A NERCHE Annual Report: Profiles of Public Engagement: Findings from the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty

Community-campus engagement has evolved significantly over the past quarter century, shaped by a number of factors. One has been the effort to reclaim the civic mission of American higher education. Frank Newman, while at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the early 1980s, asserted that the most critical demand is to restore to higher education its original purpose of preparing graduates for a life of involved and committed citizenship,” and concluded that “the advancement of civic learning, therefore, must become higher education\u27s most central goal (1985, xiv). Another factor has been the increased understanding that colleges and universities serve as “anchor institutions” (Axelrod & Dubb, 2010) and thus have responsibilities to their neighbors to act as “stewards of place” (American Association of State Colleges and Universities, 2002). There is also the influence of research in the cognitive sciences and developmental psychology that has provided a deep understanding of how students learn, highlighting the importance of validating prior experiences and gaining higher-order thinking skills through inquiry-based, problem-posing teaching and learning strategies that involve students in addressing important, trans-disciplinary issues in communities (National Research Council, 2000). Finally, there is an emerging awareness that generating knowledge increasingly requires new epistemological frameworks and research methods that honor and emphasize the “ecological” or interconnected nature of knowledge generation that includes but go well beyond the academy (Bjarnason & Coldstream, 2003; Gibbons et al., 1994; Saltmarsh, 2011). This last factor, in turn, is being driven especially by a new generation of scholars who are fundamentally oriented to networked knowledge generation and are creating integrated academic identities as engaged scholars (Sturm, Eatman, Saltmarsh, & Bush, 2011). In many ways, the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement is a product of this set of influences, particularly the evolution of perspectives on knowledge generation and the scholarly work of faculty. NERCHE created the annual Ernest A. Lynton Award in 1996 to recognize excellence in what was then called “Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach.” In 2007, it was renamed the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement to reflect shifts during the intervening decade toward a fundamentally more collaborative, integrative conceptualization of faculty work. What has not changed is the recognition of Ernest Lynton’s key contributions to engaged knowledge generation and its implications for faculty work and institutional change

Best foot forward, watching your step, jumping in with both feet, or sticking your foot in it? - the politics of researching academic viewpoints

This article presents our experiences of conducting research interviews with Australian academics, in order to reflect on the politics of researcher and participant positionality. In particular, we are interested in the ways that academic networks, hierarchies and cultures, together with mobility in the higher education sector, contribute to a complex discursive terrain in which researchers and participants alike must maintain vigilance about where they 'put their feet' in research interviews. We consider the implications for higher education research, arguing that the positionality of researchers and participants pervades and exceeds these specialised research situations.15 page(s

‘Inspired and assisted’, or ‘berated and destroyed’? Research leadership, management and performativity in troubled times

Research leadership in Australian universities takes place against a backdrop of policy reforms concerned with measurement and comparison of institutional research performance. In particular, the Excellence in Research in Australian initiative undertaken by the Australian Research Council sets out to evaluate research quality in Australian universities, using a combination of expert review process, and assessment of performance against &lsquo;quality indicators&rsquo;. Benchmarking exercises of this sort continue to shape institutional policy and practice, with inevitable effects on the ways in which research leadership, mentoring and practice are played out within university faculties and departments. In an exploratory study that interviewed 32 Australian academics in universities in four Australian states, we asked participants, occupying formal or informal research leadership roles, to comment on their perceptions of research leadership as envisioned and enacted in their particular workplaces. We found a pervasive concern amongst participants that coalesced around binaries characterized in metaphoric terms of &lsquo;carrots and whips&rsquo;. Research leadership was seen by many as managerial in nature, and as such, largely tethered to instrumentalist notions of productivity and performativity, while research cultures were seen as languishing under the demoralizing weight of reward and punishment systems. Here, we consider what is at stake for the future of the academic workforce under such conditions, arguing that new models of visionary research leadership are urgently needed in the &lsquo;troubled times&rsquo; of techno-bureaucratic university reforms.<br /

ATR Commissioning Software Task Force Report

The Beam Injection Test Software Task Force was Charged with Studying software needed for the ATR Test, seen as a stepping stone or template for the larger scope for the full RHIC control system. This report outlines our avenues of exploration so far, present the current analysis and implementation work in progress, and gives recommendation for the future on the ATR and longer time scales

Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.Cally Guerin, Vicki Xafis, Diana V. Doda, Marianne H. Gillam, Allison J. Larg, Helene Luckner, Nasreen Jahan, Aris Widayati and Chuangzhou X

Towards an ethical ecology of international service learning

International Service-Learning (ISL) is a pedagogical activity that seeks to blend student learning with community engagement overseas and the development of a more just society. ISL programmes have grown as educational institutions and non-governmental organisations have sought to achieve the goal of developing ‘global citizens’. However, Service Learning (SL) in general and International Service-Learning (ISL) in particular remain deeply under theorised. These educational initiatives provide policy makers with a practical response to their quest for a ‘Big Society’and present alluring pedagogical approaches for Universities as they react to reforms in Higher Education and seek to enhance both the student learning experience and graduate employability. After outlining the development of ISL in policy and practice, this paper draws on the rich tradition of ISL at one British university to argue that ISL is a form of engagement that has the potential to be ethical in character although we identify a number of factors that militate against this. Our contention is that ISL which promotes rationaland instrumental learning represents a deficit model and we therefore conceptualise ISL here as a transformative learning experience that evinces distinctly aesthetic and even spiritual dimensions. Upon this theoretical groundwork we lay the foundations for conceptualizing ISL in ways that ensure its ethical integrity