Engaged Scholarship
Engaged Scholarship calls upon faculty, staff, students, and administrators of the College to embrace an awesome civic responsibility to our communities as part of the shared enterprise of a liberal arts education. As defined by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (2006), "community engagement describes the collaboration between higher education institutions and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity."
The engaged learning courses of the Sharpe Community Scholars Program (for entering students), the Community Studies minor, and other faculty-led curricular or research-based activities with our students exemplify the following features of Engaged Scholarship:
- It is collaborative and participatory
- It draws on may sources of distributed knowledge, based on partnerships
- It is shaped by multiple perspectives and expectations
- It deals with difficult, evolving questions
- It is long term in both effort and impact
- It requires diverse strategies and approaches, crosses disciplinary lines
Faculty who lead Engaged Scholarship at the College are highly skilled at integrating a dynamic teaching pedagogy with community-based research activities, often drawing on extensive experience with ethical community partnering. As active citizens and scholars themselves, our professors model for their students some of the best practices and steps toward a future of continued learning and engagement.
