Community engagement is … : revisiting Boyer’s model of scholarship

Abstract

Criticisms have been levelled at academics at a time when funding of universities is increasingly tied to private and corporate purposes and when academics are held accountable through a hierarchy of functions. Claims are also made that academics work within narrow specializations and are removed from real-world experience and problems. Boyer's model of scholarship offers four categories of scholarship that remain relevant to understanding and guiding the work of academics, including how they engage with communities. To explore the nature of academics' work, we draw on data provided by a group of academics who participated in a research project using both sociological elicitation and visual arts-based research methodologies. The participants were asked to explore what various aspects of current academic work mean for them by providing an image and text, akin to creating a postcard. In this article, we focus on responses they provided to the prompt 'Community engagement is … ' The postcards show how community engagement can be interpreted in diverse ways and that, along with teaching and research, community engagement are all integrated, mutually reinforcing drivers and outcomes of academic work.

Academic incentives for enhancing faculty engagement with decision-makers—considerations and recommendations from one School of Public Health

“…Activities described under "faculty engagement" are generally recognized as part of knowledge translation and exchange and therefore embedded within the "service" pillar of academia. Scholars have explored this notion in terms of associated concepts of "knowledge exchange" (Johnson, 2020;Tang and Chau, 2020), "engaged scholarship" (Nkhoma, 2020;Renwick et al, 2020), as well as "service". However scholars note that methods to recognize, evaluate, and reward academic engagement need to be enhanced, (Brownson et al, 2006;Denis and Lomas, 2003;Jacobson et al, 2004;Lomas, 2007;Longest Jr and Huber, 2010;McVay et al, 2016;Oliver et al, 2014;Stamatakis et al, 2013) but offer few ideas for what these could be.…”

AN ENGAGED UNIVERSITY: RESCUING SMEs DURING THE COVID-19 CRISIS

“…Universities have a leading role to play in creating entrepreneurial thinking and actions, and developing entrepreneurship capital (Audretsch, 2014). Despite the discourse claiming that universities are 'ivory towers' and have no regard for the public good, many academics are motivated by their deep desire to make a difference by helping society (Renwick, Selkrig, Manathunga, & Keamy, 2020).…”

Integrated knowledge translation to advance noncommunicable disease policy and practice in South Africa: application of the Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, and Sustainment (EPIS) framework

“…This has given rise to several models and frameworks for enhancing evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) [15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. The increased focus on the importance of relationships [11,12,[22][23][24][25][26] and stakeholder engagement [8,[27][28][29][30][31] led to further evolution of these frameworks to what is now referred to as integrated knowledge translation (IKT): "an approach or set of processes that can lead to the generation of knowledge for optimizing healthcare delivery systems and improving health system performance and associated outcomes" [32]. Implementation science, on the other hand, is defined as the "scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice, and, hence, to improve the quality and effectiveness of health services and care" [33].…”