Engaged Research and Practice

“[This volume] highlights research and practice within the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good to demonstrate how engaged scholarship can have a direct impact on local, state, and national communities. By giving examples of engaged scholarship at these varying levels of community, Engaged Research and Practice provides snapshots of engagement at different scales, thus advancing a concept of engaged research that moves beyond working with a local neighborhood or a non-profit organization. These chapters provide examples of organizational change at the institutional level and state and national initiatives all informed by or part of engaged research for the public good.”

Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement

"The centerpiece of this important book is the case for how engaged research and scholarship revitalizes campus commitments to the public good. Making this case positions publicly engaged scholarship as a potent alternative to the neoliberal logic of privatization in ascendency in higher education. Engaged Research and Practice clarifies what commitments to the public good look like on the ground, on campus and in communities, and offers hope for a more socially just and democratic vision of higher education."

John Saltmarsh, Professor of Higher Education

University of Massachusetts

“Generous public and private investments made the U.S. postsecondary education system the envy of the world, and now it is pay-back time. By championing the kinds of engaged, actionable inquiry described by the contributors to this book, colleges and universities can help strengthen the fraying social fabric plaguing many local communities, promote equity, and remedy injustice, changing our world for the better.”

George D. Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor of Higher Education Emeritus

Indiana University

From the Foreword:

“READ this book! The essential messages among the pages are not the first or final words regarding higher education's special relationship with the society that created and supports it. Sit with it. Put it down and pick it up again later. It shifts perspective kaleidoscopically; what you see depends on where you stand at any given moment. The messages encourage reflections, as all good work should do. Argue with the perspectives outlined in the following pages. Curse and correct the messages. But don't leave the messages and their reflections be....Doing so begins the end of engagement and signals the irrelevance of scholarship. Engaged scholarship begs for engagement. Not necessarily agreement or blind fidelity...but stringent and earnest engagement.

If nothing else, this collection calls higher education to question, again, its claim to relevance at a time in American society when neoliberal and commercial objectives of higher education are winning out over the broader life sustaining objectives of justice, knowledge, compassion and community."

Tony Chambers