Reports and References - Typology for Civic Engagement - Doherty

(Appendix 4 for 2000 Civic Engagement Final Report)

William Doherty
Professor
Family Social Science
University of Minnesota

The typology is as follows. The strategy is to include potentially every faculty member in the university who is willing to think broadly about his or her current work, to highlight where outreach is on the continuum, and then to articulate how the emerging model of civic engagement would differ from outreach. At various points in their careers, faculty might be engaged in one, two, or all three ways.

Engagement Type 1: Faculty Conducted Project, explicitly connected to a community need. This would fit my physics professor example. He is conducted an expert-defined and conducted project in a technical or esoteric area, in which direct community involvement (beyond taxpayer support) is not feasible, but which nevertheless can be conceptualized by the investigator as serving a community need. All faculty research could fit under this kind of engagement if the faculty member is willing to think through and articulate the connections between his/her work and citizen needs or priorities. The same would be true for teaching: it may be in an esoteric area to small group of graduate students, but the faculty member should be able to connect the content to broader themes. Engagement Type 1 would not require that a faculty member put in more time or do explicit community outreach, but rather be able to articulate a vision of a connection to the commonwealth. This gets around the problem of lack of rewards and lack of time for those who might resist the University telling them they have to do more work or work differently.

Engagement Type 2: Faculty Consultation or Teaching in the Community. This is the traditional outreach model, which is alive and does good things for the U and the community. We bring our expertise to the people in ways that they see as relevant. In advance outreach work, we leave citizens with knowledge and skills that they can act on in the futurenamely, through empowerment. The physics professor could reach out to high school students to encourage them to take up careers in science, or could do community education about the origins of our universe and its implications for how we think about our role in the universe.

Engagement Type 3: Faculty Partnership with Communities. This would be the emerging approach to civic engagement as two-way partnership, with co-defined problems, co-activated resources, and collaborative action.The physics professor could work on a collaborative and ongoing basis with a group of citizens concerned with nuclear power plants in our community or with a group of citizens concerned with nurturing a generation of minority scientists.