Dissertation Dish in 2023
About the Dissertation Dish
The Dissertation Dish is a collaboration between the International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE), GivePulse, and LEAD California. Dissertation Dish webinars are meant for all audiences, from seasoned scholars to practitioners to graduate students, as well as journal editors or conference organizers seeking scholars to present the most current and innovative research. Dissertation Dish highlights quality emerging research in the field of service learning and community engagement by providing a platform for recent doctoral degree recipients to share their work more broadly. We invite you to join us!
REQUEST TO PRESENT
If you completed your dissertation in the past two years on a topic that relates to community engagement and service learning, and you wish to be considered as a possible presenter for an upcoming Dissertation Dish webinar, please click the button below to share information about your dissertation research. If you are selected, you will be contacted to coordinate a presentation.
The Dish on October 23rd, 2023
An Exploration of Two Community Advisory Boards Within Community Engagement Centers at Institutions of Higher Education
SPEAKER
ELIZABETHCANNON
Director of Community-Engaged Learning at Vassar College and the Co-PI of the Mellon-funded Community-Engaged Intensives in the Humanities Grant.
Abstract: Community engagement has become an important part of the higher education landscape and, as a result, developing mutually-beneficial community-university partnerships has become a common interest for practitioners and researchers. However, building these partnerships, often distinguished by reciprocity, shared goals, and effective communication (Bringle, Games, & Malloy, 1999; Harkavy & Benson, 1998; Pompa, 2002) is a complex endeavor. The partnerships between communities and universities often involve challenges such as paternalism, unequal power, clashes in values, and often-wrought histories (Strier, 2014). As a way to support building partnerships based on mutuality, and to address some of the challenges present in the complexity of community-university partnerships, community engagement centers on college campuses have created Community Advisory Councils (CACs). While CACs have recently become a structure within the practitioner-realm of the community engagement field, the higher education research that investigates CACs is still in its infancy. Thus, through a multi-site qualitative case-study, I aim to fill the gap by comparing, contrasting, and analyzing themes about the formation, role, and responsibilities of two Community Advisory Councils housed within community engagement centers at two different institutions. I examine the successes and challenges of the CACs in building strong equitable partnerships based on reciprocity and centering community voice. In this research study, I utilize Bringle, Clayton & Price’s (2009) spectrum as a conceptual framework to assess partnerships based on three qualities: closeness, equity, and integrity (Bringle et. al, 2009). This multi-site case study both fills a large gap within the higher education and community engagement literature and helps to examine the critical components necessary to building meaningful partnerships through a Community Advisory Council.
Dr. Elizabeth Cannon (she/her) identifies as a cis-white woman educator, facilitator, researcher, and practitioner within the critical community-engaged learning field. Currently, she serves as the Director of Community-Engaged Learning at Vassar College (which resides on the occupied Munsee Lenape land) and the Co-PI of the Mellon-funded Community-Engaged Intensives in the Humanities Grant. Prior to Vassar, Elizabeth served as a Senior Associate Director at Penn’s Civic House and Associate Director of the Ursinus Center for Advocacy, Responsibility and Engagement at Ursinus College. Elizabeth received her Ed.D. in Higher Education from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education with research interests that focus on critical feminism within community engagement, the role of power dynamics between institutions and communities, and best practices for centering community voice.
The Dish on August 30th, 2023
Partnership Experience in Service Learning Between a Private University and Community Organizations in Lebanon
SPEAKER
MAYADAKANJ
Lecturer of Health Promotion and Community Health at the American University of Beirut
Abstract: In 2012, the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) adopted a SL pedagogy to reach out to underserved communities in order to enhance the learning experiences of public health students as well as improve social conditions impacting health of the population in those communities. Community sites are located in underserved areas that struggle with poverty, which is impacting health outcomes and well-being of the population living there. This research adopted a qualitative methodology to explore the partnership experience of community organizations engaged in SL with the FHS at AUB. Purposive sampling was used to identify community organizations based on set criteria and subsequently semi- structured interviews were conducted with key informants in the selected organizations and with faculty who teach SL courses.
Results suggest that the SL relationship between the faculty and the community organizations created threads for a possible network where benefits are skewed towards the academic partner. Yet, despite these inequitable conditions, community organizations chose to remain in the relationship and provided justifications for doing so. These justifications are embedded in a power dynamic between academia and community organizations where the soft power of the university impacted interactions of the faculty with the local communities.
Findings of this research cannot be interpreted outside the context of a developing country and a collectivist culture. The perception of power impacted the reaction of community respondents to the power dynamic in the going interactions. Being situated in a collectivist culture seemed to impact the acceptance of unequal relationships and in most cases, this imbalance could not be disrupted.
Dr. Mayada Kanj (she/her) is a lecturer at the Department of Health promotion & Community Health, Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) at the American University of Beirut (AUB).
Until 2015, Mayada coordinated the Health Education Resource Unit at FHS. This entailed managing local and regional projects with UN partners (WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, UNESCO) as well as international collaborations with Center for Communication Programs at Johns Hopkins University & Kansas University: online Community Tool Box.
In her current post, she teaches and supervises graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in the MPH and Health Communication programs. She is a member of the Service- learning task force, which in 2012, introduced the service- learning pedagogy to FHS. She taught several service- learning courses and was able to experience first- hand the engagement of community organizations with academia. She is currently a member of the community engagement task force supervising the community engagement general education requirement for undergraduate students. Her research interests are health literacy, community university partnerships and health communication.
Mayada has an MPH, concentration in Health Behavior & Education from AUB. She received a Doctor of Education from the School of Histories, Languages & Cultures, University of Liverpool, UK in 2022.
The Dish on June 8th, 2023
Community-Engaged Practitioner-Scholar Professional Identity Development Through Participation In A Community Engagement Association’s Graduate Student Fellowship
SPEAKER
TRINAVANSCHYNDEL
Membership Director for Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA).
Abstract: When rhetoric does not match reality for higher education institutions’ commitment to community engagement, graduate students may find counterspaces to the academy are necessary and allow them to reset and reframe, collectively organize, and push back against normative socialization processes of the academy that do not serve their needs as emerging community-engaged practitioner-scholars. This basic, exploratory qualitative study examined professional identity development of community-engaged practitioner-scholars through participation in a community engagement professional associations’ graduate student fellowship – the Imagining America (IA) Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellows program. From 15 interviews, six major themes emerged, which were divided into two sections. The first section, the people, focused on participant backgrounds (i.e. personal/social identities, characteristics, and life experiences) and ways of work as community-engaged practitioner-scholars. The second section, the setting, focused on tension experienced within the academy during and after graduate school, as well as the experience and development of new conceptualizations (i.e., revelations of the mind – or head), new relationships (i.e., affirmations of the heart), and new practices in their work (i.e., transformations of the hands) through participation in the IA PAGE Fellows program. While socialization (Weidman et al., 2001) toward community engagement did occur through IA and the PAGE, these spaces also functioned in a way similar to counterspaces (Case & Hunter 2012) and influenced participants’ professional identity development through new revelations, affirmation, and transformation in the face of oppressive and deficit-oriented narratives toward community-engaged work that continue to perpetuate academia.
Dr. Trina L. Van Schyndel (she/her) is the Membership Director for Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA), where she engages and supports scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers internal and external to the IA network who seek to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory “America” and world. She also manages and serves as the PI on the grant-funded IA Joy of Giving Something (JGS) Fellows program which aims to elevate photography and digital media as pathways for undergraduate students, in particular first generation college students, to pursue their careers and to make a difference in their communities. She currently serves on the IARSLCE Graduate Student Network (GradSN) Steering Committee and previously served as the Chair of the IARSLCE GradSN and the GradSN representative on the IARSLCE Board. Van Schyndel received her doctoral degree in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education from Michigan State University, where she is also completing a Graduate Certificate in Community Engagement. Her recent publications and presentations focus on understanding and supporting community-engaged graduate students and community-engaged boundary-spanners in higher education.
The Dish on April 6th, 2023
“When There’s Good, There’s Good. When There’s Harm, There’s Harm”: Diverse Voices on Community Engagement
SPEAKER
CARMINEDPERROTTI
Assistant Director of Community-Engaged Scholarship at the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University
Abstract: Service learning and community engagement (SLCE) have become near ubiquitous across U.S. higher education. While much scholarship has demonstrated positive student learning outcomes of the pedagogy and practice, there has been unequal consideration towards understanding the experiences of communities involved. Because “the community” has been largely missing from SLCE scholarship, this community-based case study, drawing on theories of whiteness and neoliberalism, aimed to engaged a multivocal account of how one community described and understood their experiences with SLCE by one college. As a result of the community knowledge and contributions shared, this dissertation aimed to (re)imagine more equitable possibilities for the future of SLCE with those who have often been left out of research.
Carmine Perrotti (he, him, his) is Assistant Director of Community-Engaged Scholarship at the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University, where he works to support students and faculty interested in the integration of academic study with community-engaged learning and research. Carmine also is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Education at Brown University and a faculty member at College Unbound. Carmine received his Ph.D. in higher education from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and a Master in Public Policy from American University.
The Dish on February 2nd, 2023
Organization Development for an Engaged Campus: Assessing Narratives and Architecture to Direct Future Change
SPEAKER
JAMILAHDUCAR
Executive Director of the Engaged Campus, University of Pittsburgh.
Abstract: At the intersection of the fields of engagement and organization development lie the strategies, structures, and processes of community-engaged praxis. This qualitative inquiry focused on the experiences of community engagement professionals at an urban, state-related research university. This study provided an understanding of the activities that contribute to the institutionalization of engagement through the lens of the architectural approach. The architectural approach addresses the key aspects of organization development, including the institutional conditions, design, and infrastructure that interconnect and integrate with narratives across different levels of the university as a system. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the institution’s engaged architecture through semistructured interviews, surveys, and artifact analysis. The qualitative practices aligned with the premises and practices of dialogic organization development. Findings include narratives that emphasize the importance of relationships, the values of the engagement profession, conflict management as a key tool, and the challenges found in disconnects from the strategies or architecture that clarify and support institutional community engagement architecture. These narratives intersect with critical context and institutional praxis that suggests a future organizational change model that institutionalizes community engagement through open-ended inquiry and artifacts that advance key aspects of the practitioner experience.