Stylus Publishing (VA) Building the Field of Higher Education Engagement: Foundational Ideas and Future Directions

Community engagement has evolved as a respected field and now occupies a seat at the academic table. In the past, this work had often been relegated to the institutional fringes of higher education, its practitioners marginalized, and the work often portrayed as service, not scholarly. Today, higher education community engagement is a dynamic and continually evolving field of scholarship and practice that carries ever-increasing academic respect. This book contributes to the ever-under-construction edifice by presenting a scaffolding of the scholarship that has been part of the building process, documenting and analyzing the past, speculating about the future, and framing a continuing conversation about and for the field.There are three parts to this book designed to promote a continuing field-building conversation: A look back at foundational documents of the field; a set of provocative questions interrogating those foundational works; and a look to the future by the next generation of leaders in the field. The central part is the special 20th anniversary issue of the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, which brings together key documents of the scholarship of engagement with reflections on those documents by key scholars and/or the authors of the original works. In addition to highlighting the foundations and evolution of the field, this work also looks ahead to the next generation of voices and views as input to the conversation, with a closing chapter that includes invited essays by nine outstanding community-engaged thinkers and writers of the next 20 years who share their ideas about probable futures. Review Building the Field of Higher Education Engagementprovides a comprehensive record of the arguments made in favor of communityengagement scholarship in the past, present, and future. As a result, the bookis well suited for those just beginning their careers. It is also an importantresource for more experienced professionals who may need to step away fromtheir own activity in order to consider the larger issues, trends, and themesthat drove the growth of the field, along with challenges encountered along theway. For scholars approaching promotion decisions, the book provides criticaldocumentation of the significance and historical record of how communityengagement advances the democratic purposes of higher education, particularlywhen read alongside complementary texts (Ayers, 2004; Dean, Johnson &Lhumann, 2019; Overton, Pasque,& Burkhardt, 2017; Stoecker, 2016). Addingsuch detail into tenure and promotion dossiers helps committee members betterunderstand and appreciate the rigor, philosophy, and values associated withengaged scholarship.-- "Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement"Building the Field of Higher EducationEngagement: Foundational Ideas and Future Directions presents twelve landmark articles from 1996-2012 thatcontributed significantly to the emergence of the field of engagement. Alongwith the articles, the book presents updated commentaries and responses by theoriginal authors or noted scholars to the questions they proposed. The formatof this publication is thoughtful as each chapter presents conversation-provoking questions about engagement across academic disciplines. In addition, Chapter 13 is a prospectivelook into the future. Nine authors provide their insights to what engagementmay look like in the next two decades. This book is valuable...as it strives to rethink the work of the academy. Lorilee Sandmann states that colleges and universities remain one of the greatest hopes for intellectual and civic progress because they search for answers in light of pressing problems. Furthermore, higher education in its highest ideals is committed to the scholarship of engagement. She defines engagedscholarship as a mutual relationship between academia and the community thatleaves a positive legacy for all partners. These concepts challe