Public Engagement

Law School probably isn't the first place you'd look for engaged scholarship in higher education, but the University of Minnesota Law School has several Centers that exemplify remarkably high and innovative standards of public engagement. In this blog we'll take a look at the Human Rights Center and its associated Human Rights Library and Resource Center. We'll subsequently consider the Consortium on Law and Values and the Center on Race & Poverty.

The Human Rights Center helps human rights advocates, monitors, students, educators, and volunteers to access effective tools, practices, and networks in order to promote a culture of human rights and responsibilities in local, national, and international communities.The Center was inaugurated December 1988 on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Its principal focus is to help train effective human rights professionals and volunteers through

• Applied human rights research
  
• Educational tools
  
• Field and training opportunities
  
• Human rights on-line
  
• Learning communities and partnerships



Perhaps the key resource of the Center is the University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, which houses one of the world's largest collections of more than fourteen thousand core human rights documents, including several hundred human rights treaties and other primary international human rights instruments. The site also provides access to more than four thousands links and a unique search device for multiple human rights sites. This comprehensive research tool is accessed each month by more than 175,000 students, scholars, educators, and human rights advocates from over 135 countries around the world. Documents are available in six languages - Arabic, English, French, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.

The Human Rights Resource Center is an integral part of the Human Rights Center and works in partnership with the Human Rights Library to

• Create and distribute Human Rights Education resources via electronic and print media;
  
• Train activists, professionals, and students as human rights educators;
  
• Build advocacy networks to encourage effective practices in human rights education;
  
• Support the World Programme for Human Rights Education (2005-2007) and the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education (1995-2004).

It is noteworthy that the Center's Director, Law Prof. David Weissbrodt, has been named Regents Professor, the highest level of recognition given to faculty at the University of Minnesota.

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This story, "Engineering a Better World" is a great example of how engineering students can apply their skills to public engagement projects. An international project is helping Thai officials to transform a village in Thailand into an educational hub serving families from 10 rural communities. The overall goal is to develop a community-based boarding school that educates the children within their cultural environment. This village's proximity to others will allow students to visit on weekends and maintain close ties to their families. The University of Minnesota chapter of Engineers without Borders' part of the project is to develop a water sanitation system.

Closer to home, a project with the Indian Health Service (IHS) in Bemidji, Minnesota is improving the drinking water supply of the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa Indians. According to the story,

Residents of the Grand Portage Reservation, located at the northeastern tip of Minnesota's Arrowhead Region, get their drinking water from Lake Superior. Because the reservation is located near several major point sources of pollution along the lake, individual homes are equipped with UV filtration units to ensure that people have potable water. Unfortunately, something is causing the units to malfunction, and the IHS has asked the student engineers to research the problem and come up with a diagnostics protocol. In addition, they will investigate the possibility of using an alternative filtration system.

Inventing Tomorrow, the magazine of the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology, has this and several other stories about how science, engineering, and mathematics are having positive impacts on public issues.

Information about Engineers without Borders - USA can be found at their web site. In particular, this page gives more examples of interesting senior projects.

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Our University of Minnesota forum on "Civic Engagement and Graduate Education", a warm-up for next week's Wingspread conference had a lot of thoughtful discussion. Among the ideas put forward about how to integrate public engagement into graduate student and faculty life:

• Create a Community Scholars program to recognize and support the substantial work we ask of community partners. Have funds available to give honoraria to community partners who come in and talk to classes.


• Expand the research ethics/‘best practices in research’ training required of all graduate students to address public engagement. Develop and disseminate a code of ethics and case studies in research ethics that are related to public engagement.


• Provide graduate students opportunities for guided reflection with faculty and community members, which could help them remember why they were in graduate school—thus preventing the passion from getting socialized out of them, as often happens now.


• Develop a graduate-level minor or a post-baccalaureate certificate (which would have the advantage of being open to community members) focused on public engagement. There is already the Community Engagement Scholars Program for undergraduates.


• Create partnerships within different communities that rest on trusting relationships and offer researchers, including graduate students, a foundation for engaged work that doesn’t require them to develop new relationships on their own.


• Gather individuals interested in engagement as a teaching and learning strategy into an intellectual community.

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Should public engagement be part of graduate training in research ethics?

Instruction in research ethics, or responsible conduct of research, is an increasingly common component of graduate education. A good case can be made that a concern for the public context of scholarly research is an important part of research ethics. Examples of how a scholarly discipline interacts with the public can enliven and deepen graduate courses or discussions of responsible conduct of research.

Those of us who have taught graduate students about research ethics know that it's helpful to have case studies about common ethical dilemmas: fraud, authorship, proper treatment of human and animal subjects, etc. There are several books and several web sites that serve this purpose. One that we've developed at the University of Minnesota is at http://www.research.umn.edu/ethics/materials/.

Most of these case studies deal with issues within the academy. It would be useful to develop a collection of cases that emphasize interactions between academia and the public. Prof. Ray Newman, of our Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, has pointed out a good example: a TMDL case from the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science.

Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) is a modeling technology used to develop a comprehensive view of all pertinent activity in a given watershed and of how much pollution a given body of water can absorb without violating water quality standards. The case describes the development of a TMDL for nitrate in a low-flow creek and river system that flows through a predominantly agricultural region and has a poultry processing plant discharging wastewater into it. The participants included a university researcher, a graduate student, an independent consulting engineer, the processing plant, poultry farmers, state agencies charged with maintaining water quality, and a citizens advisory group. Interactions among this cast of characters raises a rich set of ethical issues, of the sort that might arise in many community-campus partnerships.

Those of you reading this blog may have other examples from your own disciplines. If you send them to me at this address, I'll undertake to compile them into a web resource for general use. Such material will make it easier for us to integrate public engagement into our teaching and research training.

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At our forum on Monday, Bernadette Longo, Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, made an interesting analogy: Might we infuse public engagement into our courses in the same way that we infuse writing?

Writing across the curriculum is an example of teaching a skill while simultaneously teaching a content area. Faculty wonder: How can I teach writing when I’m already short of time for teaching the chemistry I need to cover? Writing becomes viewed as an add-on, rather than an integral skill of the discipline.

Clemson University, Prof. Longo's previous institution, worked to develop a culture of writing across the university. Faculty came together at lunches to talk about writing in their disciplines and in their courses. Writing faculty co-authored articles with colleagues in other disciplines on how to write for those disciplines. Writing consultants went out to talk to professors to help them integrate writing into their curriculum, as part of faculty development. A website and a research institute were established. Writing became viewed as another way to achieve disciplinary learning objectives.

The analogy to engagement is obvious. There are general writing/engagement skills that must be developed, but professional writing/engagement is discipline-specific. On the other hand, disciplinary specificity is not enough; you need to be able to write for/engage with many audiences, not just insiders. Effective written communication about your discipline is an important component of professional success, and so is effective engagement with a variety of public audiences.

Perhaps we can learn from such writing-across-the-curriculum efforts how to grow the intellectual community of those interested in civic engagement as a teaching and learning strategy.

Posted by Victor Bloomfield at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday we held a forum on "Civic Engagement and Graduate Education", cosponsored by the Office for Public Engagement, the Graduate School, the Career and Community Learning Center, and Minnesota Campus Compact. The forum was a warm-up for the Wingspread Conference "Civic Engagement in Graduate Education: Preparing the Next Generation of Engaged Scholars", to be held March 1-3, 2006.

I started the forum with an overview of my paper "Civic Engagement and Graduate Education: Ten Principles and Five Conclusions", which will serve as a basis for discussion at the Wingspread Conference. A link to the full paper is here. The main points are.

Principles
1: Connection with the public is crucial to the future of higher education, including graduate education and the contributions that graduate education can make to society.

2: Consciousness of the social meaning of scholarly work is an essential part of graduate education.

3: Graduate students want to make better connections between their scholarship and the real world.

4: Civic engagement has broad support from leaders in higher education.

5: Civic engagement is also encouraged by potent environmental factors.

6: Studies of graduate education emphasize the need for more civic engagement.

7: Engagement is based on scholarship, integrated with teaching and learning, and reciprocal with community partners.

8: Civic engagement is based on public scholarship, which can be local or
universal.

9: Civic engagement can enrich research and teaching.

10: Acceptance of civic engagement by graduate students and faculty requires support by all sectors of higher education.

Conclusions

1: National professional organizations should do more to recognize engagement as an intrinsic part of scholarship.

2: Rankings should take engagement into account.

3: Graduate deans and other central administrators should support, facilitate, and reward engaged scholarship.

4: Faculty should recognize the many ways it is in their best interest to value
engaged scholarship.

5: Graduate students should recognize their own interests in civic engagement and, if necessary, take things into their own hands.

In the next post I'll describe some of the discussion of these and the many other ideas that arose at the forum, deftly moderated by Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Gail Dubrow.

For now, I'll just note one cogent comment from the audience: There should be a Principle 0, asserting that public research universities exist to serve the public. Goes without saying, but it should have been said.

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