Who do you want to be as a scholar? What kind of societal impacts are you hoping to achieve through your work?
These questions are, at their core, values-laden questions. They are also extremely big. And broad. And very, very difficult to answer. It’s easy to freeze up at the thought of answering such important questions.
As a program manager in the Office of Public Engagement and Research Impacts in the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan, I’m on a team that thinks a lot about how we can help faculty answer these types of questions. Many faculty are eager to use their scholarship for real-world impacts but lack the time, space, and guidance that enables them to reflect on their scholarly identities and strategize about their next steps as engaged scholars. Part of our team’s work is to develop tools that serve as entry points into these big ideas and then use these tools in capacity-building efforts for faculty.
Our signature capacity-building effort is the Public Engagement Faculty Fellowship (PEFF), a two-phased program for faculty who are interested in incorporating engagement more fully into their careers. The first phase of the program, the Studio Experience, is an intensive cohort-based learning experience, while the second phase of the program, Project Support, involves funding and in-kind support for ambitious public engagement projects. Since the program began in 2020, 75 faculty representing the arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM have completed the Studio Experience.
The Studio Experience is primarily designed to enable faculty to define their scholarly identities, make critical connections with other engaged faculty and resources supporting engagement at the university, and build skills necessary for ethical, equitable engagement. Over the course of five weeks, cohorts explore how public engagement means different things to different people, learn about different forms of engagement—including areas such as lifelong learning, educational outreach, media engagement, policy work, and community engagement—and build core skills that are necessary across these different forms of engagement, such as project planning and communication. During the program, faculty meet together synchronously for active learning and discussion; they also complete a robust set of asynchronous materials designed to extend this learning, including a workbook rooted in reflective practice, a draft explainer script to practice communications skills, and a public impact statement that articulates their guiding values, philosophies, experiences, and ambitions in public engagement.
As a springboard into developing the public impact statements, we host a workshop toward the beginning of the Studio Experience called “Envisioning Impacts.” This workshop is intended to guide faculty in starting to answer some of the big questions about their scholarly identities and desires for societal impacts in a clear, approachable way. The entire session is scaffolded around the concept of an “impact identity” (Risien and Storksdieck, 2018). Similar to the Japanese concept of ikigai, “impact identity” is an emerging idea from the broader impacts with science space. (For those unfamiliar with this space, the National Science Foundation requires all proposals to articulate the potential societal benefits and outcomes from a project, what they call “broader impacts.”) An impact identity involves the integration of key facets of a scholar, including personal preferences, capacities and skills, disciplinary and institutional contexts, and societal needs (58-59). It’s the sweet spot of what a scholar might do, what they should do, and what they can do. Although a helpful scaffold, the concept of an impact identity is also still pretty broad — imagine asking someone right from the beginning what their impact identity is! So to make these concepts even more approachable, we break down each component of impact identity during the session and flesh it out with a corresponding activity, starting with values.
For the values activity of the Envisioning Impacts session, we turned to the values deck exercise that HuMetricsHSS has developed and tailored it to our own circumstances. Scholars in the Public Engagement Faculty Fellowship are thinking not just about their scholarship but also about their engagement; they also must consider the alignment or any tensions that exist between these two. We therefore ask faculty to sort the values deck two times: once to identify their values for their scholarship and once to identify their values for their engagement efforts. We also added an additional layer by asking faculty to sort the deck into three different piles each time: matters, matters more, and matters most. When it comes to values, it’s not necessarily that some values don’t matter at all, it’s just that some values matter more, and it’s important to prioritize as much as possible. Finally, to push faculty even further, we ask them to identify only one to three values that “matter most” for both their scholarship and engagement. We hear a lot of good-humored shock from faculty at being asked to name just a few core values — it’s really hard!
As a way to wrap up this reflective activity, faculty share their “matters most” values with one another by writing each one on a sticky note and placing it on our Values Wall, and they then conduct a paired conversation with another cohort member about the activity. The visual Values Wall allows everyone to observe similarities and differences across the group; it is also especially helpful in bringing faculty from different disciplinary and engaged backgrounds together, reminding everyone that regardless of the type of engagement they are undertaking— whether media engagement or community-engaged research, educational outreach or policy— everyone is centering a values-driven approach. The paired conversation is another means to build community among the group, as it enables faculty to discuss any alignment or tensions they noticed between the values they identified for their scholarship and engagement and then brainstorm together how they might begin to live these values out in practice.
The rest of the Envisioning Impacts workshop builds out the other components of an impact identity through activities like mind mapping and small group disciplinary conversations, but it’s this beginning values activity that really establishes a critical foundation for the rest of the session as well as the remaining time in the Studio Experience. The values deck helps faculty to ground their work in what matters most to them as they explore different forms of engagement and consider which forms of engagement most align with their envisioned scholarly identity.
Program evaluation supports the idea that faculty find the values deck activity and the other reflective practice exercises of the Studio Experience to be meaningful components of the fellowship. When asked in the final survey to name a favorite session or activity from the Studio Experience, we’ve received responses like these:
Activity: Matters, Matters More, Matters Most; Reason: I found it to have a broad range of applications, from teaching, to writing, to planning
Envisioning impacts as it provided a firm foundation for my later PEFF studio experience learning/training
When we did the deck of cards activity to inform our scholarly identity. It helped unearth some principles I was holding about my work and myself that hadn’t been as clearly articulated before
These types of responses, which we’ve heard now across multiple years and cohorts, confirms the importance of values-driven approaches in defining scholarly identities. Similarly, in a recent five-year program evaluation that we conducted, 94% of PEFF alumni who responded said that it was very helpful or helpful to have the time, space, and structure to focus on their engaged efforts and scholarly identity. As one alumnus shared, “Having time to talk and practice in a safe space is so impactful. With high teaching loads, we don’t always have time to think about what and why we are doing something.”
Values-centered activities like the HuMetricsHSS values deck are flexible and adaptable across spaces. As we’ve discovered within our own context, they apply not just to research, teaching, and service but to engagement as well — and most notably, to the integration of all of these different facets of a scholarly identity. For university leaders interested in supporting faculty in their career development and ultimately achieving larger societal impacts from their research, building opportunities for faculty to reflect on their values and define their core scholarly identity is an important first step.