Winding Pathways to Engagement: Creating a Front Door

Abstract

Service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) practitioner-scholars--meaning all who do the work of SLCE with a commitment to integrating practice and study--find avenues to this work in a variety of ways. Many of the thought leaders in this movement started as traditional scholars in their disciplines and, only in their later careers, focused on creating and enhancing SLCE on their own campuses and across the academy. Others first learned about SLCE as an epistemological framework and a pedagogy in graduate programs such as Curriculum and Instruction or Higher Education Leadership. Others came across it during their academic careers somewhat randomly in conversations with colleagues, at conferences, or in the literature. And still others began their journey to SLCE by working in the public sector (as did co-author Mary Tolar) with community organizations, as community organizers, or as social justice advocates. Members of a younger generation of practitioner-scholars have now experienced SLCE in undergraduate or graduate education and seek ways to integrate it into their academic or professional lives from the very beginning. The edited volume Publicly Engaged Scholars: Next Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education (Post, Ward, Longo, & Saltmarsh, 2016) highlights the emergence of this "next generation" of SLCE practitioner-scholars. It offers an intriguing contrast to the question raised twenty years ago by Edward Zlotkowski (1995) of whether SLCE had a future and, if so, what it would need to flourish. Looking back to that moment twenty years ago in his 2015 framing essay for the Service-Learning and Community Engagement Future Directions Project (SLCE-FDP), Zlotkowski notes that it was "a good time to dream of a new era" (p. 82); and he ponders what the forces currently shaping the academy and democracy in the U.S. mean for the SLCE movement. Publicly Engaged Scholars strongly suggests there is currently considerable momentum and excitement around a reimagined future for SLCE. The narratives of 22 engaged scholars from both the academy and the broader community (including co-author Timothy Shaffer) make clear the progress of SLCE in recent decades. And yet, they also reveal dissatisfaction with where we are today and call for continued evolution of the movement. The stories of these next generation practitioner-scholars, including their winding paths into SLCE, suggest to us the importance of supporting the ongoing development of the SLCE movement through more explicit, direct, formalized, and institutionalized points of entry into the work. Many of them went through the academy as graduate students and now work either on campuses or in communities across wide ranging professions. Indeed, graduate-level education is an increasingly common component of such journeys. It is not, however, an unambiguous point of entry to SLCE-related careers. Therefore, in this essay we call for increased attention to the potential of graduate education to serve as a doorway into SLCE. And we suggest the importance of designing graduate-level study with an eye to shaping how incoming SLCE practitioner-scholars understand and undertake the work (e.g., with an asset-based rather than a deficit-based orientation; as an integrated part of their lives rather than an add-on to other responsibilities). Co-author Lori Kniffin's own journey provides an example of the presently common winding path into SLCE taken by members of the next generation of practitioner-scholars: I experienced SLCE first as an undergraduate student in an introductory course in a leadership studies program. When I later joined the same department as a staff member and then as an instructor while completing my master's degree, I learned that the kind of SLCE I had experienced had a lot of room for improvement. I started participating in conversations to improve that course using best practices in the SLCE literature. …