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K-State Today

March 3, 2014

National speakers highlight K-State Engagement Symposium

Submitted by David E. Procter

Four national thought leaders in engagement will highlight this year’s K-State Engagement Symposium from 9 a.m. to noon April 7 in the K-State Student Union.

Hiram Fitzgerald, vice provost for engagement and outreach at Michigan State University, will speak about engagement and scholarship. Louis Swanson, vice president for engagement at Colorado State University, will talk about the engagement mission within the extension service. Seth Pollack, director of the Service Learning Institute at Cal State University, Monterey Bay, will speak about engaged teaching. Valerie Paton, vice provost at Texas Tech University, will discuss communicating engagement work to external stakeholders.

The 2014 Engagement Symposium focuses on "The Centrality of Engagement in Higher Education: Integrating Engagement across the University." Engagement - a form of research, teaching or service in which collaborative efforts between university and community stakeholders result in scholarly activity and community benefit around a public issue – will be explored from all mission areas of university work including research, teaching and outreach/extension. In addition to bringing together national engagement voices, K-State faculty and staff will also highlight their work.

Discussions of engagement are especially timely at K-State. A central theme of Vision 2025 is "engagement, extension, outreach and service" and the university just completed a campuswide engagement benchmarking survey. The symposium is a wonderful opportunity for faculty and students to hear discussions about issues such as: How do we understand engagement? How do we benchmark it? How should we reward engagement? How can we best energize engaged research and teaching? Why is engagement valuable to our faculty, students and institution? This symposium will address these questions and many others.

The annual K-State Engagement Symposium is open and free to all faculty, students and general public. We ask that you pre-register for the symposium by March 31. The symposium is sponsored by the office of the provost, the Center for Engagement and Community Development, and the School of Leadership Studies. View the complete symposium agenda and to preregister.