Stances Toward Academic Engagement
A cluster of strategies called “community engagement” represents an ongoing desire by researchers to forge respectful, open-ended, and mutually beneficial relationships with communities they are investigating.
In this manner, researchers, community leaders, and community members can collaborate in the framing, analysis, and development of solutions to problems. Regardless of the particular issue (e.g., school bullying), an important by-product of engaged research can be greater community member participation. Illustrating the potential for lasting effect, engaged research into intergroup relations in high schools (particularly involving bullying or unfair treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students) has fostered a legacy of heightened awareness and participation among faculty and staff involved in related assessment research (Dessel, 2010).Scholars have posed many new ideas regarding how to approach engaged scholarship (Cheney, 2008; Cheney, Wilhelmsson, & Zorn, 2002; Cherwitz & Hartelius, 2007; Harter, Gerbensky-Kerber, & Patterson, 2011; Weis, Nozaki, Granfield, & Olsen, 2007). Recent ideas regarding engagement have challenged traditional, dialectical ideas regarded as serving either basic or practical purposes. These new perspectives offer a multitude of strategies to researchers and communities based on community context, resources, goals, and so on. We are pleased to observe how the theorypractice divide in communication research has been bridged and is no longer an issue.
In fact, the types of research partnerships likely to develop with communities are especially amenable to multiple research strategies and methods, given the likelihood that such projects will be multistage. Initial interviews or surveys may well call for more in-depth conversations, focus groups, and participant observation.
This was true, for example, with the University of Utah’s establishment of the UniversityZNeighborhood Partners Center on Salt Lake City’s west side in 2002. Recognizing the latent conflict between the university (“on the hill”) and the larger community (“in the valley”), and the class and racial divides between the two sides of State Street running through the Valley, the University pursued a deliberate, engaged, and multi-phasic strategy, which began with informal conversations and then widened to include a survey, focus groups, presentations, and Q&A sessions at neighborhood and ethnic association meetings. In this case, conflict was part of the background for a major venture. Although not the primary focus of the work, nor the most salient aspect of the situation, conflict demanded attention.Another important example of engaged research can be found in intergroup dialogue centers on campuses of major U.S. colleges and universities. In addition to offering greater visibility and voice for underrepresented community members, these centers can serve as a launching point for programs that transcend social as well as geographic barriers. For example, the University of Washington School of Social Work initiated the Intergroup Dialogue, Education, and Action (IDEA) effort in November 1996 (Nagda et al., 2001). Founded on engagement as a means to educate and to encourage interaction between people with different cultural backgrounds, the IDEA effort developed opportunities for training students in cultivating intergroup dialogue as a way to communicate across differences within communities where they work.
A few formalized intergroup dialogue projects in the United States stand out as examples. These projects’ specific approaches range from facilitation of intergroup meetings (e.g., the Intergroup Relations Center: Voices of Discovery Program, Arizona State University) to more formal education (e.g., the Program on Intergroup Relations, Conflict, and Community, University of Michigan). A very successful program is Arizona State University’s Voices of Discovery (Trevino, 2001). In a program created to encourage greater understanding between different ethnic, religious, sexual orientation, sexual identity, and within-group dialogues, experienced facilitators conduct seminars to train others in facilitation skills. Researchers and practitioners engage the university community by taking a proactive role in fostering dialogue between campus community members. This involvement conveys information, shares reactions to events, and expresses concerns about ethical behavior.