How We Do Our Work

Boundary Spanning

Our work extends across multiple boundaries:

Figure 1: university-community engagement boundary spanning roles at public research universities (weerts and sandmann, 2007). community based problem solver: focus on site based problem support, resource acquisition, partnership development. field agents, outreach staff, clinical faculty. engagement champion: focus on building external, political, intra-organizational support, roles may be symbolic. presidents, vice presidents for engagement, center directors, deans. internal engagement advocate: build campus capacity for engagement (rewards promotion tenure budget hiring) provosts, academic deans. technical expert: emphasis on knowledge creation for applied purposes (disciplinary or multidisciplinary) faculty, disciplinary based.
(Weerts & Sandmann, 2007)
  • University - Community
  • Faculty - Staff
  • Content Expertise - Engagement Expertise
  • Research - Practice
  • Individual - Collective
  • Positional Power - Functional Power
  • Quantitative - Qualitative
  • Positivism - Constructivism

This goes into more depth about boundary spanning - what it is and why it is critical to university-community engagement.

A Healing Centered & Restorative Lens

Dr. Tracy Hall and Dr. Jessica Camp's scholarship, , provides a lens through which we approach community engagement. Some examples include:

  • Scholarship that is created with and by members of the community rather than scholarship that is separate from those that are studied
  • Encouraging faculty to conduct creative and interdisciplinary research rather than reinforcing discipline-specific promotion and tenure rules
  • Relying on knowledge of the community to define priorities and allocate resources rather than relying on university "specialists" separate from community
  • Delegating decision-making to those closest to the situation rather than a hierarchical decision-making approach

    Traditional Community Engagement

    • community is viewed as a passive presence or source of limited information
    • the concept of community exists as a source of information and data and is practiced upon
    • focus on short-term fixes/reactive
    • faculty follow the rules and regula