nc state awarded national grant
to develop faculty as
community-engaged scholars
February 28, 2009-- A team of NC State faculty and staff was recently awarded a grant to design, implement, evaluate, and disseminate an innovative faculty development program to advance community-engaged scholarship on campus and nationally. The team is led by Patti H. Clayton, Director of the Center for Excellence in Curricular Engagement; Audrey J. Jaeger, Associate Professor of Higher Education Administration, Director of the Collaborative for Research on Engagement, and Civically Engaged Scholar with the Center for Excellence; and Jessica Katz Jameson, Associate Head and Associate Professor of Communication and Civically Engaged Scholar with the Center for Excellence.
“Community-engaged scholarship” encompasses scholarly activities related to research and/or teaching that involve full collaboration of students, community partners, and faculty as co-educators and as co-generators of knowledge. It is a model for integrating research, teaching, and engagement that is well-aligned with NC State’s land-grant mission and extension and engagement history. “As a research-extensive university in the land-grant tradition, NC State has a long history of engagement with the people, communities, and issues of our state, nation, and the world,” noted Provost Nielsen in his letter of support for the grant. He added that NC State is committed to institutionalizing community-engaged teaching and research.
The goal of the new faculty development program is to build capacity for scholarly community-engaged teaching and research among faculty at various career stages. Called “EDGES” (Education and Discovery Grounded in Engaged ?Scholarship), the program targets faculty during key transition points (or edges) in their career paths and supports the development of projects that, in turn, involve students at key transition points in their undergraduate careers. Twenty-four faculty members (6 at each of 4 career stages: doctoral students, new-to-campus pre-tenure faculty, recently tenured faculty, and late career faculty) will undertake a series of professional development activities (both within and across stage cohorts and in collaboration with community partners) that will be oriented toward the development of a community-engaged scholarship project to be implemented with students in the first or final year of their undergraduate careers. EDGES will thus support an intergenerational mentoring community of faculty.
The highly competitive grant competition was part of a national initiative called “Faculty for the Engaged Campus,” funded in part by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education in the U.S. Department of Education (FIPSE) and sponsored by Community-Campus Partnerships for Health in partnership with the University of Minnesota and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The other five institutions awarded a Faculty for the Engaged Campus grant are: Northwestern University, Ohio University, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
Additional information and application materials for EDGES can be found at www.ncsu.edu/curricular_engagement or by contacting Patti Clayton patti_clayton@ncsu.edu, Audrey Jaeger audrey_jaeger@ncsu.edu, or Jessica Jameson jameson@ncsu.edu.
