Nurturing Networks of Engaged Faculty

Books and movies are full of images of faculty as out-of-touch older white guys with bow ties and elbow patches on their cardigans. They get accused of ivory tower-ism, of holing up in secret and speaking in codes about the amazing (often irrelevant) research they are doing. But reality is different: many faculty — indeed, all of them, from my count — undertake their work because they want to address the world’s challenges and they are contributing, through research, professional leadership, and teaching. The goal of Engaged Cornell has been to support these powerful commitments to making a better world, refreshing and renewing the university’s founding mission of knowledge with a public purpose. We fund, coach, and connect faculty, placing a special focus on curricular community engagement because it’s at the heart of the student experience. We hope community engagement will fundamentally shape the experience of every undergraduate, but change at that scale is relatively uncharted terrain. What does it look like to have not only an exciting course or two that ambitious students can take, but a thoughtful curriculum that centers engagement opportunities as ways of living out the public work of the discipline? Thanks to the extraordinary work of engaged faculty, we’re finding out.

Instead of positioning ourselves as the expert, the hub of learning, our work needs to be connecting faculty with deep and varied expertise across the university for mutual learning and collaborative practice.

The kind of community-engaged curricula we hope to see doesn’t come from our vision alone — we don’t pretend to know the most powerful and effective ways to craft disciplinary journeys that will develop scholar-citizens. But we know that faculty, with the right support, can build extraordinary things. So the Office of Engagement Initiatives (OEI) created two positions for faculty development and support (Amanda Wittman and I occupy those; Richard Kiely launched this whole effort and works closely with us). As the first of those hired, I had the opportunity to think through with our earliest colleagues how best to achieve our goals. And as a proponent of network theories of change, collective impact, and self-determination, I saw pretty soon that we would need a different model than the usual “faculty development” approach. Instead of positioning ourselves as the expert, the hub of learning, our work needs to be connecting faculty with deep and varied expertise across the university for mutual learning and collaborative practice. An example: when we run workshops to advance faculty practice in community-engaged teaching and scholarship, we don’t do it all ourselves. We choose excellent partners from among our faculty colleagues, and with them we co-design and co-facilitate workshops open to anyone. We emphasize relationship-development as well as individual growth at our workshops, and we know that this kind of network-weaving has generative effects.

Cornell is, after all, the birthplace of citizen science; the home base of NYS cooperative extension; a hotbed of translational research. Bruce Lewenstein edited the seminal journal Public Understanding of Science; Noliwe Rooks has reshaped the national conversation on race and education with Cutting School; John Forester shifted professional paradigms with The Deliberative Practitioner; Cornell’s Prison Education Program has won national accolades and transformed countless lives. Yes, my colleagues and I have unusual experience as scholars-practitioners-teachers of public engagement, but it’s been clear to us that the way forward, for all of us, is through humility, connection, and mutual curiosity. We have so much to learn from each other and so much important work to do together.

The strategy we developed, then, was rooted not just in individual faculty growth, which is the field standard, but also in faculty network development. Our Engaged Curriculum Grants require a team to apply together, with at least two of them on the tenure track so as to ensure some main-streaming of the new engaged curriculum they develop. But that strategy is also a way to make sure that people ask around, seek colleagues with shared interests, move past the perennial perception of engaged learning as something that isolates them from their colleagues. This strategy has supported the development of new multidisciplinary minors in Community Food Systems and Crime, Prisons, Education, and Justice, and paved the way for the newest minor in Migration Studies. Our Faculty Fellows programs (traditionally in Engaged Learning, but this year branching out into Engaged Scholarship as well) also invite colleagues from across the university to join a year-long learning community where we learn and innovate together. Results have been fascinating, both in the short and long run, as theater professors offer scientists embodied exercises for playing with power; design professors introduce different models of syllabus construction; law and policy and public health and environmental science all find common challenge and creative solutions in the same room.

So, we take a “big tent” approach to public scholarship, understanding it as scholarly work on public issues, for public purposes, with public partners, and/or (co-)creating public goods.

What’s been hard in this work is also what’s brilliant about it: we embrace and engage such diversity that it can be hard to find common languages across our differences. And they aren’t just semantic differences: in a conversation that celebrated participatory practice and local knowledge, for example, a food scientist offered the observation that in his field (dairy management), “local knowledge” can kill people. Science has a place and listeria can be managed, and how do we find ways of contributing those knowledges so that they can be heard and used, giving to and also learning from the field of practice? So, we take a “big tent” approach to public scholarship, understanding it as scholarly work on public issues, for public purposes, with public partners, and/or (co-)creating public goods. Across this expanse of practice and terminology, we find relationship is what helps us learn best from each other and leverage one another’s expertise. For example, when Law School colleagues worked with the Cornell Farmworker Program to provide clinical legal support, they also discovered how hard it was for these new taxpayers to properly file their taxes because almost everyone (even CPAs) is under-informed about how the system should work. So Law and Accounting colleagues across two different colleges teamed up to develop new engaged coursework on low-income and immigrant tax law. These colleagues not only do important public work, but they’ve created a new academic field in the process.

Besides this network approach to change, the other innovation from OEI, from a “faculty development” standpoint, has been our shift from “ladder” to “climbing wall.” Many learning and development programs offer staged opportunities that serve as rungs on a “ladder” of learning. What we’ve found, though, is that faculty come to community engagement from such an array of backgrounds and perspectives that uniform rungs are rarely what’s needed here. We offer a variety of opportunities, then, like handholds and footholds on a proverbial climbing wall, and encourage people to come to the wall for their own reasons, in their own ways, finding their own paths toward their self-defined goals. Some people want to work on partnership development, or curriculum design, or preparing students for engagement, or assessing student learning from community partnership, and we want to support them in that process. All our workshops and institutes center on topics raised by colleagues (as well as the Faculty Learning Outcomes we created based on research in the field) and are co-designed and co-facilitated by faculty colleagues, advancing the network-weaving and individual growth simultaneously.

I’m not the point here. The network is. It will generate amazing and emergent new impacts as we see every day, and my job is to keep nurturing it.

So this all sounds good, but it’s hard — I don’t get to visit people’s classes often enough, to check in or review syllabi or respond to all the requests for co-authorship of new work (one of our uses has been to advance understandings of the field of service-learning and community engagement as a whole) as I’d like. But that’s where the faith in the network becomes so important — I’m not the point here. The network is. It will generate amazing and emergent new impacts as we see every day, and my job is to keep nurturing it. The question I sit with most these days is about how best to encourage faculty leadership and self-organizing, because the changes faculty seek — reward systems that better recognize their many kinds of contributions; labor and funding distributions that better account for the heightened workload and impact of community-engaged learning; advocacy at the highest levels for a vision of public scholarship that embraces their sense of calling in the world — needs to come from them, and them alone. Or rather, from them together.