Stylus Publishing (VA) Engaged Research and Practice: Higher Education and the Pursuit of the Public Good (Engaged Research and Practice for Social Justice in Education)

Engaged Research and Practice is about two prevailing and complementary ideas that have surfaced in the higher education arena: engaged research and higher education for the public good. Engaged research is scholarship that not only attempts to open up new knowledge, but it does so with a sense that the new knowledge, insight and directions have a direct relationship to needs and problems within our communities, institutions, and policy arenas.Engaged, actionable, or participatory research and scholarship attempts to tackle the identified issues of our communities and society. This handbook offers important insights and tangible examples of how higher education leaders may work directly with communities and in policy settings to understand the deeper meanings often lost in conversations about educational opportunity. Each chapter addresses the ways in which faculty, community and administrative leaders may connect research and practice through unique research projects. The authors offer clear explanations of ""how"" their engaged research was conducted to illustrate explicit pathways for practitioners. This book also includes short narratives where authors involved with this research reflect on their experiences and the lessons they have learned while immersed in community and policy related work Review "[This volume] highlights research and practice within the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good to demonstrate how engaged scholarship can have a direct impact on local, state, and national communities. By giving examples of engaged scholarship at these varying levels of community, Engaged Research and Practice provides snapshots of engagement at different scales, thus advancing a concept of engaged research that moves beyond working with a local neighborhood or a non-profit organization. These chapters provide examples of organizational change at the institutional level and state and national initiatives all informed by or part of engaged research for the public good."--Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement (4/21/2017 12:00:00 AM)"Generous public and private investments made the U.S. postsecondary education system the envy of the world, and now it is pay-back time. By championing the kinds of engaged, actionable inquiry described by the contributors to this book, colleges and universities can help strengthen the fraying social fabric plaguing many local communities, promote equity, and remedy injustice, changing our world for the better."--George D. Kuh, Chancellor's Professor of Higher Education Emeritus "Indiana University" (9/1/2016 12:00:00 AM)From the Foreword: "READ this book! The essential messages among the pages are not the first or final words regarding higher education's special relationship with the society that created and supports it. Sit with it. Put it down and pick it up again later. It shifts perspective kaleidoscopically; what you see depends on where you stand at any given moment. The messages encourage reflections, as all good work should do. Argue with the perspectives outlined in the following pages. Curse and correct the messages. But don't leave the messages and their reflections be....Doing so begins the end of engagement and signals the irrelevance of scholarship. Engaged scholarship begs for engagement. Not necessarily agreement or blind fidelity...but stringent and earnest engagement.If nothing else, this collection calls higher education to question, again, its claim to relevance at a time in American society when neoliberal and commercial objectives of higher education are winning out over the broader life sustaining objectives of justice, knowledge, compassion and community.--Tony ChambersThe centerpiece of this important book is the case for how engaged research and scholarship revitalizes campus commitments to the public good. Making this case positions publicly engaged scholarship as a potent alternative to the ne