturing of the nation into implacably hostile camps. … Focusing on pedagogies of empowerment, or ‘civic agency,’ the citizen-centered approach to change, which animated the freedom movement a generation ago, shows signs of being a promising approach to major changes.” Boyte and Scarnati believe ACP is a driving force for this kind of change, and the op-ed highlights some “empowered pedagogies.” Click here to read the whole piece.

RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance

Borders and Translations

Call for Papers for a themed edition of RiDE examining the ideas of borders and translations in applied drama and theatre

‘But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of [...] fact’; ‘We must learn those new names [...] We must learn where we live. We must learn to make them our own. We must make them our new home’; ‘it is not the literal past, the “facts” of history, that shape us, but the images of the past embodied in language.’ [...] ‘We must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilise.’ (Friel 1984 pp.419 & 445)

RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance is a fully refereed, international journal published by Routledge, now included in the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. This themed edition seeks submissions of work that consider the shape and contours of applied drama and theatre practice as they crosses different types of borders and are translated into different languages.

Both metaphorically and conceptually, the ideas of borders and translations have currency within the field of applied drama and theatre. They bring to mind philosophical issues of nation, identity, community, politics, post-colonialism, inter-disciplinarity and liminality. They also allow us to access the more grounded discourses of language, field, discourse and communication. Historically, we have sought to cross borders with our work, and the process of translating practice from largely euro-centric roots has been on-going during the last half-century. Over the past decade, work within our community has begun to redefine borders of the extent and nature of our work, and to share languages in ways that have made them less deeply fixed. Recent issues of RiDE and other work illuminate this clearly.

What becomes clear is that challenges continue to emerge in the on-going expansion and greater diversification around what defines the limits and boundaries of work in the field, and what languages are used both to describe and conceptualise practice. This special issue will seek to publish research that specifically dwells on translations and borders in applied theatre and drama with a view to identifying tensions, difficulties, dilemmas and successes. It particularly invites articles that metaphorically and conceptually probe the languages and borders of our practices in applied drama and theatre, and it seeks to be a volume that gathers together research that explicitly deals with the changing nature of practice and thinking in our community.

Key issues that the themed edition will consider:

• What are the common tenets of language that bind together disparate aspects of practice and research within an increasingly diversified applied drama and theatre community?
• How are the practices of drama education and applied theatre being interpreted and translated within specific national, cultural and linguistic settings?
• How can the practices and languages of the community of drama and theatre education be further refined in a manner that avoids narrowness and cultural specificity but that allows for greater communicative clarity and wider access to the work of the community?
• What marks the borders of practice and discourse in applied theatre and drama and how can their identification allow the community co-exist successfully but distinctly alongside neighbouring and related fields such as education, theatre studies and performance studies.

Articles of approximately 5,000 words in length are welcomed in response to the general statement and key issues noted below. The breadth and potential playfulness of the issue’s theme may also suggest research that is not explicitly identified above.

Delegates to the 7^th International Drama in Education Research Institute (www.idieri2012.org), to be held in Ireland in July 2012 on the same theme, are welcome to submit their papers for consideration.

Article abstracts (of no more than 500 words) must reach the editor Michael Finneran (Michael.Finneran@mic.ul.ie) by July 20^th 2012 and should also be copied to Joe Winston (J.A.Winston@warwick.ac.uk).

Contributors whose proposals have been initially accepted will be informed by August 15^th, 2012, and will be required to submit the full article for peer review by December 21^st, 2012. Further editing is then likely in response to review and editorial comment, and final submission will be July 1^st, 2013 for publication in RiDE 18:4 in the autumn of that year.

Tune in tonight! The “White House Young America Series: Live from Syracuse University” will be live-streamed this evening from 6 to 9 p.m. Eastern at http://www.syr.edu/whitehouse, with virtual exchange via Twitter at #WHatSU. The event will feature several of Imagining America’s regional publicly engaged graduate students, as well as many other young people in Central New York who will share stories, ideas, and spoken word performances about civic engagement. IA and SU will also announce a pilot video contest for students in this region.

IA conference proposals are due this Monday, April 23! Please submit on IA’s website. Also, we recently announced the PAGE Fellowship; applications are due June 1.

IA at Vanderbilt Reflection: Graduate student G. Cory Duclos wrote this blog post about Friday’s panel featuring Jan Cohen-Cruz, Bill Ivey, and Teresa Mangum.

IA at AERA: Chancellor Nancy Cantor, Timothy Eatman, Susan Sturm, and Kal Alston spoke this past Monday at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in Vancouver on “Scholarship in Action for a New Generation.” Their remarks included a discussion of IA’s and the Center for Institutional and Social Change’s Linking Full Participation action-research project, as well as the American Commonwealth Partnership.

Town Halls at LIU & VT: IA-member campuses are collaborating with Sojourn Theater and The TEAM to host local civic dialogues as part of Town Hall Nation. Long Island University will host a dialogue on student debt in the humanities this Thursday, April 19, at 3:15 p.m. (contact Deborah Mutnick). Virginia Tech will perform a play-in-process, Whether System, April 23-25 (contact Bob Leonard).

Central New York PAGE this Friday: At Syracuse University all-day Friday, April 20, we will host the 5th annual CNY PAGE conference. Follow the Twitter exchange at #CNYPAGE.

This past Friday, the Vanderbilt Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities hosted a roundtable discussion about Imagining America, an organization that promotes engaged, public scholarship. Imagining America provides resources for scholars around the country to gather and find others with a similar dedication for connecting the creation of knowledge inside a university with a larger, public community.

The panel included three speakers: Jan Cohen-Cruz, Director of Imagining America and Professor of Drama at Syracuse University, Teresa Mangum, Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and Bill Ivey, Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.

Cohen-Cruz used her time to explain some of the objectives of Imagining America. The organization has helped raise awareness of the concerns that many scholars have about the place of knowledge creation within public communities. It has helped push for the recognition of the value of public scholarship within the process of tenure review.

The Imagining America web site provides several resources for people interested in engaging in public scholarship. Various publications are available, including Julie Ellison and Timothy K. Eatman’s Scholarship in Public: Knolwedge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University, available as a free PDF download. Cohen-Cruz also took a moment to plug the 2012 Imagining America National Conference on Oct. 5-7 in New York, NY. Of particular interest to me was the open invitation to graduate students to apply for a PAGE fellowship to attend a half-day summit and the national conference in October. Accepted fellows also participate throughout the year in a working group on various research projects.

Cohen-Cruz also discussed how institutional chapters of Imagining America help work together to collaborate across the country. Her remarks were then emphasized by Teresa Mangum, who discussed the success that her university has had in public scholarship. An important point that Mangum made was that public scholarship is not simply “outreach.” That term suggests a type of benevolent handout from above. What Imagining America promotes, however, is a type of engaged scholarship in which both the university and the public are partners. She mentioned this approach being especially successful at what she called “crossroads” institutions, such as museums, theaters, concert halls, etc. The work that has happened at U of Iowa, Mangum noted, has better prepared graduate students for their professional careers and has helped them find jobs.

Mangum also noted how digital humanities can play a key role in moving teaching beyond the classroom and helping both teachers and students interact with the world in a more meaningful way. Vanderbilt Center for Teaching Director Derek Bruff (who is apparently also a note-taking artist) beautifully summarized the way that engaged scholarship benefits the entire education process in the sketch below.

The final speaker, Bill Ivey, was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under President Clinton. His remarks focused on how engaged scholarship can serve as a way of helping to show the value of higher education in a political environment in which the arts and humanities are often denigrated. He noted that the varying social values of different groups makes it difficult to relate university objectives with public values. In contrast to the rapid change of public policy, scholarly research is a slow, steady process. Public scholarship can serve as one solution to reconcile the inherent differences between scholarly and public objectives through mutually beneficial collaboration.

The presentations led to an interesting discussion, mainly focused on discussing how it is that faculty members can help show the value of public scholarship to their individual departments. Imagining America stands as a resource, not only by providing a place for inter-university collaboration, but also to help show the growing number of universities that are taking seriously the importance of engaged scholarship.

The Humanities and Public Life book series is another way that public scholarship is being promoted. As Cohen-Cruz put it, the editors of the series are helping show that engaged scholarship is not just “a nice thing you do,” but “the thing you do.” Since monographs are often the expected product of scholarly research, this book series is providing a way for scholars to produce monographs related to their public scholarship (not despite it).

The roundtable provided an interesting forum for better understanding the resources available through Imagining America for scholars looking to become more engaged with their local and global communities. As a final summary, I once again direct you to the note-taking art of Derek Bruff:

#

Photo Credits: (1) Trudy Stringer, Chen Xi, Mona Frederick, Teresa Mangum, Bill Ivey, Jan Cohen-Cruz, photo by Kate Rattner; (2) sketch by Derek Bruff; (3) Joel Harrington, Marshall Eakin, Whitney Weeks, Marcio Bahia, unknown, Cory Duclos, Ifeoma Nwankwo, photo by Kate Rattner; (4) sketch by Derek Bruff

2012-2013 Call for PAGE Fellows: Imagining America invites graduate students with a demonstrated interest in public scholarship and/or artistic practice to apply to join this year’s PAGE Summit and Working Group. Awardees receive $500 to attend a half-day Fellows Summit on Oct. 4 and the IA National Conference, Oct. 5-7, both in New York City. Fellows also commit to co-create and participate in a yearlong working group to promote collaborative art-making, teaching, writing, and research. Deadline is June 1. [Link]

White House Young America Series Next Week: On Wednesday, April 18, from 6-9 p.m. Eastern, Syracuse University will host 300 high school and college students from Central New York on the topic of civic engagement. Students will share stories from their experiences addressing real-world problems in their communities. Affiliated with the White House Office of Public Engagement and the U.S. Department of Education Office of Communications and Outreach, IA and its local Publicly Active Graduate Education chapter are helping to organize the event. Watch live on the web and engage via Twitter, #WHatSU. [Link]

Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Steering Committee: IA joins 12 other national organizations to coordinate and expand the impact of civic learning initiatives around the country. This effort emerges from discussions among some 140 civic and educational leaders brought together during a year-long initiative sponsored by the Department of Education and coordinated by AAC&U and the Global Perspective Institute, Inc. [Link]

IA Conference Proposals due April 23: Just a reminder. [Link]

Field-Wide News:

Symposium: Tomorrow through Saturday, April 12-14, in Minneapolis, MN, and live streamed on the web, the Walker Art Center and Northern Lights.mn present, “Discourse and Discord: Architecture of Agonism from the Kitchen Table to the City Street.” In various sessions, local and national artists and scholars will explore agonism, a political theory that emphasizes the potentially positive aspects of certain (but not all) forms of political conflict, and its relevancy to art, democracy, and more. [Link]

Summer Opportunity for Students & Community Partners in Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will host this free, five-week summer course, “Field School in Buildings, Landscapes, and Cultures,” from June 11 to July 14. Participants will be trained in site documentation, historic interpretation of buildings and landscapes, and primary source research, and will create site reports on historic buildings and cultural landscapes that will become part of the historical record of Wisconsin. [Link]

Conferences: Community-Campus Partnerships for Health’s 15th anniversary conference will be held April 18-21, in Houston, TX. The conference will bring together individuals promoting health or social justice through community-based participatory research, service-learning, and community-academic partnerships. [Link]

“Going Local (Imagining Atlanta),” the 2012 Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas conference will be June 28 – July 1. Last year, the conference theme, “The Dramaturg as Public Artist,” challenged dramaturgs to use their skills in institutional and audience outreach to imagine a truly public role for themselves; the upcoming conference will expand upon this theme by using the city of Atlanta as a case study for how dramaturgs and other artists can serve the community in public and innovative ways.” [Link]

For the past three years, the Integrated Assessment research group (also known as APPS, Assessing the Practice of Public Scholarship) has been investigating and elaborating integrated, collaborative approaches to assessment that emphasize community impact, involve community stakeholders, and invite evaluation of higher education and granting agencies’ institutional practices, contributions, and outcomes in relation to mutually defined goals.

APPS members have shared project findings and questions in sessions dedicated to discussion of assessment approaches at recent IA national conferences.  At this stage of our development, we may contribute more usefully and effectively by working with other members to provide perspectives on assessment in relation to their projects.

If you are proposing an IA conference session that would be enhanced by APPS participation, please send a brief email outlining your plans for an IA conference session, together with a brief statement about the role(s) APPS might play in your plans to Miriam Bartha (mbartha@uw.edu). Early mails that allow adequate time for correspondence appreciated.

By the 2011-2012 Imagining America PAGE Fellows

This edited conversation among members of Imagining America’s 2011-2012 Publicly Engaged Graduate Education (PAGE) cohort is our attempt to both critique and enact the shift David Scobey anticipates in his talk, “Civic Engagement and the Copernican Moment” (which has been published as IA’s 11th Foreseeable Future, available for download here). We have used various media to create this response collaboratively: Mozilla’s open source Etherpad platform, email exchanges, and transcribed conference calls.

Professor Scobey reflects back on the development of Imagining America (IA) to examine the contemporary moment in the academy and its future, but what can PAGE’s development in this context say about “change, crisis, and innovation in higher education”? Since 2003, PAGE, first under the direction of Sylvia Gale and then Kevin Bott, has helped IA consider the full career arc of the publically engaged scholar (1) and contribute to trans-disciplinary professionalization and mentorship for graduate students. PAGE shares Scobey’s interest in what it might mean if the institution were not the center of our reality in higher education. We come together from various disciplines and campuses across the country for mutual support, reciprocity, camaraderie, and collaborative scholarship. While Scobey calls for a re-envisioning of place and pedagogy for undergraduates, new scholarship and artistry like Nick Sousanis’s, featured on this cover, also calls out for a re-envisioning of dissertations, doctoral programs, partnerships, and scholarly artifacts.

We invite your responses in the comments!

• • •

Adam Bush: Scobey’s talk at Imagining America’s national conference on September 22 took place five days after the first 1,000 people gathered in Zuccotti Park to ignite the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. The movement emerged out of a long history of protest, civil disobedience, and anger with the status quo to organize around financial inequality, educational access, and citizenship. While Scobey doesn’t address “Occupy” in his talk, the paradigm shift he calls for in higher education materializes out of calls for action, access (2), equity, and citizenship similar to those that have long been happening on university campuses, which is why his invocation of Copernicus is so interesting. Copernicus introduced a heliocentric solar system, but the implications and details of that have changed dramatically, again and again, since the 16th century. So, following the Copernican metaphor, is this paradigm shift a stepping-stone to something else we can theorize about together?

Alex Olson: The Copernican metaphor is indeed provocative, but I am troubled by the way it positions something that is legitimately contested—the organization and practice of higher education—as a matter of fact and science, casting defenders of the status quo as equivalent to Ptolemaists who thought the sun revolves around the Earth. The metaphor closes conversation—why, after all, should we take people who espouse the geocentric model seriously? I think there is more to our colleagues who advocate for disciplines, tenure, majors, etc., than simply clinging to an outmoded paradigm.

Nick Sousanis: I found the Copernican analogy fitting and quite specifically chosen (as opposed to other major paradigm shifts—i.e., special relativity). Copernicus’s removal of the earth from the center of the universe is analogous to the idea that the Academy is no longer the center that learning orbits around, but rather one element in an inter-connected community/universe. That understanding of no longer being THE center is no small thing, a shattering of a world/universe view that would fuel further scientific and cultural revolutions. Similarly, Scobey posits that this is the sort of change the modern university (which comes into being around the time Copernicus’s theory is published) needs, but it is perhaps as unimaginable to us now as those living in the time before Copernicus.

Alex, I totally agree—there is more to our disciplinary colleagues than geocentric delusions. But I don’t see Scobey using Copernicus to close the conversation and throw out all that’s come before. Rather, I saw him pushing the idea that we need a radically new perspective on things as they are, something the Copernican model made possible. To Adam’s point, it’s not that Copernicus was right, it’s that “this is the best theory available” until we discover a better one. Tangentially, that often seems to be the problem: instead of seeing the models we come up with as tools to aid in our understanding, we seem to mistake them for the thing in itself.

Alex O: I wholly agree that there is much to be said for the Copernican metaphor as it relates to de-centering knowledge production and power relationships. It is a main strand running through much of our work and that of others in IA. At the same time, I think we can make the point in a non-reductive way that acknowledges the complexities of the current academic landscape. Tenure, for example, has historically worked to protect an important space of critique in American life. The notion that the whole system was predicated on being “the center of the universe” flattens these complexities to provide us with an easier-than-necessary foil. I would ask instead, how can we utilize the existing strengths of higher education, including vibrant strands of thought being generated in and around the disciplines, to help make the transition from generation to generation, paradigm to paradigm?

Adele Holoch: Let’s expand upon Scobey’s question, “what might that future look like?” with more concrete thoughts and examples drawing on our own work as scholars, educators, and community activists. What are some specific contributions we can make toward enacting the kinds of change he talks about? What can our experiences tell us, and others, about why and how change might be challenging?

Alex Agloro: This moment is a social phenomenon, too. So much of the really important learning that we do takes place in social situations, particularly with those who equip us to cross boundaries, feel differences, and manage interactions with people who do not come from the same backgrounds as our own.

Cecilia Orphan: The discussion about community is challenging as well. Alex A., you have talked about how in higher education we’re so obsessed with being global and yet there are communities surrounding our institutions that are totally falling apart. Students are developing more awareness of what’s going on abroad than in their own neighborhoods. I’m not saying you shouldn’t create global learners, but I think the communities surrounding universities are equally important local contexts for learning and exchange. We need to dispel this notion that the university is an island unto itself and the community just exists around it and when we want we can go out and engage it.

Kinh T. Vu: Around the time that Copernicus was circulating his heliocentric theory (1514), the church was also facing confrontation from one of its own, Martin Luther, who posted his 95 Theses on the Wittenberg church door (1517). Not long after, in 1545, the Catholic Church rebutted with its own reforms during the Council of Trent. How do graduate students, like today’s Imagining America fellows and other allies, advocate for revolutionary change in local, national, and global ways that prompt institutions to examine their own academic and socio-political priorities on campus and off?

Nick: I like this shift to education and revolutions—the heart of Scobey’s talk. But as a metaphor for the unsettling of a changing landscape, we should note that lacking a physical demonstration, Copernicus’s hypothesis didn’t present a real challenge to the church. Only later, with the aid of the telescope, can Galileo present a basic theory of relativity. And it’s then that the church turns against him, forcing Galileo to recant his views and putting him under house arrest.

To bring the analogy back to higher education, the environment that IA is wading into and Scobey is speaking of is hostile (3). Institutions don’t want to hear that their view of the cosmos is off. They have a lot invested in maintaining the status quo. Nearly a hundred years passed between Copernicus and Galileo, and then hundreds more before the church’s apology to Galileo. So the actual Copernican Moment is only a moment in hindsight; the actual revolution took a long time. Such, it seems, is the moment we are in today—it will be a long haul. I think Scobey’s talk affirmed IA’s work and challenges us to seize this moment and push on towards revolutionary educational shifts.

Kristin Buchner: I find the larger story of Copernicus/Kepler/Galileo interesting—Galileo was condemned as a heretic for expanding on Copernicus’s models, while years later Kepler was praised as a scholar. We can liken this progression of astronomers to that of community-engaged scholars—from early pioneers to us as PAGE fellows, representing the next generation of this work. What is our responsibility to the engagement field in terms of continuing to reinvent higher education? Scobey spoke directly to me when he said, “early scholars have struggled for the sake of this work, and have paved the way for a stronger future.” While this work is far from complete, the Copernican leaders have set the stage for the next generation of Keplerian scholars to thrive.

LaTanya Autry: I focused my attention on Scobey’s points about changes in engagement and education. Overall, I liked his statements about empowering students and being more aware of students’ identities, lifestyles, and goals. In light of the recent Occupy movement, these issues, which I haven’t heard much about on my campus, are paramount. It’s very exciting to consider this challenging time as an opportunity for profound positive changes in our educational system. With so many attacks on public funding for education and increasing costs, the current situation often seems disheartening. However, public scholars can be instrumental in publicly expressing the relevance of education and fostering necessary community networks. Scobey’s mention of how we need to think locally, translocally, globally, and digitally gets at this idea.

Elena Gonzales: LaTanya importantly addresses the root of much of the trouble with higher education today. High costs and untenably tremendous student debt limit students’ access. The Occupy movement—an actual response to the comprehensiveness with which our society has come to privilege the 1 percent—inspires me. I haven’t been living in a tent in Chicago, but I have been asking myself where my work can amplify and bolster that of the Occupiers. My dissertation addresses museums’ use of their exhibitions for social justice, and one of my case studies is the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. Several weeks ago, JAHHM hosted Occupy Hull-House, a daylong symposium that involved academic speakers, Occupiers from Chicago and New York, and many others from inside and outside the academy. Vijay Prashad and Nathan Brown, both speakers at the symposium, argued that the movement must transform from a tactic into a strategy that should include the fight against ballooning student debt. To me, this is where Scobey’s talk has gone since last September. That’s not to deny universities’ deep financial difficulties. Rather, as we discussed as a group, the crisis in funding throughout higher education must be used and not wasted: it can’t be misdirected at professors and administrators. It has to reach policymakers.

Adam: I think you’re right, Elena. This cuts deeply into the need for policy changes. Scobey’s talk reminded me of one Catherine Cole gave at UCSB earlier this year, looking to Clark Kerr’s Master Plan for assistance in navigating the UC’s present conditions (4). While Kerr was the architect of the past 50 years of California’s public higher education system (5), he also, through his work with the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, was instrumental in policy changes on the federal level and the formation of FIPSE—the Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. Many of the innovations Scobey invokes as part of the paradigm shift—distance learning, adult education support, and credit documentation—emerged as new structures in higher education through FIPSE support. This year, the White House Office of Public Engagement, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, and the Department of Education are inaugurating the American Commonwealth Partnership on the 150th anniversary year of the Morrill Act, which created land grant institutions to examine, create, and support new models for democracy colleges (6). I’m truly excited for what this moment can create for publicly engaged graduate students, like PAGE, and all those invested in democratic engagement practices through higher education.

Professor Scobey notes at the close of his talk that “someone’s new paradigm” will surely take hold in the coming years. He then asks: “Will we have created a ‘Copernican Revolution’ worthy of the name? And will we … have created new visions and practices of democratic education adequate to the promises and disruptions of that revolution?” It is with that closing thought in mind that we invite you to join in on this conversation.

• • •

End Notes:

1. Please see the Imagining America web site to download our Tenure Team Initiative, new data from our Publicly Engaged Scholar Research Project, and 2011’s Catalyst Paper for Full Participation.
2. I think of PAGE Fellow Blair Smith and CNY PAGE director A. Wendy Nastasi who co-authored “Syracuse’s Rise” in response to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, writing, “We embrace engaged scholarship, the building of knowledge that is inseparable from practice. The inclusion of historically underrepresented students does not detract from our ability to recruit or to remain competitive. It contributes to a robust and dynamic learning environment where multiple perspectives and voices expand our notions of what is knowable. Public scholarship is important to us because it mobilizes community and campus resources, brilliance, and creativity.”
3. As evidenced by last fall’s Chronicle of Higher Education article, which prompted our colleagues to respond with “Syracuse’s Rise.”
4. Catherine M. Cole, “Trading Futures: Prospects for California’s University.” Thanks to Kim Yasuda for alerting me to the talk. Within the talk Cole posts a link to Clark Kerr’s 1963 Godkin Lecture at Harvard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4J94a_NxLU /.
5. A Master Plan, Cole points out, that was only written with the next 15 years in mind.
6. The ACP is spearheaded by former IA board member Harry Boyte with a steering committee including 2011-2012 PAGE Fellow Cecilia Orphan, IA founding director Julie Ellison, board member John Saltmarsh, director of research Tim Eatman, and former board chair David Scobey.

By Director Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America

We are pleased to announce the publication of our most recent Foreseeable Future, the IA series featuring keynotes from our national conferences. This year’s text, Civic Engagement and the Copernican Moment, by longtime IA-er and national leader in public scholarship David Scobey, provides a seeable present: the state of higher education a decade into the 21st century and sorely in need of change. Evoking a paradigm shift on the scale of Copernicus’s discovery that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe, Scobey adjures, “there is widespread agreement that higher education faces a sea-change in its intellectual, institutional, technological, and economic organization.”

Focusing on the ramifications of this shift for public scholarship, Scobey commends civically-engaged pedagogies as energizing responses to stultified academic practices. However, he takes engaged scholars and artists to task for not fully understanding out-of-date assumptions about undergraduate education, given that increasing numbers of students must simultaneously work, may have families, and for various other reasons may not have “the time, space, and money for intensive, unpaid community-based learning.”

Scobey’s remarks come at a moment of change for IA as well, as we complete our first five-year term at Syracuse University. We are in our own Copernican revolution, decentering IA from the national office as the source of all research, convenings, and projects to increasingly collaborative teams trans-locally. A new director will guide IA’s second five-year term, which will continue to be hosted at SU.

Fittingly for a text oriented to higher education’s changing present and future, a cohort of 2011-12 PAGE Fellows (graduate students selected from IA member campuses to participate in our Publicly Active Graduate Education program) has composed a group response to Scobey’s talk. One of the fellows, Nick Sousanis, has provided the cover design as well, excerpted from one of his graphic novels. We thus continue IA’s practice of inviting young scholars to open a discourse around the Foreseeable Future text of a senior scholar, initiated in 2009 by Adam Bush, now PAGE director. As Lewis Hyde beautifully writes in Common as Air (2010), “Young poets need to be fed; mature poets spread out banquets. The commons of culture is a huge lake” (203-4).  Enjoy!

Read the newsletter here or download the PDF.

The TTI Research Group (TTI-RG) builds on the work of Imagining America’s Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship (TTI). Specifically it is committed to understanding the reverberations of the 2008 report, Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University. 

 We aim to:

• document changes in faculty rewards policies at a wide variety of colleges and universities;
• map the impact of the report on efforts by higher education and disciplinary associations to value publicly engaged scholarship; and
• create capacity for ongoing change by making findings from the impact study broadly available.

Key Documents

The TTI was established to help campus leaders, faculty members, and emerging scholars themselves to understand and value public scholarship. Evaluating the work of civically engaged scholars in the humanities, arts, and design was then–and continues to be–a challenge. In the past, the IA research team has surveyed a large body of knowledge on this topic, conducted original research, and published several reports. These include a background study (2006); Scholarship in Public (2008); and ”Laying the Groundwork for the TTI Impact Study: Purposes, Values, and Concepts” (2010).

“Laying the Groundwork,” our most recent paper, can be downloaded here.  We knew that our first task in “Laying the Groundwork” would be to sort out the relationships between the TTI-RG and complementary Imagining America projects and initiatives, as well as between the TTI-RG and several research collaborations with other organizations. Since we completed “Laying the Groundwork,” the emergence of the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP) has enlarged our reach and heightened the need for coordination.

Expanding Our Scope

The American Commonwealth Partnership was announced at the White House meeting, “For Democracy’s Future,” on January 10, 2012.  ACP has initiated a year of advocacy and activity under the banner, “For Democracy’s Future – Reclaiming Our Civic Mission.” To a collaboration with the White House Office of Public Engagement, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the American Commonwealth Partnership brings a broad alliance of higher education and civic groups, including Imagining America, the American Democracy Project, The Democracy Commitment, The New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE), the National Conference on Citizenship, Campus Compact, the Anchor Institutions Task Force, and more. The American Commonwealth Partnership is coordinated by Harry Boyte, former Imagining America board member.

ACP will expand the impact of IA’s leadership on the issue of faculty rewards. ACP has launched a Public Scholarship Working Group co-chaired by IA Director of Research Tim Eatman and IA board member John Saltmarsh. Julie Ellison, co-PI of the TTI-RG, is a member of that Working Group and serves on the ACP Council along with TTI-RG fellows David Scobey (The New School University for Public Engagement), Blase Scarnati (Northern Arizona State University), and Julie Plaut  (Minnesota Campus Compact).

Planned Activities

The TTI report has been enthusiastically received. Praised by KerryAnn O’Meara, a leading higher education scholar, as “the most persuasive and comprehensive guide to tenure reform supporting interdisciplinary and engaged research that we have as a field,” it is being used as a tool for dialogue, planning, and action across higher education.  Following the release of the report at a working conference in New York City in 2008, Imagining America convened a series of regional meetings in collaboration with Campus Compact. These meetings helped to advance the work by connecting communities of change from 58 institutions representing every higher education sector and several regions of the country.

We know intuitively that the TTI has had an impact. But we need to test our assumption of the degree to which it has been effective. The TTI-RG is in the process of gathering and evaluating information about the impact of the recommendations presented in the TTI report. Moreover, we are taking a broader view of where change is needed. For example, the national debate about the rewards system for contingent faculty members has not addressed their roles as publicly engaged teachers and scholars. The TTI-RG is planning several conference sessions  in 2012 to stimulate dialogue on this important issue.

The TTI-RG is looking at quantitative and qualitative evidence of the impact of the 2009 Tenure Team Initiative regional meetings.  A compilation of all related material produced before, during, and after the regional meetings is almost complete. In addition a brief follow-up survey of institutions that participated in the regional meetings is under development.

The Research Group is also examining institutional efforts at college and university campuses that did not participate in the regional meetings. Further, it is building bridges to allied research initiatives by initiating conversations with the Imagining America research collaboratories on Undergraduate Civic Professionalism and Integrated Assessment, as well as with Linking Full Participation to Higher Education’s Public Mission. Linking Full Participation is a national project conducted in partnership with The Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. We are also documenting related undertakings by other higher education organizations.

IA’s national conference in October 2012 is going to be an important event for the TTI-RG.  We hope to see the TTI-RG session at the conference be an exchange among several working groups: the TTI-RG, the Integrated Assessment and Civic Professionalism collaboratories, and Linking Full Participation. This session would make it possible for all of us to explore together the connections among promotion policies, liberal arts education, and curricular assessment.

#

For a complete list of TTI-RG Fellows, please see here.

The photo is from the June 2010 IA regional meeting in California, by Kim Yasuda.