Engagement for Excellence: Portland State University is internationally recognized as an engagement for excellence leader in “Letting Knowledge Serve.” More than three decades of research-evidence indicates that well-structured community engagement leads to excellence in academic achievement, scholarly productivity, and community enhancement.
Hundreds of journal articles, books, and seminal research demonstrate unequivocally that Community Engagement increases:
Student Retention, Learning, and Graduation: students stay in school, learn more academic content, increase critical thinking skills, and graduate at higher rates. Moreover, students from first generation and under-represented populations demonstrate exponentially positive increases on each of these indicators.
Faculty Breadth and Depth of Scholarship: faculty conduct disciplinary and multi-disciplinary research including the scholarship of teaching.
Community Enhancement: reciprocity of interests and efforts with businesses, government, and the non-profit sectors are realized in community enhancement across educational, economic, and environmental outcomes.
University Mission: community engagement provides a unifying vision and action agenda for PSU purposes, processes, policies, and programs.
Community Engagement has a definitive and quantifiable value on multiple dimensions which include pedagogy, scholarship, community, and organization. Engagement for Excellence is the educational process and product of capacity building of individuals, communities, and organizations.
Engagement for Excellence research is not fully complete nor comprehensive. There are critical details, nuances, subtleties, and differentiations to the processes and products of engagement for excellence. As such, PSU will work to sustain its leadership in investigating, analyzing, comparing, deconstructing, and co-constructing community engagement as a 21st pedagogical model and scholarly approach for creating inclusive, equitable, and thriving colleges and communities.