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This Research Work-in-Progress paper explores how motivation and identity can evolve when faculty from different disciplines (arts, engineering, medicine, etc.) collaborate to present on a central theme or topic (e.g. color) across multiple community settings. Sharing research findings beyond the academic community is essential for systemic change and wide spread enhancements to our everyday lives. Through this work, we explore how faculty researchers’ motivations to share their work and their identities as researchers develop through collaborative experiences with other faculty that aim at sharing research findings with the public. In this study, faculty from divergent academic fields are working together to present convergent presentations as one coherent theme across three different informal learning sessions as well as a control setting. These presentations intend to increase public engagement with scientific research and broaden the scope of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) learning by approaching the themes through the faculty’s different academic backgrounds. Through collaboration and engagement with the public, we will track how faculty’s identities as researchers and motivations to share their work develop over this experience through the use of the Longitudinal Model of Motivation and Identity (LMMI). Over the course of this study, we hope to see gains in faculty motivation and researcher identities who engage with the public through this experience. For this paper, we focus on framing the overall study and provide initial findings from our recruitment survey.
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This content will become publicly available on October 1, 2026
Navigating changing maps for public engagement in higher education contexts.”
Public engagement is becoming a critical element of U.S. universities’ missions. Defining public engagement has become increasingly complex, however, and navigating the significant and diverse literature on public engagement can be daunting. This essay addresses this challenge as well as two others that make public engagement difficult for those feeling called (or pressured) to perform such work. We draw on our own public engagement experience and research to (1) conceptually scope out the terrain of public engagement literature and approaches, (2) articulate how the emerging problems of rapid intensification and hyperpolarization in American political culture make public engagement work ever more challenging for both faculty and students, and (3) call attention to the ways universities are often not bureaucratically or structurally aligned to meaningfully support and advance public engagement work. We conclude with some recommendations for how faculty, staff, and administrators might navigate these concerns.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2331208
- PAR ID:
- 10657603
- Publisher / Repository:
- University of Georgia
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement.
- Volume:
- 29
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1534-6102
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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