Notes
Community Scholarship
Author: Jewon Woo, Lorain County Community College
The most common question I receive in private conversation with other scholars at humanities conferences is why I continue to conduct research at a community college. Deciding where to live and work is complicated for any academic, but this question often stems from a common misconception about community colleges: that a community college is not a place for research. To borrow from Anne McGrail, “seen through an R1 institutional lens, community college humanists’ careers are assumed to be dead on arrival.” However, as McGrail points out, community college faculty members’ careers are centered on “less visible but vital local communities of students.” Community college faculty members engage with both the immediate campus community and the broader community that shapes their students’ lives. Therefore, humanities faculty members have developed their scholarship through active involvement in the community.
While the “crisis of the humanities” in higher education has been a topic of discussion since the mid–twentieth century, little attention has been paid to the growth of humanities programs and student enrollment within community colleges.[1] With their emphasis on community engagement, community colleges offer valuable opportunities for faculty members to explore innovative approaches to promoting and sustaining humanities education and research. This essay demonstrates why their faculty members’ research matters, with an emphasis on the community-oriented nature of their scholarship in the humanities. More importantly, I point out three challenges that constrain community college faculty research and consider what colleges and funders can do to foster faculty research by overcoming these challenges.
The Community’s Scholars
As many research projects in this volume demonstrate, community college faculty members conduct valuable research, and their dedication to community service uniquely shapes their scholarship, extending its impact beyond academia. This essay proposes the term community scholarship to describe this distinctly public-facing research focus. Broadly defined, community scholarship refers to research that is situated in a community for the benefit of the community. I do not suggest that all of community college humanities faculty members’ research should be classified as community scholarship, as they engage in a wide range of scholarship. Nevertheless, heavy teaching loads lead them to closely observe student life inside and outside the classroom, and the institutional emphasis on student success through equitable teaching practice enables them to remain keenly aware of the communities to which students belong.
Community scholarship is closely linked to community-engaged and community-based teaching, which thrive on mutually beneficial collaborations between institutions and communities. In the 1980s, many US higher education institutions reevaluated their role in fostering democratic ideals by “producing knowledge and utilizing university resources to support the public good” (Gordon da Cruz 363). In this trend, collaborations between universities and communities have been promoted as effective ways of teaching students how to apply knowledge within the communities to which they belong (see Heasley and Terosky). Even before this pedagogy became an “academic trend,” and despite the decline of humanities programs at four-year institutions, community colleges reached out to their local communities for research and teaching, enriching their humanities programs.
In fact, the term community in community colleges reflects their mission to serve as institutions for their local communities. Although junior colleges were established as early as the 1850s to provide affordable education for teachers, the title community college—describing publicly funded institutions—gained prominence and grew exponentially during the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and 1960s. This expansion was a response to public demand for increased educational access for historically marginalized groups. As a result, community colleges were designed to provide education that aligns with the community’s pursuit of the democratic ideal of equal opportunity for higher education. Community colleges are born from local needs, shaped by the community’s unique history and circumstance, and directed by its members. In turn, community colleges produce knowledge that supports sustainable growth in areas such as the local economy, education, culture, and general well-being of the community. Following this tradition, the community scholarship conducted by community college faculty members addresses issues in public life that affect local residents, including their students and themselves, actualizing a higher educational institution’s social responsibility to produce knowledge for the public and to promote practices for a more fair and just civic society.
Above all, community scholarship centers community college students as the primary audience of research, while it remains relevant to other scholars in specialized fields. When community college faculty members reexamine established scholarship from their students’ perspectives, they may uncover underlying ideological foundations that reinforce social privileges and perpetuate prejudice against certain groups. Accordingly, through innovative and equitable research, community college faculty members seek ways to empower their students, who are often marginalized in both society and academia.
Danica Savonick, a scholar of pedagogy and digital humanities, notes that Black feminist writers like Toni Cade Bambara and June Jordan taught at minority-serving colleges in the 1960s. She argues that these writers’ research was heavily influenced by their students, most of whom were first-generation college students from underserved communities. Believing that “authorship—the power to move people through language—is widely distributed despite cultural institutions that privilege the voices of a narrow, white male elite” (Savonick 66), their work as community college faculty members and editors led to literary anthologies. These anthologies “helped students understand the power of their voices and share survival strategies across the partitioning walls of classrooms and institutions.” Through these anthologies, students learn about authors of color who share similar struggles and experiences. By witnessing how these writers transform oppressors’ language as a tool to express their own agency, students empower themselves through creative expressions. Bambara and Jordan exemplify how community scholarship challenges the values and legacies of earlier studies from the perspective of community college students, whose critical, humanistic inquiries arise from their position outside traditional power structures.
Research Roadblocks in Community Colleges
Unfortunately, community college faculty scholars face challenges that may not be experienced by those at research-focused universities. “Faculty members at public community colleges report spending 79.8% of their time teaching but only 3.5% on research, compared with public doctoral university faculty members, who report spending 50.8% of their time teaching and 28.2% on research,” according to the Modern Language Association’s 2022 report (MLA Committee). This shortage of research by community college faculty members is problematic. Their teaching and community engagement could otherwise enrich scholarly conversations about pedagogy, community-based research, and the role of higher education in democracy across various academic fields. Here, I highlight three challenges that prevent community college faculty members from actively engaging in research: time poverty for research, inadequate research infrastructure, and difficulty maintaining research outcomes.
Conducting research at a community college can significantly increase a faculty member’s workload, often without institutional recognition or compensation. Given the teaching-focused mission of these institutions, research competes for time with other faculty duties. Teaching at a community college involves not only instruction inside and outside the classroom but also additional responsibilities, such as updating curricula in line with a state’s ever-changing policies on transferability and accreditation, learning and adopting digital tools to tailor teaching methods for diverse learners in addition to standard learning management systems, and responding to student needs that extend beyond the classroom. These requirements are rarely considered part of the usual fifteen-credit-hour teaching assignment per semester.
The uncertainty of research outcomes, further compounded by delays due to other priorities and heavy workloads, can ultimately discourage productivity in both teaching and research. Even when faculty members produce scholarly work on top of their teaching duties, institutional recognition is rare. Evaluations of community college faculty members focus more on teaching performance, student success rates, and pedagogical development than on academic research or conference presentations. Even worse, prolific publications by a community college faculty member may raise suspicions that they are neglecting their teaching duties. Although community college faculty members wish to continue conducting research based on their graduate training, many must put it aside until they have access to adequate funding, time, and institutional support. Delaying their research also causes faculty members to miss opportunities to engage as junior scholars in academic networks, which could lead to collaborative research projects.
Furthermore, community college faculty members do not have enough support to pursue research from their individual institutions. First, community college libraries are not well-equipped for humanities scholarship, primarily due to insufficient databases, a lack of digital librarians, and limited digital resources, as they have to prioritize career-related databases and remote teaching. Despite the increased digital accessibility of academic materials, most community colleges—especially ones not affiliated with larger public college and university systems like the City University of New York and the University System of Georgia—do not subscribe to as many databases and journals as four-year institutions do. Digital librarians, who work on selecting, organizing, and preserving digital information in a library, are crucial to researchers of archives and big data. While investing in transforming their libraries as hubs for e-learning, most community colleges cannot afford to hire digital librarians for emerging fields like digital humanities and innovative research with digital tools. Community college faculty members often have to travel to nearby research universities or purchase expensive journal subscriptions to access essential research materials, without the opportunity to learn about technologies that could considerably boost their research capabilities.
Second, information on available research fellowships is often scarce. Without active institutional support for applying for funding opportunities, community college faculty members must not only seek out fellowship resources on their own but also find scholar peers who can offer advice. By contrast, many research-focused universities have offices that specialize in securing funding sources and helping faculty members strategically apply for them, whereas community college faculty members may have a hard time even in asking for references in their academic field.[2]
Finally, tight budgets in higher education limit a community college’s ability to financially support faculty professional development, such as conference attendance and research trips. In many cases, the annual fund may not even cover the cost of attending a single in-person conference. In short, the lack of community college faculty member participation in scholarly venues, whether through publication or conference, is directly linked to the absence of research infrastructure at community colleges.
Even if community college faculty members overcome these barriers to publish their research, this does not mean that they can promptly shift focus to a new project. Securing research time and funding without institutional support is already a significant achievement. However, the additional burden of promoting the work to its target audience and ensuring its upkeep, especially for digital projects, ultimately falls back on the faculty scholar. Digital platforms, regardless of their classification within digital humanities, have gained popularity in humanities projects due to their accessibility, flexibility, and creative potential. These platforms, which broadly include blogs, websites, and open educational resources (OER), are especially useful for community college faculty members’ community scholarship, as they align with the collaborative, public-facing, and interactive nature of their work. The use of digital platforms in several ACLS/Mellon Community College Faculty Fellowship projects highlights their potential for humanities research; for example, projects like Samuel Finesurrey’s A People’s History of New York City, Ife Williams’s Black Slave Revolts, and Charlotte Lee’s OER for teaching the China Dream suggest this potential.[3] Likewise, these nontraditional platforms for digital publication and scholarly circulation will continue to serve underresourced scholars. However, unless the research is either published through an academic center with a name such as Digital Research Center or supported by a team with a digital librarian or specialist, the faculty member must personally handle the ongoing updates and maintenance of the digital project, which demands additional time and resources.
Pathways to Scholarship Success for Community College Faculty Members
Community college faculty members’ engagement in vibrant scholarship requires collaborative efforts among colleges, funders, and faculties. As the concept of community scholarship discussed earlier in this essay suggests, community college faculty members understand how their research impacts the students and communities that their institutions serve. While a faculty scholar seeks ways of delving into research, colleges and funders can promote faculty research by considering the following three suggestions.
Community colleges must diversify curricula and offer a variety of electives to allow both faculty members and students to explore the broad realm of the humanities in depth. For reasons of efficiency and student success, many colleges have streamlined program pathways, focusing on general education and entry-level subjects, particularly in the humanities. This structural shift has resulted in low enrollments in, and the eventual elimination of, nonfoundational or experimental courses. While streamlined pathways make it easier for students to navigate their course options, both students and faculty members lose the opportunity to engage with advanced or newly emerging topics in the humanities. Teaching those courses could have allowed faculty members to connect their research with instruction, while students would have been able to explore the humanities in conjunction with other disciplines and personal interests beyond the traditional boundary of general education. If community colleges provide faculty members with opportunities to create and teach courses even outside rigid program pathways, administrators should recognize faculty research as a form of curriculum development and course creation. This recognition in practice could potentially reduce faculty teaching loads through course release, warrant funding for professional growth, and provide a platform—at least on campus—to present research through teaching. Research-based electives can still align with a college’s general education outcomes, helping students transfer credits to four-year institutions.
Local partnership programs that promote collaborations among colleges, universities, and local institutions can provide community college faculty members with research support beyond their own institutions. These programs allow participants to access resources and join scholarly networks at research universities. In turn, universities can strengthen their transfer pipelines by helping students prepare for the learning environment at universities. While community colleges often collaborate with nearby research universities and public institutions for course exchanges and community-based projects, funders can ensure that resources are distributed equitably among participating institutions. Such collaborations should not reinforce the existing hierarchy between large universities and local institutions, including community colleges and historical societies. Instead, they should demonstrate flexible, democratic, and human-centered partnerships that cannot be achieved by a single institution alone. For example, the Cleveland Humanities Collaborative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, is a partnership between one research university (Case Western Reserve) and three regional community colleges (Cuyahoga County, Lakeland, and Lorain County) focused on humanities education and research. The collaborative not only provides bridge programs for students planning to continue studies in the humanities at the university but also promotes academic collaboration among faculty members at these institutions. As part of the collaborative, a week-long summer seminar offers an opportunity for community college faculty members, independent scholars, and graduate students as well as university faculty members to lead workshops and share their research on social justice issues in contemporary literature.[4] Such regional networks enable community college faculty members to pursue research, particularly in community-focused areas of the humanities.
Funding community colleges directly for faculty research rarely guarantees the best possible results due to the lack of research infrastructure at these colleges, as I highlighted earlier. If funders choose to offer community college faculty fellowships through their institutions, they must ensure that faculty members receive course releases or a complete break from teaching responsibilities, which should be formally documented and approved by a dean or provost. Additionally, funders can support cross-institutional projects and centers that are committed to including researchers from underrepresented institutions, such as community colleges and independent scholars. The Black Book Interactive Project Scholars Program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), ACLS, and the Mellon Foundation, partners with scholars at diverse institutions in the United States to expand the volume of Black-authored texts in digital humanities.[5] As another example, I have been able to continue my research on historical Black newspapers because the Black Digital Research Center at Penn State invites scholars from outside their institutional boundaries for projects like the Colored Conventions Project.[6]
Given the growing political precarity that affects many state-funded community colleges and their faculty members’ research opportunities, funders might consider creating fellowship programs that target community college faculty members through research libraries and historical societies. These institutions can provide access to research materials and support that community colleges lack, allowing faculty members to pursue projects independently without institutional oversight.[7] The recent ACLS fellowship program for community college faculty members is an excellent example.[8] It offers flexible research opportunities in terms of timeline and location, allowing faculty members to conduct research in any mode—in-person, virtual, or hybrid—over a two-to-three-month period. This flexibility enables them to use their summer and sabbatical semester when they are briefly relieved from heavy teaching loads. Moreover, through the fellowship, three major research libraries—American Antiquarian Society, Folger Institute, and Newberry Library—provide one-on-one support from librarians and archivists to assist fellows. Funders should continue to seek creative ways of supporting community college faculty scholars rather than replicating existing funding models designed for research-university faculty members.
Of course, the degree of these challenges varies depending on each community college’s unique situation and resources to foster faculty research, so we cannot simplify the problems and possible solutions. Nevertheless, while we await institutional and communal advocacy for community college faculty research, faculty members themselves must find ways to pursue their research. Above all, it is important for us to be part of a vibrant scholarly community that can offer both intellectual and emotional support so we can grow together as scholars. The latest pandemic taught us not only the importance of recognizing our interdependent lives but also the necessity of humanities scholarship through collaboration, mutual aid, and community, even amidst separation, uncertainty, and anxiety. More specifically, the global crisis compelled us to reconsider problematic gatekeeping practices in academia and “high-brow” research that may fail to engage with the learning public. As the emerging popularity of hybrid fields in the humanities suggests, revising humanities scholarship to make an outreach effort to a broader audience aligns with the missions of community colleges. This is why community scholarship can guide the future humanities: Humanists must demonstrate the significance and meaning of public life by connecting humanities scholarship to our everyday lives as members of a community through humanistic inquiry.
Works Cited
“Associate’s Degrees in the Liberal Arts and Humanities.” Humanities Indicators, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/associates-degrees-liberal-arts-and-humanities. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.
Gordon da Cruz, Cynthia. “Critical Community-Engaged Scholarship: Communities and Universities Striving for Racial Justice.” Peabody Journal of Education, vol. 92, no. 3, 2017, pp. 363–84.
Heasley, Chris, and Aimee LaPointe Terosky. “Grappling with Complexity: Faculty Perspectives on the Influence of Community-Engaged Teaching on Student Learning.” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, vol. 24, no. 2, 2020, pp. 19–35.
McGrail, Anne B. “The ‘Whole Game’: Digital Humanities at Community Colleges.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, U of Minnesota P, 2016, dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/39a2e421-1588-455a-8828-3709a728126f#ch02.
MLA Committee on Community Colleges 2022. “A Community College Teaching Career.” Modern Language Association, 2022, www.mla.org/about-us/governance/committees/committee-listings/professional-issues/committee-on-community-colleges/a-community-college-teaching-career.
Rodrigues, Marcela, and Philip Jankowski. “131 College Scholarships Put on Hold or Modified Due to Texas DEI Ban, Documents Show.” The Dallas Morning News, 17 June 2024, www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2024/06/17/131-college-scholarships-put-on-hold-or-modified-due-to-texas-dei-ban-documents-show/.
Savonick, Danica. “What Can Our Writing Do in the World? The Feminist Praxis of Publishing Student Writing.” Radical Teacher, vol. 115, fall 2019, pp. 64–70.
For example, over the last thirty years, the number of students who completed associate’s degrees in the liberal arts and humanities at community colleges has increased by about 4.3%. See “Associate’s Degrees,” the report on the data gathered by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. ↑
For example, see the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Office of Research and Innovation’s webpage “Research Services and Resources” (research.unl.edu/research-services-and-resources/). ↑
Finesurrey’s project (historynyc.commons.gc.cuny.edu) introduces the history of the city through the experiences of immigrant and migrant communities through various digital tools such as videos and recordings in addition to open sources. Williams’s project (blackslaverevolts.org) presents a geopolitical representation of slave revolts by Africans and African descendants by using digital humanities methods. Lee explores the concept of the “China Dream” in the sociopolitical context of its long-standing nationalist narratives within the country and uses the research to teach students by creating the OER for a political science course. ↑
This seminar focuses on books recognized by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which prize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity. ↑
See coloredconventions.org. ↑
For example, Texas public colleges have frozen or amended 131 scholarships to comply with the state’s new law prohibiting spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives (see Rodrigues and Jankowski). ↑
For details, visit ACLS Community College Faculty Research Fellowships webpage, www.acls.org/programs/acls-community-college-faculty-research-fellowships/. ↑