How We Do Our Work

Our work extends across multiple boundaries:

• University - Community
• Faculty - Staff
• Content Expertise - Engagement Expertise
• Research - Practice
• Individual - Collective
• Positional Power - Functional Power
• Quantitative - Qualitative
• Positivism - Constructivism

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

Dr. Tracy Hall and Dr. Jessica Camp's scholarship, Healing Centered and Restorative Engagement, 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