Flipping the (Alignment) Script: Attracting & Retaining Community-Engaged Scholars

Abstract: As institutions seek to recruit and retain community-engaged scholars, it is important to understand the experiences of faculty who arrive at their new institution and whether those experiences align with their initial perceptions about institutional commitments to and support for community-engaged scholarly work. Do institutional signals that express support for community-engaged scholarship influence faculty members’ choice to work at an institution? Once recruited, how do faculty experiences align with their initial expectations for community-engaged scholarship? This study examines 21 faculty member’s experiences at a single minority-serving university to understand their sense of alignment and the intersections between individual faculty and institutional commitments to equity-centered community engagement. Institutions that highly regard and reward faculty community engaged scholars provide conditions that foster full participation of faculty, students, and communities allowing them to flourish.

Narrative: Institutions designated as minority serving and situated within racially diverse communities carry a particular responsibility to these intersecting commitments in ways that can level power hierarchies and open us up to truly equitable and inclusive community engagement (CE) practices (Ward & Lortan, 2021). Post and colleagues (2016) note a broadening of forms of scholarship within higher education to include community-engaged scholarship (CES). Concurrently, this expansion reflects the commitments of a new, more diverse, generation of faculty, aiming to engage in scholarship that matters. For many CES, community engagement is rooted in inclusivity, equity, and social justice and is a scholarly identity tied to one’s purpose for becoming a scholar–understanding how knowledge is stewarded, generated, and shared, and developing relationships with and in communities (Ward, 2010; Vogelgesang et al., 2010). Faculty seeking to influence social change are likely to pursue community-engagement opportunities in their academic careers.

The desire to develop and sustain community-engaged scholarship is motivated by both individual and institutional characteristics (Colbeck & Michael, 2006; O’Meara, 2008; Wade & Demb, 2008; Ward, 2010). Individual characteristics may include identity, gender, race/ethnicity, experiences and pathways into the work, purpose, academic discipline, teaching and service loads, research expectations, and epistemology. Institutional characteristics may include mission, resources, norms, and evaluation policies and practices. One’s sense of alignment or fit is developed through interpretations of an institution based on artifacts, espoused values, and assumptions (Eckel et al., 1998). Prior to choosing to join the institution, faculty form judgments about alignment via public statements, policies, websites, accreditations, and conversations and interviews. Once employed, faculty acquire more and new information as they experience the application of policies, witness the extent to which espoused values are followed through, and the unwritten norms and assumptions of different groups within the institution. Now as a member of the institution, the faculty member develops a deeper understanding of the institution’s identity, and, in turn, may be better able to navigate the policies and practices that are in place. This literature informs the conceptual framework, see figure 1, developed to help the authors explore how the faculty member’s perceptions of institutional characteristics, via espoused values and artifacts, aligns and motivates them to choose to apply to work there as well as how their experiences once employed affect their choice to stay.

To understand whether university efforts to communicate its institutional identity as a community-engaged campus are effective, one must know whether prospective faculty do, in fact, perceive the institution to be community-engaged. Further, if potential faculty perceive the institution to be community-engaged, then is this considered as part of their decision to accept employment? And what were their reasons for pursuing CES at the university? Answering these questions helps those wishing to CES to their campuses to understand whether and how messages sent externally affect employment choices. As important as the question of recruitment, is the question of retainment. Once faculty elect to join an institution they perceive to be community-engaged, do their experiences once employed match their earlier views? What shapes faculty’s perceptions of whether their views before and during employment align? Which aspects of the institution do they point to when describing their choice to stay? These questions guided our research.

This is a qualitative case study informed by interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) which “places the person at the heart of all its research endeavours” (Eatough & Smith, 2017, p. 204). IPA seeks first person perspective. Twenty-one faculty consented to participate in an hour-long interview. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and thematic analysis and coding were supported by NVivo software. Participants came from across 17 departments, six units (i.e., school or college) and both tenure track and non-tenure or academic professional track (see Appendix for further demographic details). Time employed at UNCG ranged from one to six years.

Findings/Conclusions
Key findings from the study include:
1. Individual motivations for community engagement are personal; they are shaped by family values, faith, racial/ethnic identity, early childhood and experiences in their communities.
2. CE faculty are aware of institutional image: prior to employment, they saw the institution as connected to and caring towards the surrounding community; they recognized the institution’s “status”,“focus” or “classification” as community-engaged; knew of institutional efforts to support diversity and inclusion, and recognition of community engagement in promotion and tenure policies.
3. While institutional support matters, department messages and practices matter even more; just over half of the participants felt their CE was valued. Faculty pointed to the value of funded research and types of scholarly products as evidence for support and lack thereof.
4. Contextual factors, such as institutional budget shortfalls and changes to contract length, impact faculty’s sense of the university’s commitment to their CE, as well as faculties’ sense of commitment to the university.

Insights based on these findings include:
1. Prospective and current faculty respond to institutional messaging about community-engaged scholarship.
2. Community-engaged scholarship stems from personal commitments and values, which then are brought into faculty members’ professional purposes and missions.
3. Promotion and tenure policies that support community engagement can be influential for prospective faculty perceiving institutional support of community-engaged scholarship.
4. Institutional messages can help recruit faculty, but department messages must also follow if faculty are to feel that the institution is “walking their talk.”
5.In a time of budget crises, faculty, and especially contract faculty, are especially attuned to whether community-engaged scholarship is valued - or not.
6. How can an institution of higher education “flip the script”, so to speak, such that faculty are not asked how they align with the institution, but rather, the institution asks how it aligns its policies, procedures, and practices - at all levels - to support the community-engaged scholars they sought and hired in the first place?

This study calls on institutions to fully own their responsibilities to receive community-engaged faculty members across a multitude of identities, backgrounds and motivations and have structures and supports in place that not only value equity driven community engagement work, but also who the faculty member is in that work.

Preprint:https://osf.io/b972n/