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Learn More About Public Scholarship

Readings and Resources We Recommend

We've curated a collection of books and articles we use in our faculty programs and workshops, webinars and podcasts that explore public engagement work, and tools and guidelines for community engagement across multiple disciplines. If you know of a great resource we missed, email us your recommendation!

While you are here, be sure to check out curated resources on the Public Scholarship & Engagement eScholarship site. 

We created a list of recommended summer reading books that will enrich, illuminate and inspire your understanding of public and community-engaged scholarship. Check out our summer reading list.

Reading List

  • The Activist Academic (Cann and DeMeulenaere)
    “The Activist Academic serves as a guide for merging activism into academia. Following the journey of two academics, the book offers stories, frameworks and methods for how scholars can marry their academic selves, involved in scholarship, teaching and service, with their activist commitments to justice, while navigating the lived realities of raising families and navigating office politics. This volume invites academics across disciplines to enter into a dialogue about how to take knowledge to the streets.”
    For more: Imagining America discusses The Activist Academic
  • ASA Footnotes
    Footnotes is a magazine of the American Sociological Association that showcases sociologists’ perspectives on the potential of community-engaged scholarship.
  • Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Series on Service Learning Research
    A five-part series focused on conceptual frameworks, research methods, and assessment for students and faculty as well as communities, institutions, and partnerships.
  • Primer on the Benefits and Value of Civic & Community Engagement in Higher Education
    Released in February 2021, this resource was created by the North Carolina Campus Compact Community of Practice, Inquiry & Learning (COPIL). COPIL is comprised of practitioner-scholars interested in being part of the ongoing inquiry that is helping to establish promising practices of civic and community engagement and to build a knowledge base around it.
  • Principles for Community Engagement (2nd edition)
    Principles of Community Engagement (Second Edition) provides public health professionals, health care providers, researchers, and community-based leaders and organizations with both a science base and practical guidance for engaging partners in projects that may affect them.
  • Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy
    Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy is a holistic approach to teaching that defines seven steps to unlocking the potential of teachers and their students. The author, Laura Rendón, offers a transformative vision of education that emphasizes the harmonic, complementary relationship between the sentir of intuition and the inner life and the pensar of intellectualism and the pursuit of scholarship; between teaching and learning; formal knowledge and wisdom; and between Western and non-Western ways of knowing.
  • Service-Learning Essentials: Questions, Answers, and Lessons Learned (Jacoby)
    “Service-Learning Essentials is the resource you need to help you develop high-quality service-learning experiences for college students. Written by one of the field's leading experts and sponsored by Campus Compact, the book is the definitive work on this high-impact educational practice. Service-learning has been identified by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as having been widely tested and shown to be beneficial to college students from a wide variety of backgrounds.”
  • The Craft of Community-Engaged Teaching and Learning (Welch and Plaxton-Moore)
    This guidebook for faculty development provides a foundation as well as a blueprint and tools to craft a community-engaged course. The book provides a scope and sequence of information and skills ranging from an introduction to community engagement, to designing, implementing, and assessing a course, to advancing the craft to prepare for promotion and tenure as well as how to become a citizen-scholar and reflective practitioner.
  • The Scholar as Human (Sims Bartel and Castillo)
    “Recognizing that colleges and universities must be more responsive to the needs of both their students and surrounding communities, the essays in The Scholar as Human carve out new space for public scholars and practitioners whose rigor and passion are equally important forces in their work. Challenging the approach to research and teaching of earlier generations that valorized disinterestedness, each contributor here demonstrates how they have energized their own scholarship and its reception among their students and in the wider world through a deeper engagement with their own life stories and humanity.”

Community Engagement Toolkits

  • Community Futures, Community Lore
    Community Futures, Community Lore is an online resource dedicated to making culturally-rooted, youth participatory action research (YPAR) resources available for free. The resources on this site originated from the work of the Intercultural Oral History Project, Community LORE, Youth In Focus, the UC Davis Center for Regional Change Putting Youth on the Map program and many, many community collaborators. 
  • Community Science Guidance for Scientists
    Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX), powered by AGU, connects Earth and space scientists with community leaders and helps them work together on projects that use Earth and space science to advance community priorities. TEX has launched over 60 collaborative projects, giving them a view into the challenges of community science and some of the successful strategies that have been used to overcome those challenges. This resource summarizes what they have learned from those projects.
  • Farther Together: Seven Best Practices for Engaging Communities to Create a Healthy, Resilient Region for All
    Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative's new guide provides detailed recommendations for policymakers and practitioners on centering communities impacted by inequities—from project budgeting tips to no-wrong-door approaches for gathering community-driven solutions. 
  • M Engage Partnership Toolbox
    University of Minnesota has additional resources that offer guidance and support for navigating the many stages of university-community partnerships, including trainings, partnership checklists, memorandum of understanding and more.
  • Public Scholar Conversation Cards
    The Public Scholar Conversation Cards were designed by Imagining America to spark conversation about the joy, contributions, and struggles of public artists, designers and scholars. 
  • Public Scholar Imagination Guide
    The Public Scholar Imagination Guide from Imagining America provides a variety of reflection and action tools for anyone trying to improve their own practice and for those interested in making the university a more hospitable, caring, and creative place to nurture public, engaged, and activist scholarship, art-making and design.
  • Scientist-Community Partnerships: A scientists guide to successful collaboration 

  • Tools and Resources for Remote Community Engagement

    The collaborative, action-oriented research we conduct and the community-led efforts we support are needed now more than ever, but how does one do this work as authentically, equitably and effectively as possible during a pandemic? To help answer this question and support our staff and others engaged in similar remote work with communities, the CRC’s Community Engagement team decided to compile the following resource guide.

Conferences and Organizations

  • Association of Public and Land Grant Institutions (APLU) Annual Meeting
    The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) is a research, policy, and advocacy organization dedicated to strengthening and advancing the work of public universities. APLU's 244 members span across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, four U.S. territories, Canada, and Mexico. During the meeting, APLU names a new board of directors, announces winners of its four institutional awards, hosted 5 keynotes and nearly 20 interactive concurrent sessions.  
  • Campus Compact
    Campus Compact is a national coalition of more than 1,000 colleges and universities committed to the public purposes of higher education and building democracy through civic education and community development.
  • Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities
    The Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) is an international coalition of colleges and universities that share common understandings of their institutional missions and values. CUMU serves and connects the world’s urban and metropolitan universities and their partners.
  • Engaged Scholarship Consortium Annual Meeting
    The Engagement Scholarship Consortium (ESC), a non-profit educational organization, is composed of higher education member institutions, a mix of state-public and private institutions. Our goal is to work collaboratively to build strong university-community partnerships anchored in the rigor of scholarship, and designed to help build community capacity. Attracting more than 300 participants and offering more than 70 sessions, the meeting established that there was broad interest in the subject matter and set the stage for an annual conference.
  • Imagining America National Gathering
    The Imagining America National Gathering is an annual convening of public scholars, artists, designers, students, and cultural organizers who are addressing the most pressing issues of our time. The gathering offers participants a three-day immersive experience in which to connect, dialogue, learn, and strategize around the ways to build new knowledge and inspire collective imagination towards transformative education and action.
  • International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) Research Conference
    The annual IARSLCE conference is a scholarly venue to disseminate new knowledge on service-learning and community engagement. The focus of presentations, symposia, and keynotes is on research incorporating a variety of theoretical methodologies and perspectives. The conference also serves as a gathering place for networking and association business meetings for members. 
  • Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference
    The UC Davis Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Conference, hosted by the Center for Educational Effectiveness, is dedicated to celebrating and sharing the work of UC Davis’ growing community of scholarly educators. Together we will share research, ideas, practices and resources for evidence-supported teaching innovation at our university.

Webinars and Podcasts

Community Engagement Journals