Journey of a community-engaged scholar: An autoethnography

Background: Community engagement is central to the civic mission of a growing number of colleges and universities, and numerous faculty members are applying their expertise to issues of importance to local communities. Yet there are few first-hand descriptions of the career paths of faculty who engage in community-engaged scholarship. Faced with traditional faculty work - teaching, research, and service - junior faculty in particular are often advised to postpone their community engagement work until after establishing a research and teaching foundation. Methods: The author is a tenured full professor who employed autoethnographic methods to reflect on the motivations, influences, and experiences informing his career path. Data were drawn from career recollections and written reflections, and published and unpublished writings. Qualitative analysis employed the constant comparative method to develop themes, which were then compared to issues raised in the community-engaged scholarship literature. Results: Emergent themes include: the need to intentionally integrate teaching, research, and service into a professional identity as a community-engaged scholar; the influence of support and barriers on an untenured community-engaged scholar; the challenges of promotion and tenure when committee members do not understand community-engaged work; and tensions between engaging with the community and producing community-engaged scholarship. Conclusions: This autoethnography contributes to the theory and practice of community-engaged scholarship by addressing the tensions facing community-engaged scholars as they navigate faculty roles and rewards in higher education, and offering creative solutions for present and future scholars to view their work through an engaged lens while still advancing their scholarship.