What is Public Engagement

Public engagement in the humanities and arts brings academic, artistic, professional, and community knowledge into meaningful relationship. It can happen through performances, exhibitions, research, teaching, workshops, public conversations, collaborative projects, digital work, community partnerships, and many other forms.

For H&A in Action, engagement means more than presenting university work to an audience. Knowledge moves in multiple directions. Faculty and students bring disciplinary and creative expertise into public settings, while artists, organizations, cultural institutions, civic partners, and community members bring expertise, experience, questions, and perspectives that can change the work taking place within the university.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick describes this movement in Generous Thinking as creating forms of dialogue and collaboration that do more than bring the university to the world: they also involve the world in the university. That principle has become central to how H&A in Action approaches public work.

Citation: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University

Engagement Is Reciprocal

H&A in Action is guided by reciprocity: the principle that public engagement should move in more than one direction. The people involved in a project may contribute different forms of knowledge, labor, access, resources, interpretation, or experience, and those contributions should matter to the work itself.

That distinguishes engagement from simply making an event open to the public. A lecture, exhibition, or performance can be valuable in its own right. Deeper engagement develops when participants also have opportunities to respond, question, interpret, make, collaborate, contribute knowledge, or influence what happens next.

Public engagement therefore takes different forms and different degrees of intensity. What matters is the relationship created among the people participating and whether the exchange creates possibilities that would not have existed without their involvement.

This approach also changes how we think about “the public.” Jordan Windholz argues that public humanities practitioners should be cautious about defining a public in advance; publics emerge through relationships with the institutions, communities, and people encountered through the work. At a public university such as SJSU, that distinction is especially important: the university and “the public” are already deeply intertwined.

Citation: Jordan Windholz, “Going Public: Rethinking Engagement and Access through Local Partnerships,” Profession (2019).

Students as Participants in Public Life

Students are central participants in H&A in Action’s model of public engagement. They may enter a project as learners, but they can also become researchers, artists, performers, filmmakers, designers, writers, translators, interviewers, organizers, curators, and collaborators.

Their work can move between classroom and public life. A course may prepare students to participate in a performance or exhibition; research may become a film, public program, or digital project; a conversation with an artist or community partner may reshape an assignment; questions raised through public programming may return to a classroom, studio, rehearsal, or research project.

This movement matters particularly at SJSU because students already belong to the communities surrounding the university. Public engagement does not require students to leave one world and enter another. It can help them recognize how disciplinary knowledge, creative practice, lived experience, and community expertise intersect.

Public Engagement as Scholarship and Creative Practice

Public engagement can also be part of faculty scholarship and creative activity. Collaborative projects may generate performances, exhibitions, research, publications, digital resources, curricular materials, public conversations, or other forms of intellectual and creative work.

Julie Ellison and Timothy K. Eatman’s Scholarship in Public describes publicly engaged scholarship in the humanities, arts, and design as work produced about, for, and with specific publics and communities. Their framework recognizes collaborative knowledge-making and public-facing creative work as part of a continuum of scholarly practice.

That understanding is especially relevant at SJSU, where the University’s Retention, Tenure, and Promotion policy recognizes the Scholarship of Engagement within Scholarly/Artistic/Professional Achievement. H&A in Action helps faculty develop, document, and communicate this work through project support, assessment, Stories of Engagement, and other forms of evidence.

Citation: Julie Ellison and Timothy K. Eatman, "Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy" in the Engaged University (Imagining America, 2008).

From Engagement to Evidence

Public engagement does not end when an event concludes. H&A in Action documents what happens through participant surveys, project reports, attendance and participation data, photography and video, and the Stories of Engagement archive.

Documentation helps us ask different questions about impact. How many people participated tells us something about reach. We can also ask what people encountered, what they contributed, what students made or learned, how a collaboration affected the project, and whether an experience generated new questions, relationships, or work.

Those forms of evidence serve several purposes. They help project coordinators understand their own work, allow the College to learn across projects, give faculty material for future grants and professional advancement, preserve a public history of engagement, and provide evidence of the broader value of humanities and arts education.

Explore the Stories of Engagement archive

From Evidence to Advocacy

The evidence created through public engagement can also travel beyond an individual project or the university.

H&A in Action uses stories, project outcomes, student and faculty experiences, grant records, assessment data, and other documentation to communicate the value of humanities and arts education to broader audiences. That work has contributed to the College’s participation in humanities advocacy, including National Humanities Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C.

Advocacy therefore becomes another form of public engagement. The knowledge generated through teaching, scholarship, creative activity, and community collaboration can inform conversations with funders, higher-education leaders, cultural organizations, policymakers, and national humanities organizations. Documentation allows the College to speak about the value of this work with evidence drawn from what students, faculty, and communities have actually experienced and produced.

Explore Humanities Advocacy

Questions We Continue to Ask

Public engagement remains a practice of inquiry. As H&A in Action develops projects and partnerships, we continue to ask:

• How does public programming become part of student learning?
• Whose expertise shapes a project?
• How can students participate in producing knowledge and creative work
• What does meaningful collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and communities require?
• What can participants contribute as well as experience?
• How do we recognize and sustain the labor required for engaged work
• How do we document what happened and carry what we learn into future projects?
• How can the evidence generated through this work strengthen the public case for humanities and arts education?

These questions keep H&A in Action responsive to the people and communities involved in the work. Public engagement is an ongoing process of creating, listening, learning, documenting, and building relationships that can continue beyond a single project.

For additional scholarship, examples, and SJSU materials related to public humanities, public arts, and community engagement, visit our Resources page.