Professional Development Manager Campus Compact Campus Compact Mosier, Oregon, United States
Abstract: Community engaged scholarship has gained attention as public universities begin to answer calls to return to their roots of serving the public good. The scholars at the heart of community engagement play an important role in this mission, but their experiences in the academy are not well understood. As institutional leaders endeavor to support this important work, they need more information about the ways institutional support is experienced by the faculty. A deeper understanding of the nuanced lived experiences of community engaged scholars could improve their ability to attend to the public purpose of the institution.
The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the way community engaged researchers experienced institutional support as they worked through unexpected changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this research described the essence of the experience for five community engaged scholars at a public institution with a recognized legacy of community engagement.
Institutional leaders would do well to recognize the meaningful contributions community engaged scholars are making to the mission of the university and invest in understanding their needs. This study provides a glimpse inside the lived experiences of these faculty and offers insight into the forms of support that would be most meaningful in their work. Improving systems of support for community engaged scholars would pay off in achieving the mission of public universities: serving the communities for whom they were built.
Narrative: Higher education faculty have been engaging with communities for centuries, although their meaningful contributions in the academy have been largely under-recognized (Dolgon, Mitchell, & Eatman, 2017). Today, as higher education leaders call for a return to the public purpose mission of their institutions (Gavazzi & Gee, 2018), the work of community engaged scholars is receiving increased attention. As many public institutions advocate for community engagement, the scholars themselves have found themselves pushed to the margins of the academy because their scholarship does not fit comfortably within the long-standing tradition of their institutions. Moreover, as a group, community engaged scholars are largely represented by women and faculty of color whose minoritized identities have positioned them as marginalized in higher education settings (Antonio, Astin, & Cress, 2000; Doberneck, Glass, & Schweitzer, 2011). If this distinct group of faculty members is filling an essential role in the higher education field, yet vulnerable to multiple challenges in their work environments, careful attention to their experiences in the institution is needed to ensure supportive conditions exist.
The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the way community engaged researchers experienced institutional support during a transformative time in history. The study intended to describe the essence of the experience among community engaged scholars, emphasizing their subjective experiences which are grounded in sociocultural contexts. Providing richer understandings of engaged scholars’ lived experiences can contribute to more tailored support for faculty in the field. The central research question explored in this study was, during the COVID-19 pandemic, how do community engaged researchers at a public research university experience institutional support?
This study required a philosophical framework that attends to the meaning making of individuals and their nuanced lived experiences to achieve the purpose of the study. Hermeneutic phenomenology was best suited to achieve this goal and offered a new approach for the scholarship of engagement.
Phenomenological research provides understanding of, and insights into, the less tangible meanings and complexities of our world (Finlay, 2011). Gaining a nuanced understanding of the unique way individuals experience a phenomenon requires a close attention to their process of meaning-making. Slowing down to explore a person’s world and dwell with the phenomenon (Finlay, 2011) is most accessible through phenomenology.
Four of the five study participants were women, making gender a salient contextual factor in the study. For that reason, a feminist perspective complemented the foundation of hermeneutic phenomenology, which attends to the participants’ sociocultural contexts. Using these lenses in the revisionary research process, I came to understand each community engaged researcher’s experience as a unique story contributing to a collective account of what it means to be supported by their institution.
The study used a hermeneutic qualitative phenomenological approach and participant interviews to investigate the phenomenon. As a method, phenomenology emphasizes rich descriptions of the lived experience of individuals through first-person accounts (Moustakas, 1994). It seeks to understand the essence of an experience for a group of individuals who have experienced the same phenomenon (Patton, 2015). Enacted in this study, a phenomenological approach served to identify the essence of life for a community engaged scholar as described by those who live it.
Interpretive phenomenology, with an emphasis on the subjectivity and temporal nature of lived experience (Moran, 2000), is complemented by interpretive phenomenological analysis, or IPA (Smith & Osborn, 2003). The purpose of IPA is to explore in detail how participants are making sense of their personal and social world with close attention to the meanings particular experiences and events hold for participants (Smith & Osborn, 2003). It emphasizes a dynamic process with an active role for the researcher. The goals are for the researcher to understand and describe the participants’ world and develop an overtly interpretive analysis, positioning the description in relation to a wider sociocultural context (Larkin, Watts, & Clifton, 2006).
Considering the guidance from the greater field of phenomenology and recommendations from Smith and Osborn (2003), I carefully selected five study participants. Study participants were faculty members at a broad access institution in the Pacific Northwest with a distinguished record of community engagement. Participant parameters included a full-time faculty position, scholarship that has been primarily ‘community-engaged,’ and whose efforts to engage with community partners continued through the crisis events of 2020. These criteria provided an information-rich sample for the study.
The Institutional Review Board at Oregon State University approved the research plan, including participant consent forms and secure data storage to ensure maximum confidentiality. Additionally, during the data analysis process, several forms of verification and validation measures were in place including corroboration by participants, review from colleagues, and returning to the literature for affirmation (Rocco & Hatcher, 2001).
Participants represented a diverse faculty population spanning five different departments and five different position types. Although all held full time faculty positions at the same institution with a reputation for a culture of engagement, their experiences with institutional support for their community engaged research was highly diverse.
Interviews with faculty found a range of experiences. Themes included feelings of inclusion or exclusion, frustration or ease, privilege or restriction, security or instability, and more. Data suggested contextual factors like institution type, disciplinary department, and type of faculty position influenced the way they experienced support. Relationships and connectedness were crucial in women’s experiences in all cases. More broadly, undifferentiated forms of support for community engaged researchers were found to be insufficient. More tailored forms of support for individuals, or groups with commonalities like women, would be a more effective approach.
Taken together, results from the data led me to understand the phenomenon in an unexpected way. The essence of the experience with institutional support for community engaged research is highly individualized and making any generalizations would be superficial at best, and harmful at worst. Data analysis guided me to four primary arguments supporting this understanding: 1) women’s experiences are different, 2) context matters, 3) relationships are crucial, and 4) undifferentiated forms of support are insufficient.
Keywords: community engaged scholars, institutional support, phenomenology, women
