Understanding an Emerging Field of Scholarship: Toward a Research Agenda for Engaged, Public Scholarship

The theme of both "Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement" volume 12 issues 1 and 2 collectively, is "Faculty Motivation for Engagement in Public Scholarship." Herein Dwight Giles, Jr. touches upon each article in issue 2, specifically, noting the variability of the central terminology that is used across authors and even within the same article. While the theme of the issue references "public scholarship," only some authors use this term, thus raising the focus question of the first part of this article, Is there is a difference merely in terminology or in the phenomenon being studied, or perhaps some combination of both? Since many of the authors include service-learning as a form of engaged scholarship, Giles begins by looking at the movement toward definitional clarity and standardized terminiology in that field of academic endeavor over the past twenty years. The article concludes by asking what an engaged process would like and how likely is it to succeed. In response to these questions, Giles proposes a process that would have three key elements. The first element is a practice element to broaden the scholarship to include practitioner voices as cogenerators of knowledge. The second element is an interactive approach. While research agendas and plans of inquiry are never set by summits alone, neither are they set by individual scholars or even small groups of scholars laboring under their own points of view, data variability, and even differing terms. The third element is more outlets of this type of scholarly exploration and advocacy for inclusion of this type of scholarship in other mainstream journals. [This article was originally published in: "Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement" v12 n2 p97-106 2008. For the author's 2016 reflection on this article, "The Emergence of Engaged Scholarship: Seven Additional Years of Evolution," see EJ1097276.]