RFP: Next Generation Engagement

The 2014 Lynton Colloquium on the Scholarship of Engagement was held on September 15, 2014, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Hosted by NERCHE and the Center for Engaged Democracy (CED) at Merrimack College, the Annual Lynton Colloquium launched a new research initiative aimed at studying key community engagement issues identified by a crowd-sourcing methodology and input from Colloquium participants. Grounded in the work of NERCHE’s Next Generation Engagement project and CED’s focus on academic programs in civic engagement, the Lynton Colloquium and the Request for Proposals which grew out of the meeting seek to foster sustained and systematic investigations that will support deeper understandings of and clearer actions around critical issues in advancing community engaged scholarship.

Research Priority Areas:

The research initiative is framed with the goal of identifying the current critical challenges of advancing community engaged scholarship and the collaborative identification of research priority areas. The three research areas to emerge as priorities from the Colloquium are:

Structures of Inclusion:

This includes questions of student diversity, faculty diversity, research methodologies, scholar identities, inequality regimes and structures of exclusion. Respondents identified an interest in reframing these regimes and structures toward equality and inclusion

Leadership:

Includes ways in which academic administrators (Provosts, Deans, Chairs) create supportive institutional cultures for community-engaged scholars, as well as professional development for administrators to be effective and supportive (of community engaged faculty) community-engaged campus leaders.

Student Outcomes:

Includes civic learning outcomes as well as outcomes around persistence, retention, and success.

Request for Proposals

The Center for Engaged Democracy is requesting proposals for research in any of the three research priorities areas listed above. CED will support research in these areas through three research grants of up to $5,000 per research project.

A PDF copy of the Request for Proposals (RFP) is available for download here.

The RFP must be submitted electronically here.

Proposals are due November 20, 2014, for research to be completed by August 2015 for presentation at the 2015 Lynton Colloquium in September 2015.

For more information, contact Elaine Ward (warde@merrimack.edu), Dan Butin (butind@merrimack.edu), or John Saltmarsh (john.saltmarsh@umb.edu). Or visit the CED website.