New pathways for university research: Community plays leading role in engagement scholarship
By Rita Espeschit
More and more, research practices have been moving away from the ivory tower of times past and reaching out to the community. What researchers find when they get there is that knowledge creation as a two-way street can be a rewarding and impactful experience with potential impact on public policy. Sure, university and community bring different plates to the feast of research. But is one plate tastier than the other? Dean of Extension Katy Campbell thinks not, and speaks about innovative research outputs, the community as co-creator and author, and other exciting aspects involved in “bringing the university to the people” through engagement scholarship.
How would you define engagement for a non-academic readership?
We talk about university community engagement, and we talk about engagement scholarship. In our Faculty we generally make a distinction between those two things. Community engagement is what a lot of people do in universities. Health sciences faculties are a good example of that, with the work they do through community clinics.
Would that be what was known as outreach?
I would say so, yes. In the outreach model, researchers wouldn't necessarily give as much value to the expertise and knowledge of community partners. The research that emerged from that was usually disciplinary-based, and very often the university would be in control of everything: the funding, the questions, the timing, and so on.
In engagement scholarship, we use our expert eyes, our social understanding of the world, to work right in the middle of community. We respond to what the community identifies as the issues they are facing, so instead of the questions always coming from a researcher who is curious about something, they are either co-created or come entirely from the community. Engagement scholars use engagement methods. For example, I do narrative research: when I’m working with a community, we tell a story together, and we equally own that story.
The scholarship that comes out of it also looks very different — and its audience isn’t only restricted to scholars. The outputs should have a social impact in the community, and they are defined in collaboration between researchers and community members. So while we may agree that we will write a scholarly paper and go to a conference together, we will also probably work in workshops with certain groups, or we might develop a blog, produce a film, or come up with many other kinds of outputs. Another distinction is that in engagement scholarship, one of the goals is to promote learning that leads to social action. A good outcome for a project, for example, could be something like a change in social policy.
Since you’re not only producing papers for your academic peers, you also adopt a different perspective in terms of the language you use.
Absolutely. More and more people are beginning to realize that. Scientists are asking themselves, “How do I make it relevant?” Something that’s virtually unreadable in a conventional research paper might, when translated, be something that people find fascinating or useful. Very often engagement scholars will help other researchers to reformat their work, to think about it from a community standpoint. But for an engagement scholar, that isn’t something added on later: it would be part of their method.
One of the premises in this model is that knowledge transfer is a two-way street, right?
Yes, because the community has the experience. They’ve lived through whatever it is that’s going on, and they have powerful stories to tell. Who better would know about the needs of immigrant women than the women themselves and the agencies that work directly with them? For years and years, entire communities have been shut out of expert knowledge and came to believe that “knowledge” is something that the university has, not them. But in engagement scholarship, their knowledge is privileged and valued.
You mentioned social change as a goal of engagement scholarship. Is that about playing a role in terms of promoting social justice?
Engagement scholars very often work on the social justice side. Take the work done by Mary Beckie at the Faculty of Extension. She's a microbiologist, but she doesn't want to be in a lab looking at microscope slides. She wants to use her expert eyes in a social entrepreneurship kind of model, so she will work with sustainable, safe food ideas. She'll work with new Canadians who used to be small plot farmers and help them develop community gardens that can turn into farmers markets. She’s interested in what that means to the food supply and to people’s health. That’s what she’s interested in — in how to make things better and better.
It’s not that fragmented knowledge that focuses the lens on one piece and can’t see the surroundings.
Exactly. That’s a great way of putting it: engagement scholarship is not fragmented.
Is the idea of engagement scholarship growing?
I think community engagement is growing. Do I think that engagement scholarship has got a really good foothold yet? No. It’s still pretty small scale. People will say that they’re doing engagement scholarship because they are going to the community. Well, not necessarily. Some academics think that engagement means getting more participants from the community in their study. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that's not engagement scholarship.
This discussion is not an easy one to have with the academy, because we’ve been trained to see ourselves as highly specialized knowledge creators who don’t necessarily want to share authorship and don’t necessarily value what’s coming from the community as knowledge.
But in the Faculty of Extension this has been at the core of our activities for quite a while. So we’re kind of the old kid on the block.
Henry Marshall Tory talked about what the university should be about in a really democratic way, and he charged us with taking the university to the people. Not the university as the creator of knowledge, but as a partner, a platform, an enabler of knowledge to be created. So we started in a different way. But I would say that most of what we did for the first 40 years was outreach.
Are you talking about the University of Alberta as a whole or about Extension?
The university as a whole, and certainly the Faculty of Extension’s job was to take out there what was being created in the university. I mean it quite literally, like going around in Model T Fords with films, lantern slides, and things like that. That’s how the Banff Centre and CKUA radio emerged.
We changed decade by decade, depending on what was needed. For example, when oil was discovered and urbanization started to happen, we were working with things like how municipal governments may develop planning councils to do a better job of planning cities. Then there was a period (we’re still in it, actually) of neoliberalism, when faculties like ours are expected to generate revenue, through programs, for the university. The social impact on community was still there, but we had to sneak it in.
The question for the Faculty of Extension always has been: why are you a faculty? You know, you’ve got an adult educator, a learning designer, an evaluation specialist, a microbiologist, a health expert… What’s holding you guys together? What’s the common thread? To say that we work with adults or that we do certificates doesn’t tell people what holds us together. Yes, that’s something we do, but that’s not what we are. What are we? Why do we want to be here in Extension? Well, because in Extension, knowledge mobilization can look like something that the community understands. Because the research that we do has a social impact in the community. Because here we can work with communities in an equal-power relationship. All of our faculty members emphasize this aspect in the questions they work with, the methods they use, and in knowledge moblization.
The relationship with the community looks very different between these two models of scholarship.
In the traditional model, a sociologist might know about what the research says on a specific issue the community is dealing with, but may not approach it in a way where there's equity and reciprocity, may not share resources with the community. He or she might just come in and leave.
What has typically happened is that we would go in, look around and say, “Can I have that desk over there and talk to anybody I want to, anytime I want to? Can you spend some time showing me your brochures?” This is actually asking the community for capacity, rather than the other way around. Whereas if you're doing engagement scholarship, you're looking at ways that you can grow capacity in the communities. It takes a long time, though, so very often engagement scholars aren't really “productive” as far as university standards — which need to be changed — are concerned. Developing trust and building relationships is difficult work. It takes time. I mean, social change can take 50 years, and who is to say that it was started by you?
And that’s not even the most important thing.
No, but in a traditional faculty evaluation, that’s what you’re trying to claim, right? That if it wasn't for you, this would not have been discovered or created. So you’re rushed to get your discovery into a peer-reviewed journal first, before someone else does.
So how do you evaluate engagement scholars?
That is a very hard question. What our American comrades call tenure and promotion, T&P practices, do not really encourage engagement scholarship. For many reasons: because you’re not in charge of the power. Because you might not necessarily publish a peer-reviewed paper. Because you are acknowledging expertise that doesn’t have a PhD behind it. Because it takes a very long time to develop a relationship, and funding agencies don’t necessarily work on that cycle.
We’re really lucky that at the U of A the faculties have the autonomy and trust to develop guidelines on how to assess that at different levels. So when we started down this path, we were able to ask faculty to directly consider and articulate social impact on their report. To give us evidence — which can be a lot of different kinds of evidence — that this is making a difference.
What underlies rigorous research in engagement scholarship? We have a set of questions that address this issue. For example, is this an engagement scholarship method? What’s the value of your work to the community? Are we giving credit to co-creation of knowledge? We also have to take a different look at knowledge mobilization. These projects tend to be multi-year commitments, so you can’t wait until it’s finished to talk about it. You have to share early and keep sharing.
This work that’s being developed at the Faculty of Extension could put it in a position of leadership when it comes to engagement in the U of A. Is that something you think may happen or perhaps is happening already?
I don't think that we own engagement scholarship, in the same way that education doesn't own K to 12, and rehab medicine doesn't own occupational therapy. But we are indeed becoming sort of an exemplar of that kind of work. Why departments or programs might want to work with us is because they're looking around and saying, “Hey, they know when a continuing education program is going to work and not going to work. They know how to get the community involved. Why don’t we work with them?” And we really want to do that. We’d love to work with them.