CONFERENCE THEME: ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
This year’s publicly-active graduate student conference explores the topic of Engaged Scholarship across the Disciplines. Recognizing that public scholarship takes many forms and engages a variety of different communities and disciplines, we invite proposals that animate intellectual, community-based, and/or arts projects within and across all disciplines that consider the collaborative knowledge-making process with, by, and for publics. What forms does public scholarship take in your discipline? What kinds of connections across disciplines and with diverse communities are available? How do collaborative projects with the community inform your discipline? What types of methods cultivate cross-disciplinary and cross-community engaged scholarship?
To explore the varied and cross/interdisciplinary forms engaged work takes, we invite graduate students with a commitment to public scholarship to submit proposals for the 5th Annual Central New York Conference on Public Scholarship in Graduate Education on April 20, 2012 at Syracuse University.
We are particularly interested in proposals that increase our understanding of the following:
- How graduate students define and understand engaged work within their discipline.
- How all (inter)disciplines of scholarship can and do work with and by community stakeholders, and what these practices look like.
- Innovative forms of scholarship and practice. We are keenly interested in supporting panels that include a combination of graduate scholars, artists, and one or more community partners.
2012 KEYNOTE ADDRESS
The 2012 Keynote Address will be delivered by Timothy K. Eatman. Dr. Eatman, an Assistant Professor of Higher Education, teaches courses on the American Colleges and Universities and Understanding Educational Research. He is also the Director for Research for Imagining America (IA). Tim joined the Syracuse University community in the fall of 2007 after a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education.
At Michigan, Tim began working with the IA Consortium, which was established there and is now headquartered at Syracuse University. IA, a national consortium of academic and community institutions designed to strengthen the public role and democratic purposes of the humanities, arts and design is involved in a national research and policy project called the Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship under Tim’s direction. The research focuses on improving the rewards system in academe for faculty who practice engaged scholarship in the cultural disciplines. Working with a cadre of higher education leaders, the TTI seeks to develop a broad understanding of the university’s public mission and its impact on changing scholarly and creative practices in the cultural disciplines.
As the research director of IA, Tim recently served as a scholar-in-residence at the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa. As one of the country’s oldest institutes for higher education, Tim was sought to review and evaluate its current community engagement and service learning practices, as well as the institutional life of the university. His advisement to UFS on how to ensure these practices conceptually and operationally are academically grounded and work to empower needy and disadvantaged communities, as well as the institution and its students.
In addition he has worked as the Associate Director for Research and Policy for the Academic Investment in Math and Science (AIMS) program at Bowling Green State University. This work emanates from Tim’s research interests in students from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in higher education and the impact that their participation in research opportunity programs has on career trajectory. In this regard, he has a special research interest in students who aspire to careers in Science Math Engineering and Technology (SMET) disciplines and conducts research in this area.
Tim will steer the committee of the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP) as a senior research advisor for “We the People” in the upcoming year. The ACP is a partnership among colleges and universities, the White House, and other federal agencies, including the Department of Education. Together these groups will collaborate with students, faculty, administrators and community leaders to promote colleges and universities as agents of democracy and change. Overall, promoting the national campaign to make “agents and architects” of democracy out of already existing institutes of higher education with a special emphasis on schools which have high percentages of minority, first-generation, and low-income students. Both national achievements honor Tim’s expertise in civic engagement and knowledge of using democracy and social service to promote higher education particularly for underrepresented groups.
Tim has published in various venues including the Journal of Educational Finance, Readings on Equal Education, and other book chapters and reports.
Tim’s own scholarship in action is represented by several involvements including member of the Board of Directors – Mt. Pleasant Christian Academy, a K-12 non-profit, private academic institution founded by his family in New York in 1981. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Michigan Reach, a non-profit mentoring effort in the Ann Arbor, MI community connecting university students to school aged children and community members. He is active in the American Educational Research Association, serving as a member of the Division G Affirmative Action Committee.
