1.     Make the work count: Partnerships are more likely to be successful when the faculty member can devote sufficient time to the partnership. One way to ensure that faculty have time to work on partnerships is to align the partnership with research, teaching, and service obligations. This includes explaining how the partnership benefits all three areas and the university as a whole. For faculty with research interests outside the primary research topic, think creatively about research benefits to the partnership. By broadening the applicability of your research, most partnerships will touch on a variety of areas of expertise.

2.     Communication and face-time: Managing the partnership requires implementation of many best practices, but nothing can substitute for communication and face-time between you, students, and the community partner. Setting up frequent check-in meetings in a way that respects the partner’s time and follows their standard procedures helps to keep the partnership on track at the same time that it shows students an inside look at how partners operate.

3.     Leverage institutional support: Community partnerships require an investment of resources to be successful, but often the financial amount of those resources is small. Learn about small grants and small sources of funding at your institution that might apply to the partnership. These sources of funding are often endowed and, therefore, must be used for specific purposes. Leveraging these small funds can help make the partnership more successful and demonstrate institutional commitment to the partnership.

1.     Seizing opportunities: Community partners often approach a university looking for an outside entity to assist with understanding a research problem or you may fall into a conversation with a community partner that reveals a potential partnership. Be open and willing to move forward with these opportunities as they develop. As you do so, ensure that the partner and the university are comfortable with the partnership.

2.     Aligning goals: Defer to the goals and objectives of the community partner. Partners may be less familiar with working with faculty and students and may have a different vision for the project that focuses less on research publication and more on internal goals and objectives. Find ways to structure partnerships to respect the goals and objectives of the partner. Take time to explain how the partnership will benefit you and your students.

3.     Considering student involvement: Students can be involved in partnerships to varying degrees including as part of a class or through internships, independent study experiences, or research assistantships. Each form of student involvement can be beneficial. Make sure to think carefully about student capacity and interest and to find an approach to student involvement that best matches the project needs. Be creative in designing student experiences to maximize student impact and partner benefit.

1.     Trends toward more dual enrollment: Colleges and universities are increasingly adopting dual enrollment as a strategy to increase enrollment, revenue, and retention. Dual enrollment students often want to engage deeply with course material and in civically engaged experiences. Get to know your students and specific needs that they might have. Being open and welcoming to dual enrollment students can be an asset to your program.

2.     Integrate transfer students: Increased dual enrollment results in students who graduate with an associate’s degree shortly after high school. Students coming to a four-year institution with a lot of college credit may have less time to integrate into the program and may be missing critical background knowledge. Assess student learning in each course without assuming that students learned similar material in courses that were transferred in.

3.     Build intentional relationships across institutions: Opportunities exist for cross-institutional collaboration between community colleges and four-year institutions. Invite community college faculty and their students to events and vice versa. Learn common college transfer pathways and develop understandings among faculty at different institutions about curricular expectations. Encourage institutional leadership to acknowledge and reward collaborative work and relationship-building.

1.     Students are students: Dual enrollment students differ in some ways from traditional college students, but they are still college students. Get to know your students, learn their interests, and integrate civically engaged experiences that students see as relevant into the classroom.

2.     Tailor to your population: Dual enrolled students in separate sections may have different needs than dual enrolled students integrated into a traditional college course. Learn about different structures for high school students to take college courses. Find opportunities to make course content and experiences especially relevant to dual enrolled students.

3.     Leverage support and take initiative when needed: Learn about how dual enrollment partnerships work at your institution and what resources are available to support your work with these students. Ensure that civic engagement offices, dual enrollment program offices, and faculty all understand the requirements and opportunities afforded by each other’s work.

1.     No training manual: Effective mentoring is a learned skill. Reflect on experiences you had being mentored and use those experiences to develop a mentoring plan. Consult others, including your students, to modify and improve your mentoring plan.

2.     Develop a network: Alumni, other faculty, and community partners can provide excellent advice and guidance to students. Find ways to intentionally develop a network of civic engagement professionals who can supplement your advising and provide resources for students interested in careers related to their areas of specialization.

3.     Explain your work: Advising and mentoring are less visible and easily quantifiable activities compared to other parts of our work. Figure out how tenure and promotion guidelines reward different aspects of advising and mentoring. Collect appropriate data to communicate your successes.

1.     Intentionality is important: Faculty should be intentional about offering opportunities to graduate students for mentorship, and graduate students and new faculty should pursue those opportunities. Seek to develop mentor-mentee relationships that foster success in different areas of professional life.

2.     Making it last: Lasting mentoring relationships require commitment from all involved. Mentors should consistently check in with mentees and provide them with resources and opportunities that arise. Mentees should keep mentors informed about projects. Collaborating on projects, ideas, and initiatives helps to give mentoring relationships purpose and direction.

3.     Getting involved: Graduate students and new faculty should actively seek to develop mentoring relationships. For those interested in civic engagement work, consider attending the stand alone APSA Teaching and Learning Conference, attending the Political Science Education and Civic Engagement section business meetings, volunteering to serve as a chair or discussant for relevant panels and sections, and volunteering for roles that help you become more involved with sections.

1.     Political Science’s Role Isn’t Unique: While political science programs are excellent natural homes for civic engagement efforts, students are ideally introduced to civic engagement starting immediately after they arrive on campus and continuing throughout all institutional experiences. Political science faculty should think carefully about where they fit within existing infrastructure.

2.     Make Sure the Work is Rewarded: Building and sustaining civic engagement efforts is only possible if faculty are able to stay at the institution. Understand your tenure or continuing contract requirements and determine how civic engagement work might fit into them. This is especially important if you are taking on or leading a substantial part of civic engagement efforts.

3.     Tailor to Institution and Community Size and Resources: The appropriate types of collaborations with K-12 teachers, community partners, and other faculty depend in large part on institutional and community characteristics. Size, resources, and location are particularly important.

1.     Requirements aren’t required: While civic engagement requirements provide a structure that helps to institutionalize civic engagement and to establish connections across campus, faculty at institutions without such requirements are in no way disadvantaged from contributing to conversations about civic engagement.

2.     Institutionalization: A key reason that required civic engagement experiences are effective is that they help to promote institutionalization of civic engagement on campus as part of the campus culture. Faculty can add and contribute to this culture by collaborating with others across campus, supporting civic engagement centers, and engaging in conversation with student organizations and community partners.

3.     Establish connections: Required civic engagement experiences foster a culture of collaboration. Civic engagement work is inherently better when we do it together. Further, connections are more meaningful when they tie experiences together. Scaffolding, cross-course common themes, and ongoing partnerships help to provide structure to what civic engagement means and how it can be systematically implemented.

1.     Variation: Non-profit jobs are varied in nature. This means that those interested in such work can find something that is a good fit for them. At the same time, it also means that the job search process, the skills needed, and the scope of different options are not standardized. In general, many non-profit positions have a more rigid schedule, offer more specializations and roles, and are in a wider variety of places than are academic jobs. Both panelists described these phenomena alongside counterexamples of non-profit jobs with highly variable schedules, that are generalist in nature, and that might tend to be in certain areas. Put simply, the jobs and the process of applying and accepting a position varies. Making initial decisions about your priorities in the job search and for your future career will help you establish a group of more similar non-profit positions that likely share many characteristics.

2.     Support goes both ways: Because of the variety of non-profit careers, graduate students and faculty interested in these positions should carefully reflect on their motivation to pursue this work and develop a clear understanding of the types of positions about which they are interested. Individuals who have done this initial work are then in a much better position to have a conversation with an advisor or mentor and to receive helpful advice and support. For advisors and mentors, be responsive and flexible to individuals’ needs. Offer to be a bridge and a connection to the non-profit world either directly or through indirect connections.

1.     Range of opportunities: While it may seem like the academic and non-profit worlds are largely separate, both panelists discussed how academics can engage in non-profit work and vice versa. Those interested in the non-profit field can consider these opportunities on a spectrum and engage in different ways. Align where you fit on this spectrum to your own interests and goals.

2.     Discernment and vocation: Both panelists described key moments where they thought about how non-profit work was important and how these moments prompted decisions to get involved in this work. Spending time exploring different non-profit career opportunities will help those interested in the field discern both whether this work makes sense for them and their priorities. The non-profit space is varied, and features positions with a wide range of levels of direct impact, writing, research, large scale problem solving or program design, and on-the-ground advocacy.

3.     Find and value connections: Advisors and mentors come in many forms that may or may not include your designated supervisor. Academic institutions have a wide variety of resources to help you explore the non-profit world as a graduate student or a faculty member. Informational interviews and early-stage networking are important tools. Adjunct faculty, faculty doing civically or community engaged work, and civic engagement centers all are natural bridges, open to all, to facilitate academics exploring the non-profit world.

1.     Rewards outweigh risks, but be cognizant of risks: Panelists discussed benefits and rewards for students, for them professionally, and for community partners. For graduate students or early career faculty especially, professional benefits include the ability to better manage new course preparations, opportunities to connect with other faculty and centers across campus, and the ability to build a cohesive research, teaching, and service narrative focused around a central civic engagement theme. Hesitations and risks mostly involved starting projects or efforts too large to support or failing to seek out advice from colleagues on campus about how to best begin civic engagement work.

2.     Start where you are: Civic engagement work is an iterative process. While we are all excited to get started quickly and to tackle major civic challenges, do what is feasible for you. Panelists spoke about how they managed their early ambitions and successfully began civically engaged classroom work that was sustainable and increased in scope over time. One excellent feature of this panel was the sheer diversity of experiences panelists had with civic engagement activities in classrooms. Examples ranged from efforts to modify existing in-class assignments to make them civically engaged to course sequences built around community partnerships. Seminar and large lecture courses were included, as were courses from a range of sub-fields. Panelists described experiences at research universities and liberal arts colleges, including institutions serving traditionally under-represented groups.

3.     Be intentional: Gauge your department and institution’s willingness and ability to support civically engaged work. From your assessment, develop easily attainable ways to get started that will be supported in your assessment and/or tenure and promotion guidelines. It is also important to carefully consider your students, courses, and institutional context. Some major civic engagement projects need funding, specific class structures, or key community partners to succeed. Those structures and partnerships can be built over time through focused effort.

Read more from our panelists:

Monique Mironesco: “Service-Learning and Civic Engagement: Environmental Awareness in Hawai’i” published in the Journal of Political Science Education (https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2020.1777146).

Amy Risley: “Think Globally, Act Locally: Community Engaged Comparative Politics” published in PS: Political Science & Politics (https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096519000544).

Ian Anson: “Audience, Purpose, and Civic Engagement: A Reassessment of Writing Instruction in Political Science” published in the Journal of Political Science Education (https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2017.1340166).

By Lauren C. Bell, Section Co-Chair

1) Focus on impact: When designing, implementing, and describing civic engagement work, do so with impact in mind—impact on students, impact on our campuses, impact on our communities, and impact on democracy. Be thoughtful about your student learning outcomes and how you are assessing them to show the effect your work is having.

2) Enlist support from across your campus: Your department chair, your departmental colleagues, and your marketing office are just a few of the places where support structures exist to help you frame and amplify the work you are doing. Your colleagues in student affairs are also often doing this work; enlist them as collaborators and partners.

3) Think about framing and be strategic: Civic engagement work can be—and is!—anything: it’s teaching, it’s research, and it’s service to your campus and your community. In your reappointment, tenure, and promotion dossiers be sure you are describing things in clear terms. Highlight places where your work was funded, where your work links to the mission of your institution, where you may have been recognized with awards, or where your efforts have contributed to student recruitment or retention.