Engaging Scholarship with Communities

The author addresses a discussion on how to engage students and faculty with their communities to offset indifference and alienation in higher education. Engaged scholarship can take place through a number of venues, including service-learning, coauthorship and collaboration in grants and research projects, and via tenure and promotion guidelines that validate community-based scholarship. This engaged scholarship approach is further validated through research that indicates that students who are involved in the community, beyond their classrooms via service learning efforts view these experiences as transformative in their academic growth and professional development. This paper describes Pedagogy of Engagement approach with specific strategies for students, faculty, and higher education administrators in community partnerships. This work is based on seven years of engaged interdisciplinary scholarship at UT El Paso, a university located on the U.S.-Mexico border, where engaged scholarship efforts have been developed with community partners, and have resulted in co-authored publications with undergraduate and graduate students.