The Digital Story as a Reading Response to the Literary Text Revisiting Camus’ The Outsider in the French Foreign Language Classroom

This contribution discusses the potentialities of the Digital Story as a complement to literary analysis in the French foreign language (L2) classroom. The case study examines the Digital Story as an instructional tool in the reading of Camus’ seminal text, The Outsider, reflecting on the role it may play in addressing learning challenges in the L2 classroom and in moving beyond traditional reading postures and approaches. The Digital Story is shown to cultivate a scholarship of engagement and collaborative action in the teaching of literature. Furthermore, as a multimodal, multigenre form, it fosters potential for mapping out new interactions between reader, text and technology in the context of emerging literacies.

Is the Scholarship of Engagement a Meaningful Approach to Foster Change in Community Development Education? Field Notes from Three Community/University Partnerships

Pedagogical approaches in community-engaged education have been the object of interest for those aiming at improving community health and well-being and reducing social and economic inequities. Using the epistemological framework provided by the scholarship of engagement, this article examines three nationally recognized and successful examples of community-university partnerships in the fields of community planning and public health: the East St. Louis Action Research Project, the South Memphis Revitalization Action Project, and the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center. We review and compare how these partnerships emerged, developed, and engaged students, community partners, and academic researchers with their local communities in ways that achieved positive social change. We conclude by highlighting common elements across the partnerships that provide valuable insights in promoting more progressive forms of community-engaged scholarship, as well as a list of examples of what radical forms of community-engaged education may look like.

The Power of the Paradigm in Scholarship in Higher Education

In this chapter, the six paradigms explored in this book – positivist, neo-positivist, interpretivist, transformative, pragmatic, and supercomplexity – are described and the key elements of each paradigm are discussed. The paradigms are discussed here as they apply not only to research, though this is the usual area of scholarship to which they are applied, but also to the other areas of scholarship as identified by Boyer. Scholarship as discussed is based upon Boyer's definitions of the four scholarships of discovery, application, integration, and teaching, and his subsequent addition of the scholarship of engagement. The key elements of paradigms are ontology, epistemology, axiology, methodology, intent, and outcomes. The paradigm is the focal point here because awareness of the paradigm within which the scholarship is undertaken helps to ensure consistency between elements of the activity and clarifies within the scholar's mind how best to undertake their scholarly activity.

Introduction

Methods and paradigms in scholarship and education research are addressed in this book. Boyer's scholarships of discovery, integration, application, and teaching, along with Boyer's later addition of the scholarship of engagement, and their multifaceted relationship to education research, form a starting point. From there, in addressing methods and paradigm in scholarship and education research, the paradigm is placed front of stage. Paradigm, as used here, refers to a set of concepts that reflect a world view underpinning a particular subject or pursuit. The paradigms applying to education research and scholarship addressed in this book include the traditional positivist and post-positivist - here labelled neo-positivist - paradigms and the interpretivist, transformative, and pragmatic research paradigms, which have been nominated in existing literature. In acknowledgement of the “supercomplex” environment in which education now operates, a novel paradigm, supercomplexity, emerges.

Community-Engaged Scholarship and Promotion and Tenure: Lessons from Lynton Award Recipients

In 2008, for my dissertation research, I interviewed 11 faculty members who received the Ernest Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement to examine their experiences with promotion and tenure. There were 3 assistant professors, 1 associate professor, and 7 full professors. All faculty members were female and represented 8 4-year public institutions (4 RU/VH, 2 Master’s and 2 Doctoral Granting Universities) and 3 4-year private institutions (2 Bac/A&S and 1 RU/VH). They represented the humanities (8) and the sciences (3). Through qualitative, semi-structured, opened ended interviews I aimed to understand their experiences with engaged scholarship in the context of promotion and tenure. Many community-engaged scholars fight to receive the internal validation that Ernest advocated for with Amy Driscoll via Making Outreach Visible: A Guide to Documenting Professional Service and Outreach (1999). Ernest might be somewhat content to know that the award in his name provides external validation that helps legitimize their scholarship at their home institution. I say ‘somewhat content’, because it is clear that Ernest had greater expectations for institutions to value the work of engaged faculty. Amy Driscoll has helped advance Ernest’s vision through her leadership of the collaborative process of that produced the Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement (2008), and its requirement that applicants must show how they address promotion of community engaged scholarship formally via personnel policy i.e. faculty handbooks and contracts. While we find more and more evidence of rewards that value community-engaged scholarship, there is still work to be done to reach broad and consistent equivalence of recognition and rewards across all faculty roles.

The Life, Work and Legacy of Ernest A. Lynton (1926–1998)

Learning about Ernest Lynton’s rich life has been interesting for me to uncover. Where many of us only know Ernest through his writings, I have come to learn the origins of the motivations for his work and commitments to advancing the public purpose of higher education and the scholarship of engagement. The significance of the title of the first issue of Metropolitan Universities Journal in 1990, Identity and Culture, is not lost on me as I seek to understand more fully the life, lived experiences, and identity of Ernest A. Lynton that moved him to influence cultural shifts within higher education toward increased value and legitimatization of useful, publicly engaged work. As a researcher, I am driven to understand our individual and collective motivations for our community engagement scholarly work. What are our aspirations for this work and its broader impact in society? Why do what we do and how can what we do influence the greater public good. As a steward of change (Ward and Miller, 2106), I seek ways to use our individual and collective understandings to lift up and advance institutional commitments to civic and community engagement as we help our higher education institutions hold fast to and more fully realize their responsibilities to individuals and communities beyond our walls.

Emancipating Minds and Practicing Freedom: A Call to Action

The university, for tenure-track professors and others, can become an intellectual prison, an environment where you learn to follow the long-established rules in order to survive. This essay is a call to action, aiming to reach and mobilize learners in the academy who might feel alone and trapped in an institution that primarily rewards conformity. It is also a reflection on my own experience of the academy and the ways in which the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement opened my mind and set me free.