Tracing the Liberal Arts Traditions in Support of Service-learning and Public-engaged Scholarship in the Humanities

Abstract

Disciplines in the humanities have been slow to adopt service-learning and public-engaged scholarship overall, and scholars opposed to it often refer to the private goals of higher education, including private contemplation shielded from market and political forces, and furthering knowledge for its own sake in their respective academic disciplines. However, some scholars have embraced the public-engaged scholarship worldview, although they maintain it in conflict with the goals of humanities disciplines. Alternatively, other humanities scholars center the civic, ethical, and public purposes of their work. The author outlines the historical origins of the two main academic paradigms in higher education, the “orators” and the “philosophers” that led to these distinctions. The more “public,” humanities-based orientation, the orators, evolved first, and it offers its own justification for the humanities in support of public-engaged scholarship. The author proposes additional exploration of this tradition, particularly its understanding of knowledge for ethical and civic action through the “new humanities,” which can serve as a theoretical foundation for the humanities in the ways that humanistic sociology became that site of practice for engaged sociologists. Concepts, such as participation, beauty, and practical wisdom, can help develop an authentically humanities-based approach to engagement.

Leadership Formation: Interpreting Experience

“…The work of Slattery et al (2007), Sandy (2008), Rorty (2004) and Mabey (2013), that we have engaged with above, enriches and underlines the relevance of insights from philosophical hermeneutics for education and formation in general (and see also : Fairfield, 2011;Gadamer, 2004). We have shown how these and other insights from philosophical hermeneutic theory add to or modify the interpretive approaches in the leadership development literature, in order to define the principles and process for a different kind of educational practice and leadership formation.…”

“…Philosophical hermeneutics describes a participative process, but participation in this case is focused on emerging questions rather than answers (Risser, 1997;Sandy, 2008). Therefore, the focus is on individual encounters with 'the other' in which there is mutual invitation to begin participation in open-ended dialogue in each interpretive event.…”

“…The first mode is participation in beauty; this is partly because it connects with the ways in which aesthetic captivation engages us deeply, but also partly because the idea of the beautiful provides a different way of understanding social life as well as the life of art (Sandy 2008). The second mode is participation in friendship.…”

“…Frank, 2010;Sandy, 2008;and especially Sparrowe, 2005). This engages with Day's (2012) perspective on leadership development as a process of learning and engagement between leaders, followers and others.…”

The Baby and the Bathwater

“… 5. Recent analysts of the barriers to publicly engaged scholarship and community-engaged pedagogy have emphasized the need to critically reevaluate these knowledge politics within the academy. See, for example, National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement (2012), Peters (2010), Saltmarsh and Hartley (2011), and Sandy (2013). …”