Moving From Thin to Thick Conceptions of Civic Engagement: Faculty Identity and Goals for Democratic Learning

Abstract

Colleges and universities continue to respond to the call for a deepening of community-engaged research and teaching that contributes tangibly to the public good. Coupled with a new generation of scholars eschewing traditional markers of academic success, the authors set out to discover what faculty members at an urban university identify as priorities for teaching and research to advance democratic engagement. They collected quantitative and qualitative data from faculty members and their community partners. The study findings suggested that while community-engaged activity continues to grow and even thrive among an increasing number of faculty members, there remain three targeted areas needing improvement in order for democratically informed scholarship to better serve the public good: (1) The need to transform “thin” student learning goals into more robust, “thick” civic learning goals; (2) increasing what now is minimal, if existent, discussion of the political opportunities for and constraints to community work; and, (3) a fuller integration of faculty interests, personal and professional, with teaching and research priorities centering on democratic engagement.

Service-learning: An Empirically Driven and Transformational Pedagogy to Develop Psychologically Literate Citizens for Contemporary Challenges

“…Within the movement for institutional transformation, we might include efforts of long-term culture change in the academy, such as the Carnegie Foundation's Classification for Community Engagement (see Appendix A ) or Imagining America's Tenure Team Initiative (see Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University , Ellison & Eatman, 2008). These efforts seek to influence the academy by empowering faculty or staff to integrate democratic engagement fully into their work and to move community or civic ideals to the center of academic life (Boyer 1996;Jovanovic, Moretto, & Edwards, 2017;Saltmarsh, Janke, & Clayton, 2015).…”