Editor’s note: Lana Rakow, professor of communication and women studies and director of the UND Center for Community Engagement, grew up in Buffalo, about 32 miles west of Fargo in Cass County’s grain belt. Those distinctly rural Midwestern roots provide a logical bridge between Rakow’s own history and the future of engaged teaching and learning at UND.

Launched in 2004, the University’s Center for Community Engagement (see http://www.communityengagement.und.edu/) links academic resources with community needs and hews close to UND President Charles Kupchella’s call to include both experiential and service learning as vital to a UND student’s educational experience.

In the following interview with Office of University Relations writer Juan Pedraza, Rakow talks about the center, what “engagement” means for students and faculty, and how the concept figures into both UND’s and higher education’s fundamental role in society.

* Listen as Lana briefly talks about her background and the Center for Community Engagement

Q. What is the Center for Community Engagement?

A. It’s an academic unit—it covers all the academic areas of the University. Its mission is very simple: to connect academic resources with community needs. So it’s the link between teaching and learning on campus with what is outside the campus.

Q. How did you get faculty to engage in this process?

A. President Kupchella is very interested in experiential learning; he wanted to see what was being done here about experiential learning, which has come to mean learning outside of the classroom. After extensive study, I found that, although there was a lot going on at UND with respect to this kind of learning, there were some gaps. President Kupchella wanted to insure that those experiences were broadly available and that we encouraged students to take advantage of them.

This led to looking at what faculty do outside the campus. I made an open call to faculty and said ‘who’s interested in something called public scholarship’ where we as faculty are in communities doing research for and with the public.

Well, faculty came out of the woodwork and said, ‘that’s what I do!’ or ‘that’s interesting,’ or ‘that really taps what I think is important.’ So we’ve had about two years with a group of faculty involved in putting together a public scholarship program.

Q. What did you find out after looking at the campus in terms of engaged learning and public scholarship?

A grant from the UND seed money program funded a study that included surveys of nonprofits, surveys of key contacts in small communities across the state, and focus groups and forums in different quadrants of the state; I also did interviews on two reservations. We were trying to identify opportunities for engagement and public scholarship that we haven’t done yet, to identify the gaps, to see what was working, and to find what was not in place yet and come up with recommendations.

We intended the Center for Community Engagement to be the place that makes sure that those gaps are filled in.

Q. So you’re telling us that engagement itself isn’t new—UND has been engaged with the community since its beginnings—but rather that we lacked a coordinated approach to connecting engagement, communities, and students.

A. Yes, that’s correct; and also we’re filling in the other needs that haven’t been met and making sure that we’re covering all of the bases.

We’re not reinventing anybody’s wheel, and we’re not taking over anything that anybody else is doing. We’re just making sure that we’re doing all that we can. We found that there are many communities that have unmet community development needs—so there are things that we know we can do that haven’t had that kind of attention before.

Q. In an earlier conversation, you talked about Hazen, which is about 70 miles northwest of Bismarck, as a good example of how UND has “engaged” a community. Tell us about that.

A. When the center opened, publicity went out from the University, and I started getting calls and e-mails from people saying ‘that’s interesting, what have you got in mind?’

One of those contacts was from Duke Rosendahl, head of Hazen Community Development Inc.; he said ‘this is the way to go, to develop the whole community—what might we do?’

So we designated Hazen as a kind of pilot project—President Kupchella sent them a letter and said, ‘we are happy to...develop ways for the University to link its students and faculty with Hazen.’ We sent an intern—an undergraduate geography student—out there who worked with Devon Hansen, a geography faculty member who has expertise in rural development. The student wanted to find out what people in Hazen thought about their own community; she conducted focus groups there and prepared a report for the community development organization.

Q. What will come out of that process?

A. I don’t know yet—but Duke Rosendahl is coming to campus in October, and we’re going to do a workshop on community asset mapping, which is what we’re calling the process that we used for the Hazen pilot project. We will put together materials for people or communities that want to do similar things involving UND or on their own.

Q. The Hazen project directly involved the Center for Community Engagement, but you’ve talked about other organizations or units on campus doing outreach—how do you coordinate or track those efforts that aren’t specifically organized by your center?

A. If something comes into me that I know someone else is working on, I pass it along to make sure that they get it.

We’re a broker, connecting the right people and programs. So it isn’t necessarily that we always do the work ourselves but we make sure that people find each other. We’re not duplicating what other people on campus are already doing. We’re just starting to track these efforts.

The material that I was gathering for the Carnegie Foundation’s Engaged Campus application was a good way for me to start collecting precisely the sort of information about what’s going on at UND in terms of engagement. I looked at the annual reports of every department on campus, and I provided Carnegie with 20 examples of partnerships.

Q. How does the Carnegie Foundation fit into all of this?

A. The Carnegie Foundation’s Classification of Institutions of Higher Education—a typology of American colleges and universities that was developed in the 1970s and recently underwent an overhaul—designates or classifies a university’s research standing.

Carnegie is just piloting a new category for engaged campuses. They opened it up this year and said ‘if you’d like to be considered in this pilot round, submit a letter of intent from your president,’ which President Kupchella did.

Our application included, as required by Carnegie, 20 examples of reciprocal partnerships. These were examples not only of services that UND provided—and we provide all kinds—but also where there’s engagement on the other end, where that partner has a voice in the process. Carnegie is really looking to see if the engagement is reciprocal, collaborative.

Q. What does all of this mean to UND?

A. This is the next level, this is where I think that higher education is going.

There may have been a time when many universities didn’t provide a lot of service or services to the community. Certainly, that’s not the case for UND, which has always provided extensive outreach and services to the community. But engagement meant providing services to communities, giving knowledge or help, or delivering information.

However, engagement is about collaboration. It’s about respecting and valuing what partners to the University have to bring, and particularly those partners who have not necessarily been at the table—nonprofits, community organizations, municipalities.

With this next level—engagement—we’re focusing on people and groups that haven’t had access because they haven’t had the funding or other resources to make the entree into the University. That’s also where we see the next level with scholarship and with service—collaboration.

Q. What does this mean in practice?

A. It’s not ‘I’m a faculty member, and I’m here to help you,’ or ‘we’re a group of students, and we’re here to help you.’ It’s more respectful, more mutual; it’s ‘I’m a faculty member, I have this to bring to the table, but I know that you have things to bring to the table, too. You know about your community, you know about your neighborhood. Let’s see what we can do together.’

Same with service: it used to be ‘go to the mission and help out with people who need meals or need shelter.’

That still goes on and that’s good stuff. But it doesn’t solve problems, it’s very one-way; we call it ‘drive-by service learning.’

You may feel very gratified having done it, and you actually did help someone in the short term, but it isn’t a long-term commitment, and that’s what the University can do in terms of engagement that’s so exciting.

Q. It sounds like you’re describing a new trend in higher education.

A. I’d say this is a convergence of several trends.

There’s been a service movement in universities for awhile, but it’s typically been within the student affairs. They’ve been primarily interested in how to get students to volunteer and do service, saying it’s good for them and it’s good for the community. But that hasn’t been traditionally linked to academic programming; we haven’t been doing this as part of coursework nor have we really been thoughtful about what is it we want students to learn when they do this.

Then there’s been a whole movement among faculty about faculty roles. The question was should we only be teaching in the classroom and doing pure research—is there no other way we should be working as citizen-scholars. This movement has elaborated on what faculty might be doing in the community and tying together the work they do with their students with their research and their service. It’s called public scholarship or engaged scholarship.

Q. Does this mean that we’re going to change how we reward academics?

A. I think we’re looking at ways in which we can give faculty more flexibility in teaching, research, and service, thinking of those in some integrated ways and giving them credit for it. We’re thinking about faculty negotiating up front that ‘this is the kind of work I’m going to do, and that’s going to be valued,’ and we’re thinking that it’s appropriate to reward faculty for that kind of work.

That’s a big cultural shift in a lot big research universities where pure research traditionally has been valued more than what is sometimes called applied research.

Public research is engaged—it’s new knowledge that comes out of the work that’s done together with partners in communities. That’s not taking knowledge and applying it—where you say ‘now I know this, I’m going to put it to work’—it’s ‘how can we all learn something together.’

Q. Can you give us an example from UND’s own experience about this new trend in service, research, scholarship, and engagement?

A. You bet! The title of the report is UND Neighbors and the LaGrave Neighborhood. This came out of a class that I taught this summer called Service and Citizenship—it’s an example of connecting teaching, research, and service. Students learned how to do research; they actually had to get certified through our Institutional Review Board (IRB) so they could go out and be ethical researchers.

We partnered with the Grand Forks Housing Authority and went to the LaGrave neighborhood low-income housing projects just south of downtown where the students conducted their research. They interviewed residents and did some participant observation, they hung out, had some lunch, had coffee, and met with people and went to their activities—the students produced what we call a ‘community asset map,’ which answers the question ‘what are the assets in this neighborhood?’

Typically, we think of a low-income area as having deficits—they don’t have money, they don’t have other resources, they don’t have enough jobs, they don’t have enough income. Community asset mapping goes at it from the other side: what do they have here.

Asset mapping leads to finding out what is available—such as older people who want to participate in their community—and discovering novel ways of combining those assets—such as putting together people who need child care with older residents who’re willing to help out.

This project was really a fantastic experience.

Q. What is “community asset mapping”?

A. Community asset mapping—popularized by John McKnight and John Kretzman, co-directors of the at Northwestern University in Chicago—is a participatory approach to community development.

It’s like a good marriage—it can’t be one way, you have to have both partners in this.

It’s also all about what we can do as opposed to focusing on what we don’t have, what isn’t there. Healthy neighborhoods, healthy communities, start with people knowing each other. There’s room for everybody, there’s plenty to be done.

Basically, this is all about collaborative economic development—it places priority on making the best use of a community's resource base.

The engaged learning process, public scholarship, along with tools such as community asset mapping, are a way of developing from within—you engage people and value them for who they are and what they can contribute, and that’s what we’re putting into practice here at UND.

Editor’s Note: The following are brief definitions pulled from UND’s own literature of two key technical terms used in this Q&A.

Experiential learning takes academic learning for credit out of the traditional classroom. Students apply their disciplinary knowledge or they serve communities and nonprofit organizations while learning civic responsibility. The Center assists students and faculty with the development of experiential learning opportunities in the curriculum.

Public scholarship is scholarly and creative work in the public interest, scholarship planned and carried out with community or public partners, and scholarship that produces a “public good” such as exhibits, performances, and broadly accessible research results.