Community engagement at Oregon State University is collaboration that benefits OSU and its partners and generates co-created knowledge and impact. Community encompasses stakeholders outside of academia, such as the general public, private industry, government, and non-profit organizations.
Engaged scholarship describes intentional efforts to connect knowledge generated through faculty activity directly to the public in ways that collaboratively address social issues and community needs and concerns.
Ernst Boyer developed terminology to describe faculty work as a continuum of scholarly activity, calling traditional discipline-based research the “scholarship of discovery”. He asserted that alongside these activities, the university should value other forms of scholarship that enriched its purpose, including the:
- Scholarship of integration (work across disciplines)
- Scholarship of teaching (understanding how students learn and developing better pedagogical approaches)
- Scholarship of engagement (engaging knowledge to social and community-based problems).
The scholarship of engagement describes a host of practices and impacts cutting across disciplinary boundaries and teaching, research, and service functions in which scholars communicate to and work both for and with communities. It is reciprocal and mutually beneficial.
