Engaging Departments: Moving Faculty Culture From Private to Public, Individual to Collective Focus for the Common Good

This book fills an important niche in the literature on institutional engagement and advances the National Campus Compact agenda to create engaged departments. Representing a range of disciplines—art, Chicana and Chicano studies, communication, educational psychology and counseling, English, geology, nursing, social work, sociology and anthropology—and institution types—two-year and four-year, public and private, comprehensive and research—the heart of this work features 11 departments and their journeys to engagement, focusing on transferable steps and strategies, key factors that helped move civic engagement from the individual faculty level to the collective departmental level, successes and barriers, and future visions. Also outlined are engagement efforts at the institutional and state system levels.

Written for department chairs, faculty, and faculty developers, this book offers approaches to support and sustain the building of engaged departments and invites readers to contemplate and refresh their visions for the relevancy of their disciplines in the 21st century.

Content include:

• A broad persective of civic engagement
• Departmental context, assessment, and research
• National exemplars of departmental approaches
• Meta-level strategies
• An emerging vision