An interview with Alexios Rosario-Moore, Ph.D., OERD Community Engagement Research Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the NIU College of Education
Alexios is studying the prevalence of and institutional support for community-engaged research, teaching and artistry at NIU. We sat down with him to learn more about this ongoing research project and what his team has learned so far.
Can you start out by introducing us to the research project you’re working on?
In conversations with the Division of OERD and the NIU community, we learned that there was an interest in learning more about how community engaged scholarship and artistry was being institutionalized.
Institutionalization is the process through which an organization both builds structures of support – all the material things that you can measure – and also encourages the normative and cultural aspects of an activity. That means all the modes of thinking, norms and recognition that can encourage community-engaged scholarship and practice.
I’d like to thank the two graduate students who are supporting the analysis in this research project: Emelia Essumanba- Josiah and Haider Thabab. Emelia is a master’s student in the Department of Communication and Haider is a Ph.D. student in Instructional Technology. I’m grateful for their support in making this project possible.
Can you share more about the background and methods?
Going back about 30 years, there’s been a movement fostered by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to nurture the capacity for universities to co-produce knowledge in concert with communities. The theory of action being that universities should be responsive to different communities and that faculty should be engaged in understanding the kinds of problems and solutions that communities might want them to address.
With that in mind, we developed a mixed methods longitudinal study. In the summer and fall of 2024 we conducted interviews with administrators and some faculty who were active in community-engaged scholarship and artistry. Through those conversations we developed a questionnaire, and then we sent it out to all faculty. Then we had follow-up interviews with faculty members who expressed an interest in community-engaged scholarship.
The questionnaire looked at rates of participation in community-engaged scholarship, artistry and teaching. It looked at, what are the faculty members’ perceptions of the institution’s culture around community engagement, and what kind of infrastructure could support community-engaged scholarship and artistry? We also asked about faculty understandings of the changes to the Faculty Senate Bylaws regarding promotion and tenure, which aimed to ensure recognition of community-engaged work.
In total, we ended up interviewing about 20 faculty members and administrators. Then, the questionnaire yielded 204 complete responses, which is about 1/3 of the full NIU faculty.
What are the study’s next steps?
Our plan is to run the interviews and questionnaire again in fall of 2026 to see what’s changed and whether community-engaged practices have been further institutionalized as measured by the perceptions of faculty and administrators.
Right now is a time when many practical, structural changes at the institution have been happening. We really want to understand how those changes at the bylaw level might trickle down to influence department-level policies and practices around tenure and promotion. Will community-engaged scholarship and artistry truly be recognized as equal to more traditional forms of scholarship in most departments? Collecting data again in 2026 will allow us to see whether faculty perceive differences in community engagement policies and programming.
What interesting or surprising results have you seen so far?
About 38% of the respondents indicated they participated in community-engaged scholarship or artistry, which is pretty high. That might be in part a matter of who’s responding to the invitation because those with an interest in community engagement are more likely to complete the questionnaire.
About half the participants who participate in community-engaged work indicated they were affiliated with one of the interdisciplinary institutes or centers at NIU, such as the Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability and Energy or the Center for Nonprofit and NGO Studies. That’s not really surprising, but it is important. It’s clear that the centers are engaged with businesses and community organizations and they’re one of the institutional forces facilitating the development of community-engaged partnerships.
Another important finding was that, overall, there was a perception among respondents that the university is supportive of engagement activities. 90% of respondents somewhat or strongly agreed that engagement activities were part of the mission of the university. 76% somewhat or strongly agreed that university leadership supports engagement efforts. There is some consensus that university leadership advocates for community-engaged projects.
Interesting! And where are these partnerships taking place?
Another significant finding is that a large proportion of the community-engaged projects are hyperlocal. About 53% of respondents indicated that their community partners are right here in DeKalb County. I think I anticipated that there were going to be more projects in the Chicago metro area, but those actually made up a very small proportion. Instead, what we see are many projects happening quite locally, then a few in other parts of Illinois, then quite a few national and international projects.
Did you discover any challenges or needs to address to improve support for community engagement?
Where the challenges came up was when we asked about financial support. Only 29% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that there’s adequate financial support. One of the main priorities faculty expressed was getting ad hoc funding for some of the aspects of community-engaged research that they’re currently running without financial support. It could be something as simple as paying for buses to transport students to a community site.
In the interview data, there was a high level of agreement around three main priorities: the need for readily available funding and grants, the need to more consistently value community-engaged work in tenure and promotion decisions, and the need to improve campus infrastructure to support participation in engagement activities.
What else are you hoping to learn from the data?
Right now, we’re cleaning up the data in preparation to run the regression analysis. What I’m interested in finding out is how participation in community-engaged scholarship and research is associated with a few variables. One of the main types of variables we’ll look at are faculty characteristics, such as age, tenure, race, ethnicity and gender.
In addition, I’m probably most interested in the relationship between community-engaged work and disciplinary characteristics – the academic field of study, applied disciplines versus pure disciplines, humanities versus social sciences versus hard sciences. In the interviews we’ve heard that in some disciplines there’s a tendency to embrace community-engaged work, while in others there’s resistance, sometimes out of a fear that the quality of research will decline. We anticipate a lot of disciplinary variation and are looking forward to learning more about that.
What can you tell us about interdisciplinary community-engaged work?
One thing we’ve noticed, as I mentioned before, is that a significant percentage of the faculty who participate in community-engaged research and artistry are affiliated with the interdisciplinary centers and institutes at NIU. Our data doesn’t yet capture the reasons, but it makes sense that these interdisciplinary centers have ties to community groups.
There’s also the reality that community-based problems are complicated and benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. If you have a community that’s having issues around water quality, for example, there’s certainly a space in that kind of problem for an ecologist, a biologist, a chemist and even a law professor to try to make policy changes. The more you engage with real-world problems, the more likely you are to generate interdisciplinary, research-based solutions.
I think this is the strength of universities, as opposed to a municipality going to, for example, a chemical research company and asking, can you analyze this water sample for us? They can do that. But can they also explain all the ecological and human health connections around that water quality test? Can they help with a media campaign around the issue to drive public awareness while working on the policy aspects?
Interdisciplinary community-engaged research practices are pretty unique to the university setting and are beneficial to society as a whole. That’s basically the larger argument Ernest Boyer and the Carnegie Foundation began making 30 years ago, that universities should be both economic anchors and problem-solving organizations that are engaged with the community not just economically, but also in terms of knowledge production and problem solving.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about why community-engaged research is important?
It’s important both for creating social change and for the validity of knowledge production. Especially when you’re dealing with the social world, I believe that the knowledge you produce is more likely to be more accurate and valid when you learn from community knowledge and engage community members as co-researchers.
We can’t wait to check in with Alexios again to find out what he learns from the next stage of the research project. Stay tuned for updates in 2025 and 2026!
