Event Title

Peer Review of Community-Engaged Scholarship: Developing Faculty and Institutional Capacity

Presenter Information

Cathy Burack, Brandeis University
Cathy Jordan, University of Minnesota

Location

Dolan School of Business Dining Room (104A)

Start Date

29-5-2013 12:00 PM

End Date

29-5-2013 3:00 PM

Session Type

Interactive Session

Description

Peer review is the process by which academic communities assess the quality of scholarly products and, at times, facilitate or restrict the dissemination of such products. Community-engaged scholars may encounter challenges through traditional peer review processes as they seek to advance the public good through dissemination, sharing and discussion of products of community-engaged scholarship (CES). This session focuses on building both the capacity of faculty to address these challenges and of academic institutions to support CES. In this session we will provide an overview of the traditional peer review system (what is reviewed, how does review work, who reviews, why do we review, etc.) and recent innovations addressing CES. In small groups, participants will explore issues that arise at the intersection of CES and peer review, the preparation faculty members need to address the challenges and strategies institutions might use to best support faculty community-engaged scholars. Finally, the presenters, both editors of publications about CES, will offer tips for drawing scholarship from community-engaged activities and preparing products of CES to meet rigorous review standards. Resources and publication outlet ideas of interest to community-engaged scholars seeking to publish their work will be shared.

Learning outcomes for participants include:

• Increase faculty capacity to produce scholarly products of CES and to successfully submit them for peer review and publication
• Develop the beginnings of a "change agenda" aimed at providing faculty information and strategies with which they can return to their campuses to seed change at their institutions to better support CES and community-engaged scholars.

For more information about expanding the boundaries for Community Engaged Scholarship visit the ReThinking Peer Review website: https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/rethinking-peer-review/.

Topic Designation

Community-engaged teaching and scholarship, Peer Review of Scholarship

Presenter Bio(s)

Dr. Cathy Burack is a Senior Fellow for Higher Education at the Center for Youth and Communities (CYC) in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Prior to coming to Brandeis, Cathy was the Associate Director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE), and editor, The International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement.

For the past twenty years Cathy has focused on ways faculty, students and administrators can work together to fulfill the civic missions of their colleges and universities. This focus has been on two interrelated areas: access to higher education, especially by students who are among the first in their families to attend; and the ways in which colleges and universities engage with their communities. Her work has taken several forms including facilitating Think Tanks for senior campus administrators, co-coordinating and facilitating Wingspread meetings focused on the civic mission of research universities, directing various funded projects including Project Engage, a mini-grants program that supported student, faculty and community research teams working together on a community defined problem, and extensive work with faculty from a wide variety of institutions.

Through her work at CYC Cathy works with colleges and universities to use evaluation to both “prove” and “improve” their programs. Her research and capacity-building efforts attend to both outcomes and systemic change. To that end Cathy has conducted evaluations of campus-based change initiatives including conducting a national evaluation of institutional support for service-learning, developing measures of student success, helping to set up the Corporation for National and Community Service Learn and Serve America LASSIE data collection system, and conducting multi-site evaluations on campus-wide change initiatives. Cathy is currently co-Principal Investigator of the evaluation of the Campus Compact Connect to Complete (C2C) initiative, a pilot peer-support program at nine community colleges, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Complete bio available online.

Dr. Cathy Jordan, is Director of the University of Minnesota Extension’s Children, Youth, and Family Consortium and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics. Through her two large, longitudinal community-based participatory research (CBPR) projects in the 1990’s she became intensely interested in models of research that aim to address community-defined needs and contribute to social and political change yet enhance scientific methodology and contribute valid information to our knowledge base.

Cathy’s CBPR experiences and interest in creating institutional support for community engagement at her University led to her involvement in Community-Campus Partnerships for Health’s FIPSE-funded project, the Community-engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative. She chaired the Collaborative’s Peer Review Work Group, which produced a package of materials intended to assist engaged faculty in documenting their engaged scholarship and assist promotion and tenure committee members in recognizing rigorous engaged scholarship in dossiers. She co-directed CCPH’s second FIPSE funded project, Faculty for the Engaged Campus. As part of Faculty for the Engaged Campus, she is the founding editor of www.CES4Health.info, a mechanism for the rigorous peer review and online publication of innovative products of community-engaged scholarship that are in forms other than journal manuscripts. Cathy enjoys helping academics and community members to use community-engaged approaches to address issues impacting the children, youth and families in our communities.