Toward a Scholarship of Engagement: A Dialogue Between Andy Van de Ven and Edward Zlotkowski

Abstract

This article presents a dialogue between Edward Zlotkowski, an international leader in the field of service-learning, and Andy Van de Ven, a leader in the Academy of Management, on the role of service-learning in the movement toward a scholarship of engagement. According to Van de Ven, the divide between academia and practice is no accident. Many academics have been socialized in a trickle-down view of the knowledge supply chain, where researchers and academics create and test new scientific knowledge, which is taught to students by teachers, diffused by consultants, and practiced by practitioners. This view is vain and self-serving. Academic researchers do not have a monopoly on knowledge production. Andrew H. Van de Ven is Vernon H. Heath Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change at the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1972, and taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania before his present appointment. Since 1994, Van de Ven has been conducting a longitudinal real-time study of the changes that are unfolding in Minnesota health care organizations and industry. He also directed the Minnesota Innovation Research Program that tracked how innovations develop from concept to implementation in a wide variety of organizations during the 1980s. In addition to organizational innovation and change, Van de Ven's books and journal articles over the years have dealt with the Nominal Group Technique, organization assessment, interorganizational relationships, and methods for building theories and designing research studies. He is co-author of The Innovation Journey (1999) and Organization Change and Innovation Processes (2000) and co-editor (with Marshall Scott Poole) of Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation (2004) all published by Oxford U. Press. During 2000/2001 Van de Ven was president of the Academy of Management. Edward Zlotkowski (BA in English, Yale; MPhil and PhD in Comparative Literature Yale) is professor of English at Bentley College and the Senior Faculty Fellow at Campus Compact. From 1995 to 2004, he served as senior associate and general editor of the American Association for Higher Education's 20-volume series exploring the relationship between service-learning, and academic disciplines and disciplinary areas. He has also designed and facilitated professional development opportunities in service-learning for provosts and deans as well as a series of summer institutes for engaged academic departments, and has consulted to the Corporation on National Service, the Council of Independent Colleges, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Policy Center for the First Year of College, regional and state service-learning associations from Maine to Hawaii, as well as several hundred individual colleges and universities at home and abroad. Dr. Zlotkowski has written extensively on a range of service-learning topics. In 1997, he edited Successful Service-Learning Programs: A New Model of Excellence in Higher Education, and in 2002, Service-Learning and the First-Year Experience: Preparing Students for Personal Success and Civic Responsibility. In 2004, he served as lead author of The Community's College: Indicators of Engagement at Two-Year Institutions. Two other books in which he has played a leading role, Indicators of Engagement at Minority- Serving Institutions and Students as Colleagues: Widening the Circle of Service-Learning Leadership, will be published later in 2005.