Project Colleague

Effective community service needs a lot of support. Professors who’ve developed successful projects share their experience through a new pilot program.

By Cathy Burack

In 1995 the late Ernest Lynton, senior associate at NERCHE, wrote Making the Case for Professional Service. He argued that "faculty professional service"—community work based on faculty expertise that is seamlessly connected to research and teaching—embodies the outreach mission of the university by applying and making available theoretical knowledge.1 He also contended that such service is scholarly when, through the application of theory to issues facing communities, new knowledge is created, tested, and shared.

Survey on Professional Service

NERCHE had hoped to find a model institution where "best practices" could be documented. What we found instead were "service enclaves," or collectives of faculty members and professional staff who carried out the service mission of their institutions. We found these service enclaves at all kinds of institutions, from research universities to liberal arts colleges. Regardless of institutional type, the enclaves had certain things in common: specific types of leadership, a high degree of institutional savvy, visibility, resources, and clear connections between outreach activities and teaching and research. Service was not at the margins of these institutions; it was a central and supported part of faculty members’ work.

Absence of Faculty

The faculty members in the service enclaves had obviously succeeded in integrating professional service into their work as professors. But they were not the norm. Most of the faculty members we surveyed said their professional service left them isolated and their work unrewarded. We knew that discussion among administrators and commentators about service was greater nationwide than it had been in decades. This discourse centered on institutional missions and the need for colleges and universities to rebuild external support; on definitions of scholarship that would recognize the legitimacy of public service and outreach; and on incentives and recognition for faculty engaged in such work. But hardly a faculty voice, let alone a community voice, was to be heard in these discussions. In response to this problem, NERCHE initiated, with foundation support, the Portfolio Project and Project Colleague.

A major barrier for faculty members engaged in professional service is the lack of mechanisms to document and evaluate service as scholarship. Ernest Lynton and Amy Driscoll, now at California State University, Monterey Bay, established the Portfolio Project, a three-year endeavor in which sixteen faculty members from four institutions created prototypical service portfolios. These faculty members worked through their institutional review processes to develop ways to document their professional service and to devise a framework for evaluation. Lynton and Driscoll described the project in their 1999 book, Making Outreach Visible: A Guide to Documenting Professional Service and Outreach.

Since then, Driscoll and Lorilee Sandmann of the University of Cincinnati have created the National Review Board for the Scholarship of Engagement. The board is made up of scholars from around the country who serve as external reviewers in tenure and promotion processes in which the scholarship of the faculty member under review is heavily community-based.

Project Colleague

Another major roadblock for faculty members doing service work is developing skills to work with communities and to garner support within their institutions. Project Colleague began in 1996 with a "train-the-trainers" design. Faculty members engaged in professional service learned skills to help their peers in other institutions become more effective at professional service and other outreach work. The initial project design called for NERCHE to select faculty "associates," who would ultimately become the "trainers," and to set up and facilitate meetings, hire experts, develop training materials, sponsor workshops, and the like.

After soliciting peer recommendations and conducting interviews, Zelda Gamson, founding director of NERCHE, and I selected the ten faculty associates who first met on that autumn day in 1996. Collectively, they had decades of experience doing professional service in a variety of realms—schools, human service agencies, local communities, and grassroots action groups. The associates committed to attending five days of meetings and training sessions held throughout the academic year. They received a small stipend for each of the five days, plus travel expenses. Associates also agreed to serve subsequently as paid consultants or workshop leaders for colleges and universities interested in improving their faculty’s capacity for public service and outreach.

Our first meeting began a process of reflection by these highly skilled and respected scholars. As the late Donald Schön, Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a NERCHE White Paper:

If skilled performers try to teach (and therefore, in part, describe) what they know and do to someone else, they must first discover what they actually do when confronted with a situation of a particular kind. So a piano teacher might say, for example, "I don’t like the way you play this transitional passage. Let me play it so that I can see what I do." She must observe what she does before she can describe it. . . . if we want to teach about "doing," then we need to observe ourselves in the doing, reflect on when we observe, describe it, and reflect on our description—in essence, to engage in a process of "action research."

To start the process of observation, description, and reflection, associates wrote about a project with which they were currently involved. They described the steps they went through in setting up the project—from how they got the idea to what institutional barriers they encountered. They also identified the personal resources on which they drew to initiate and maintain the activity.

The projects varied as much as the institutions and disciplines of the faculty associates. An engineering professor at the University of Hartford, for example, wrote about a study on the impact on highway traffic of a train line from the city of Hartford to the airport. His idea grew out of a desire to link a new course to a community-based need. He reviewed earlier reports on the issue and met with people in and outside of the university to shape and launch the project.

A professor of education at Lesley College in Massachusetts described the Say Yes to Education Program that proposed to oversee the academic progress of sixty-nine student recipients of scholarships that would pay for all of them to attend the college of their choice if they graduated from high school or obtained a GED. An outside donor had approached the president of the college about undertaking the project, and this faculty member agreed to direct it. The project evolved from an initial focus on just the identified students, to a more involved one of working with teachers to restructure a school.

Similarly, a faculty member from the Graduate College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, told the group about the founding of the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment (CIRCLE), which helps a university build the capacity of newcomer groups to participate in their communities. Supported by a state grant, CIRCLE began as a partnership among three campuses of the University of Massachusetts system (Boston, Amherst, and Lowell), which set out to design innovative leadership programs with the state’s refugee and immigrant communities. Guided by an underlying philosophical commitment to models of collective leadership, each campus undertook different teaching, research, and service activities based on its particular strengths and the needs of local newcomer communities. The faculty associate in our group led the planning process.

Common themes emerged from our discussions. For example, how a project was initiated seemed to affect how things would develop. When a community or an outside donor approached an institution with a project and offered to fund it, the project was usually handed over to a small group of people who tried to make things happen quickly to show the donor that the institution was making progress. The positive effect of this practice was that tasks got accomplished rapidly and the project had a sense of importance attached to it. The negative effect was that the project did not have the same legitimacy within the university that activities generated internally had. Yet all of the projects, regardless of how they were initiated (or by whom), always moved into a collaborative mode of operation. Collaboration included sharing drafts, expanding committee membership, and having open meetings and forums.

All of our faculty associates had strong historical ties to their institutions, and almost all had earned tenure, participated in governance, and developed relationships across the institution. They knew their institutions’ stories, including the unwritten ones. As one faculty associate noted, the group members were "the usual suspects." They intuitively used these ties in positive ways. Their skill came through in their strong reliance on colleagues and friends within the institution, their knowledge about how to get things done, and their good sense of timing.

Successful projects always had a vehicle to move work forward—a committee, a staff, or colleagues—outside the regular committee structure of the campus. In conceptualizing their projects, faculty associates developed a clear sense of how they would connect with the community (although methods sometimes changed as the project developed). Often the community participated in the earliest stages of the project. And at some point, the faculty associates brought in students, and most tied their projects to the curriculum.

Over time, our group discussions and exercises helped the faculty associates to specify how they worked with communities and to see how they developed a sense of community within their institutions. Their shared understanding transcended their disciplinary and institutional differences. The discussions made Zelda Gamson and me realize that we needed to change our design for the project. We had planned to hire a string of experts to teach the associates how to facilitate workshops on the skills (e.g., conflict resolution) they identified as central to their service work. But in light of the group’s discussions, we redesigned the project to take advantage of the expertise within the group.

The year culminated in a three-day summer institute at which NERCHE staff and the faculty associates set up a temporary "design studio," richly furnished with materials about scholarship, communities, faculty professional service, consulting, and examples of different approaches to creating workshops. Prior to the institute, the faculty associates filled out a questionnaire that helped us determine their areas of expertise in workshop development. The questionnaire also asked them about topics on which they needed help and other skills they could offer.

We then divided the associates into two teams: one focused on initiating and sustaining community projects within institutions; the other explored ways to create effective partnerships with the external community. Over the three days, the teams used the material in the design studio, presented rough plans for workshops, critiqued one another’s workshops, made revisions, and turned in draft workshop curricula. The institute generated a set of some twenty exercises and activities focused on issues internal to colleges and universities as they engage in community projects and on matters external to them when they create partnerships with communities. NERCHE makes these exercises and activities available on request to help other faculty members implement community outreach projects.

We subsequently repeated Project Colleague with a second group of faculty associates. They chose to focus on ways to create sustainable partnerships between communities and colleges and universities. Recognizing that differences in the cultures of communities and colleges can derail a project, the group developed "Swinging Doors: Making Community-College Partnerships Work," a comprehensive workshop to help community-based organizations and agencies understand the context within which their campus partners operate.

Project Colleague has allowed NERCHE to draw together faculty from different disciplines. The faculty members’ experience with outreach and community work allows them to overcome disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and they have joined together to teach and learn from one another. NERCHE now has a cadre of faculty on whom it can call as advisers, consultants, researchers, writers, and conference presenters. The value of Project Colleague is that it recognizes that the experts in building community are already on our campuses. Institutions would do well to recognize, support, and learn from them.

Note

Cathy Burack is associate director at the New England Resource Center for Higher Education.

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