Faculty & Staff Development Opportunities
PARTNERSHIP SUCCESS: COMMUNITY PARTNER PERSPECTIVES ON COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
We hear the words “community partnerships” frequently, but what does that mean? On May 3, 2023, we heard from experienced community partners on how they have successfully partnered with community engagement college colleagues. We discussed what has worked for them. We also asked what advice they might have for their fellow community organization representatives looking to partner with a college or university, and what do college representatives want to hear? Please watch this engaging 90-minute Webinar (below), and share with your community partners, faculty, and staff!
This webinar was sponsored by LEAD California, Cal State LA, and Saint Mary’s College.
For more information, contact Piper McGinley, LEAD California’s Deputy Director.
ATTENDING TO HEALING WORKSHOP (MARCH, 2023)
LEAD California and Saint Mary’s College of California collaborated with the National Equity Project to bring their Attending to Healing Workshop to the community engagement community. This three-hour interactive and humanizing event is via Zoom.
Attending to our individual healing is essential, and insufficient, if it is not also connected to our collective healing. Explore how to center and integrate ongoing individual and collective healing processes when working, collaborating, and designing for equity.
Healing is the work of coming home to ourselves again and again. Because oppression is persistent, healing must be persistent and on-going. Doing equity works requires continuous healing from the effects of oppression in order to tap into our resilience, access our agency, and express the fullness of our humanity. We believe that healing must be prioritized as we are simultaneously working collaboratively towards transformation and liberation, it cannot wait until our systems are redesigned. Attending to our individual healing is essential, and insufficient if it is not also connected to our collective healing. In this workshop we will explore how to center and integrate ongoing individual and collective healing processes when working, collaborating, and designing for equity.
National Equity Project
The National Equity Project is a leadership and systems change organization committed to increasing the capacity of people to achieve thriving, self-determining, educated, and just communities. Our mission is to transform the experiences, outcomes, and life options for children and families who have been historically underserved by our institutions and systems.
INTRODUCTION TO LIBERATORY DESIGN WORKSHOP (OCTOBER, 2022)
WHAT IS LIBERATORY DESIGN?
Liberatory Design is an approach to addressing equity challenges and change efforts in complex systems. It is grounded in an integrated part of NEP’s Leading for Equity Framework, which meshes human-centered design (aka design thinking) with complex systems theory, and deep equity practice. It is a process and practice to:
- Create designs that help interrupt inequity and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression
- Transform power by shifting the relationships between those who hold power to design and those impacted by these designs
- Generate critical learning and increased agency for those involved in the design work
Liberatory Design is both a flexible process that can be used by teams and a set of equity leadership habits that can be practiced daily. It can be used in a variety of ways and by a variety of actors, including innovation efforts, strategic planning, community-driven design, and collaborative teams. At the core of Liberatory Design are a set of beliefs:
- Racism and inequity have been designed into systems and thus can be redesigned;
- Designing for equity requires the meaningful participation of those impacted by inequity; and
- Equity-driven designs require equity and complexity informed processes.
WHY LIBERATORY DESIGN?
It’s important to consider why so many equity efforts stall or fail to achieve intended outcomes:
- They do not employ a deep enough equity lens—for example, a diversity and inclusion focus as opposed to interrogating deeper causes produced by systemic oppression.
- They take the form of traditional linear, hierarchical plans that focus on strategies, goals, timelines, metrics and accountability. These efforts don’t recognize the messiness and complexity of the challenge, so they often are ineffective and, sometimes, even backfire.
- They are created in the context of dominant white culture, in traditional structures (e.g. committees, task forces), or in teams that don’t have an effective approach to the work. Common problems include:
- group members unable to engage in authentic critical dialogue;
- lack of trust, especially across role/power and identity difference, that undermines team efficacy;
- the process doesn’t bring forward sufficiently creative thinking; urgency leads to hasty, misguided decisions;
- creative and potentially powerful solutions are not accepted by leadership.
CRITICAL AND ASSET-BASED COMMUNITY-ENGAGED LEARNING PEDAGOGY AND PRACTICES (AUGUST – OCTOBER, 2022)
Dominican University of California
As a recipient of the 2022 Campus Compact Institutional Transformation Award, Dominican University of California has been a pioneer in embedding Service-Learning courses across its general education curriculum, as well as growing a robust cohort of students with a Social Justice major and Community Action and Social Change minor.
For more information, contact Piper McGinley, LEAD California’s Deputy Director.
ACHIEVING TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE IN PROMOTION AND TENURE POLICIES FOR COMMUNITY-ENGAGED TEACHING AND SCHOLARSHIP
These experienced faculty, administrators, and researchers shared their strategic approaches to influence, integrate, and transform promotion and tenure guidelines and policies at the departmental and institutional levels. From building from an institutional culture of engagement to seizing a pivotal moment in higher education and society, these panelists shared their reflections, research analyses, cautions, and successful strategies for achieving transformational change in promotion and tenure policies for community-engaged teaching and scholarship.
(APRIL 16, 2024 WEBINAR)
PROMISING P&T REFORMS FOR SOCIETALLY-IMPACTFUL RESEARCH: Strategies and Opportunities
This session explored findings from a new white paper that scans promising reforms to faculty reward systems to recognize a wider range of scholarly contributions in promotion and tenure decisions. The project was commissioned by participants in the Transforming Evidence Funders Network (TEFN), facilitated by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
In this session, co-authors Emily Ozer, Jennifer Renick, Bruce Jentleson, and Bemmy Maharramli shared findings from the project, including recommendations for funders, who are increasingly pursuing investments in the structures, cultures, and conditions that enable more societally-impactful research. Benjamin Olneck-Brown discussed TEFN’s interest in supporting coordination among funders, university leaders, and other partners to build on the substantial momentum outlined in the white paper and catalyze innovations that lead to more dynamic, equitable, and impactful research systems.
(FEBRUARY 5, 2024 WEBINAR)
MOVING BEYOND THE POLICY: Practical Considerations for Reforming Promotion and Tenure
On Wednesday, November 8th, Dr. Emily Janke gave a detailed discussion about advancing efforts to more effectively integrate community engagement in an institution’s promotion and tenure structures, processes, and procedures. Dr. Janke shared in-depth insights and learnings from the past 15 years about how the University of North Carolina Greensboro tackles promotion and tenure reform – the successes, the challenges, and what matters most when working to advance institutional change, outlining the concrete steps UNCG has taken to bolster campus support for and understanding of valuing community engagement within promotion and tenure.
EMILY M. JANKE, PHD
Emily M. Janke, PhD, has served as the director of the Institute for Community & Economic Engagement since 2010, where she has supported UNC Greensboro’s transformation as a community-engaged university. She is also a professor in the Peace and Conflict Studies department where she contributes to its community-engaged scholarship through teaching, research, and service. As a scholar-administrator, Emily has advanced practice and scholarship in the areas of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship with diverse and inclusive teams; the equitable treatment of community-engaged scholarship in workload, hiring, and promotion and tenure policy and practices; strategic efforts to track and monitor community engagement and public service within and across institutions; pluralistic and open scholarly communications; resident-level community boards to support respectful institutional engagement; and the use of restorative practices in interpersonal, intergroup, and organizational culture.
Emily was inducted into the Academy of Community Engagement Scholars in 2021 and served as a Senior Fellow for Duke University’s Office of Civic and Community Engagement in the Office of Durham and Community Affairs in 2022. She has been honored to receive the Barbara A. Holland Scholar-Administrator Award given by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, the Civic Engagement Professional of the Year Award given by the North Carolina Campus Compact, the Early Career Researcher Award and the Dissertation Award given by the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, and the John Saltmarsh Award for Emerging Leaders in Civic Engagement given by American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ American Democracy Project. She is a co-author of Collaboratory®, a publicly searchable, online database of community engagement activities within and across institutions of higher education. She has served on the Carnegie Foundation’s Community Engagement Elective Classification since 2014 and is on the editorial boards of the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, the Metropolitan Universities Journal, and the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement. She enjoys collaborating with a variety of scholars (inclusively defined) to re-imagine the future of community engagement in higher education so that it is more inclusive, impactful, restorative, and just.
(NOVEMBER 8, 2023 WEBINAR)
RE-ENVISIONING PUBLICLY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP IN PROMOTION AND TENURE (FEBRUARY, 2023)
LEAD California, North Carolina Campus Engagement, and Collaboratory are partnering on a series of conversations (webinars and in-person events) that focus on transforming faculty engaged scholarship promotion and tenure policies and practices in higher education. We began with this first “grounding” webinar in the series, held on February 13, 2023.
Many institutions know promotion and tenure policies need to be revised and evaluative metrics need to be created to better recognize, reward, and retain publicly engaged faculty. But oftentimes they are hit with “analysis paralysis” – the details of where or how to start can be overwhelming. Focused on the big-picture of navigating institutional change, this panel will share insights from three scholars who have helped their institutions revise both formal and informal promotion and tenure processes, and will offer insights for collective movement.
(FEBRUARY 13, 2023 WEBINAR)
PANELISTS
Dr. Timothy Eatman, Dean of the Honors Living-Learning Community, Rutgers University
Dr. Emily Janke, Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, and Director of the Institute for Community and Economic Engagement, UNC Greensboro
Dr. David Donahue, Professor of Education, University of San Francisco
For more information, contact Piper McGinley, LEAD California’s Deputy Director.