UCLA community college review: community college scholarship and discourse.

This review discusses the concept of the two-year college as a separate discourse community within the larger discourse community of higher education. The article offers a complete definition and description of discourse communities and discusses a new understanding of scholarship in terms of the scholarship of teaching. The review argues that redefining community college scholarship to include teaching as a form of scholarship will build a bridge for community college professionals to assert their knowledge and power within higher education.

Public universities, private universities, junior colleges, technical colleges, and community colleges are all included in the catch-all terms higher education and academe. These institutions, however, are quite dissimilar in many fundamental ways; the history, mission, organizational structure and faculty expectations at a community college, for example, may look nothing like they do at a private university. Because of these dissimilarities, and because four-year colleges and universities traditionally have more power and prestige, much of the language used to describe higher education is more accurate in the four-year sector than, for example, in community colleges. The majority of academe's definitions, professional terminology, and modes of discourse come from the dominant institutions of higher education, namely the universities. This discourse then comes to be accepted and adopted at other institutions, including community colleges. When discourse appropriate for the universities comes to be accepted at two-year colleges, alternative modes of discourse are not considered, and voices of individuals outside the dominant institutions--such as community college faculty--can become silenced or undervalued.

This article discusses the concept of the two-year college as a separate discourse community within higher education and argues that by redefining community college scholarship to include the knowledge gained and shared in the classroom, community college professionals will be better able to assert their knowledge and power within higher education.

The Community College as a Discourse Community

The community college can be understood as a discourse community within the larger discourse community of higher education. This concept will be explored more fully in the following pages, after a more complete definition and description of discourse communities is offered. While there is some debate regarding the definition of the term discourse community, Bizzell's (1992) definition seems comprehensive in scope. A discourse community, she says, "is a group of people who share certain language-using practices ... [that] can be seen as conventionalized" (p. 222) by social interactions within the group and by its dealings with outsiders. A discourse community is "bound together primarily by its uses of language, although bound perhaps by other ties as well, geographical, socioeconomic, ethnic, professional, and so on" (Bizzell, p. 222).

The concept of a discourse community borrows from that of a speech community. Kutz (1997) defines speech communities in terms of the words that are used, the ways they are pronounced, the subjects talked about, who gets to ask and answer questions, what is stated explicitly, and what implications might be understood. She applies the term speech community to professional communities that converse through writing, but notes that "the more inclusive term discourse community, covering both spoken and written discourse, is usually used to refer to such contexts" (p. 24). Higher education has a discourse community that governs the university's spoken and written words. The community college can be seen as a subset of this larger discourse community and also as a discourse community in its own right. Its members have, over time, developed a common discourse that involves shared knowledge, common purposes, common relationships, and similar attitudes and values. Members of two-year college discourse communities share understandings about how to communicate knowledge and achieve shared purposes, and they exhibit a flow of discourse that has a particular structure and style--all elements Kutz suggests as integral to a separate community. Further, separate discourse communities may exist within the two-year college sector (e.g., administrators and faculty in particular disciplines).

Discourse Community Boundaries

Discourse communities have fuzzy boundaries and often overlap with other similar communities (Porter, 1992; Rafoth, 1988). As Porter (1992) has noted, they "may operate like little ecosystems [that] inevitably interact with systems abutting them" (p. 86). Discourse communities are not isolated, are flexible and locally constituted, and allow for boundary crossing (Porter, 1992). In this way, the community college discourse community exists both within and apart from the higher education discourse community. It exists apart from higher education discourse communities because community colleges have institutional missions that differ from those of universities and four-year colleges--because their student bodies are comprised largely of nontraditional and at-risk students--and because the organizational structure within community colleges (including faculty roles and systems for promotion and tenure) are vastly different from those of research universities. Most significantly, community colleges comprise their own discourse community because the two-year college culture does not include an expectation of faculty scholarship as it exists in the research university.

From its position apart from the higher education discourse community, terms like open door take on meaning specific to the community college discourse community. Having an open door is a cultural statement about the mission of community colleges: They are open to any high school graduate who wants access to postsecondary education. Yet despite its separate discourse community, the community college often adopts language given meaning within the larger higher education discourse community. For example, the term nontraditional--which is used widely within both discourse communities--is much more appropriate in the university discourse community than in that of two-year colleges. Students who are deemed nontraditional at the university are, on the contrary, traditional students in the community college setting. Yet within community college discourse, the term nontraditional is still used to describe students.

Power and Influence in a Discourse Community

As the above example illustrates, discourse communities--especially those with fuzzy boundaries--can exhibit differences in power and influence (Clark, 1994). Clark notes that the rhetoric of discourse communities "assumes that [its members] are more or less equal politically, that they have equal access to and equal influence upon the discourse that determines the beliefs and purposes they will share" (p. 61). But, in fact, these communities "tend to minimize or exclude the participation of some people as they establish the dominance of others" (Clark, 1994, p. 61). This power dynamic is especially true in the case of university and community college discourse communities because, as Rafoth (1988) notes, a strength of discourse communities lies in the inclusion of writers, readers, and texts. The readers, however, play a passive role in this triad--it is the writers, and at times the texts, that hold the real power.

The power of university faculty and administrators to name "what is" and thus wield power over community college faculty comes largely from their ability to be prolific in their writing. Opportunities to share knowledge, to create policy, and to redefine the language and reality of higher education abound in the university--engaging in scholarship is a well-developed aspect of the culture of this discourse community. The power to name "what is" comes also from one's level of prestige within the community. Zito (1984) argues that "an author is granted a certain binding authority to his intended meaning; this is legitimated by academic credentials, professional associations, and the division of knowledge within the academy" (p. 89). In part because fewer community college faculty hold the doctorate as their highest degree (Cohen & Brawer, 1996), they are often viewed by their four-year counterparts as having less prestige, which further constrains their power within academe's discourse community.

Furthermore, says Zito (1984), within a discourse community, "only those qualified by some socially institutionalized agency may engage in such discourse and be taken seriously.... The academic 'turf' [is] a battleground for the right to speak with authority" (p. 89). In discussing the work of Foucault, Zito (1984) outlines three main influences on professional discourse: traditional texts that are vested with high authority and still continue to exert their influences by repetition and reiteration within the discourse community, the academic discipline working to legitimate its own author identities, and the qualifications of the speaker. As Zito explains, "only the ordained may employ the ritualistic speech of their discourse and expect to be taken seriously" (pp. 91-92). The lack of opportunity and avenues for scholarship in the community college (and, of course an institutional culture that supports it) correlates with the community college's lack of legitimate power within the larger discourse community. This situation, in turn, works against the community college faculty member's ability to be heard.

Within their own discourse community, however, community college faculty members have more individual "ability to negotiate meanings and purposes instead of passively accepting the social realities defined by others" (Bowers, 1987, p. 2). Yet when they see themselves merely as part of the discourse community of higher education rather than as important actors in their own community, the community college professionals have little legitimate power and limited communicative competence--they are often relegated to the role of reader within this community, while university faculty take on the role of writer.

Communicative Competence

As discussed in the previous section, a community college discourse community is somewhat disenfranchised within the larger discourse community of higher education. Bizzell (1982, 1992) notes that the university, as a discourse community, defines the accepted conventions for academe. It is here, among members of the university discourse community, that communicative competence abides. Communicative competence is defined as what one must know in order to use language appropriately in particular discourse communities (Kutz, 1997). To put it another way, communicative competence implies that "individuals and groups with greater skill in using (and manipulating) the language system will exercise power in naming and thus controlling how others will view social reality" (Bowers, 1987, p. 28).

Because participating in the discourse of their disciplines and of higher education in general is an expectation of university faculty, it is part of the conceptual scheme of their discourse community. Yet this particular conceptual scheme may not be a part of the community college discourse community, which may contribute to the current view that community colleges are seen as a sort of stepchild of the university. Thus, as Zwerling (1976) argues, community colleges are second best in terms of their communicative competence within higher education. In order to assert their own communicative competence and power, community college faculty should more clearly define the boundaries of their discourse community as separate from that of four-year universities. One way to do this might be through a reconceptualization of scholarship in the community college.

Scholarship in Community Colleges

Throughout the past 10 years, many scholars have critiqued or made observations about scholarship in the community colleges. Marshood (1995) notes that community college faculty are seen "as neither challenged enough nor challenging to their students in the endeavor of higher learning" (p. 51). Cohen and Brawer (1996) write that community college faculty seldom engage in scholarship, and when they do publish, the content is classroom-related and specific to their institutions. Safarik and Getskow (1997) state that community college faculty suffer from a lack of professionalism in part due to the nature of the scholarship they produce. However, they also note that "although many practitioners write in isolation and do not connect their writing to broad educational research themes, they do have the advantage of an 'insider view' of the community college not available to other researchers" (p. 72). In general, the literature on community college scholarship reveals an unfortunate perception that scholarship is not demanded, encouraged, or rewarded in most community college settings (Kelly-Kleese, in press; Mahaffey & Welsh, 1993; Vaughan, 1991).

The majority of community college students are not interested in faculty scholarship; they are primarily concerned with obtaining credentials to help them qualify for a job or promotion, to upgrade their skills, or to transfer to a university. Few students demand that their instructors be scholars. Similarly, some faculty members fear that their job security and opportunities for promotion might be in jeopardy if scholarship is tied to the evaluation process in community colleges. Other community college professors may argue against what they fear might add to their already overloaded responsibilities. Thus, although many community college faculty members value scholarship, few of them engage in it, and those who do conduct research report that they do so simply because they have a personal commitment to their profession (Mahaffey & Welsh, 1993; Vaughan, 1991). Perhaps the core of the problem is that community colleges do not have a reward system that promotes scholarship. Community college faculty members and administrators have little incentive to pursue original research and publication, and there is often little assistance for those who choose to do so. In fact, some faculty members have reported being reprimanded for engaging in scholarly pursuits during working hours (Vaughan, 1991). As Vaughan (1991) states, there is "evidence that the culture of the community college is not only unconducive to scholarship but also, on some campuses, even hostile to it" (p. 7).

Scholarship as a Community College Necessity

Perhaps it is through a redefinition of scholarship and an understanding of it in relation to the mission of providing quality instruction that community college students, faculty, and administrators will come to see scholarship as a means of preventing "burnout and help[ing to] ensure that the teacher's love of learning is conveyed to students" (Palmer, 1991, p. 72). As Palmer submits, "scholarship must be attended to or it will be overshadowed by day-to-day college operations and pushed aside by those who do not understand the nature of scholarship and its connection to the community college mission" (p. 69).

A commitment to continual inquiry is essential to providing quality education in the community college. Faculty who do not engage in scholarship and administrators who do not both engage in and support scholarship are considered second best within the higher education community (Boyer, 1987). They are neglecting, as Vaughan might put it, their responsibilities to their jobs and to the profession. Scholarship is seen as the key to academic integrity and accountability. In the ideal higher education setting, students should demand it, colleagues should encourage it, and institutions should reward it. As Vaughan (1984) reports, the Presidents Academy feels that community college faculty and administrators must keep up to date with new knowledge and technologies in order to maintain vitality in the community college.

Redefining Scholarship Within the Community College

While the notion that scholarship should be a necessity in the community college may be uncomfortable for some two-year faculty, there is a movement within the community college discourse community to redefine its terminology in such a way that faculty and administrators can work within the existing mission of their institutions. This movement attempts to understand scholarship as supportive of, perhaps even premised upon, the pursuit, maintenance, and promotion of the community college purpose and mission (Kelly-Kleese, in press).

As Kelly-Kleese (in press) notes, the Commission on the Future of Community Colleges (1988) called for the use of classrooms as laboratories to feed scholarship, linking scholarship closely to the work of community college faculty. Similarly, Boyer (1990) expanded the definition of scholarship, suggesting that teaching itself be considered a form of scholarship. These definitions challenge the accepted research-based understanding of scholarship that creates a dichotomous relationship between the two terms, research and scholarship. Another definition that has been widely accepted in the literature is the one proposed by Vaughan in 1988:

   Scholarship is the umbrella under which research
   falls, for research is but one form of scholarship.
   Scholarship results in a product that is shared
   with others and that is subject to the criticism of
   individuals qualified to judge the product ...
   Scholarship requires that one have a solid
   foundation in one's professional field and that one
   keep up with the developments in that field. (p. 27)

Understanding scholarship in this way disarms critics who are caught in the debate over whether community college faculty should engage in research. As Vaughan (1991) points out, "Community college faculty and administrators need to change their existing attitudes toward scholarship and to view it from the perspective of the community college mission" (p. 3). Furthermore, they may "redefine [their roles] in ways that are in concert with the community college mission" (Vaughan, 1991, p. 5).

Ernest Boyer and George Vaughan have both debated issues surrounding the definition of scholarship in higher education. While they focus their attention upon different settings within the higher education community, their views on scholarship are quite similar. Boyer (1990, 1997b) calls for a new understanding of scholarship in terms of the professor's responsibility to service and to meeting the practical needs of society. He defines scholarship as engagement, which encompasses four functions: discovery, integration, sharing knowledge, and applying knowledge. Boyer's definition insists on practicality, on serviceability, and on scholarship as more than just research, which had previously been the accepted understanding of the term (and perhaps in many circles remains so). His idea that sharing knowledge is more than research and publication opened up the definition to include teaching as a valid expression of scholarship. Scholars must teach students as a means of keeping scholarship alive, Boyer (1990, 1997a) argued--teaching sustains scholarship.

Boyer's insistence on service and meeting the needs of society fits nicely within the community college mission. Created as teaching institutions focused on educating the masses, community colleges do not include research in their mission; therefore, the accepted view of research-based scholarship does not apply. By understanding scholarship in the manner that Boyer suggests, the work being done in community colleges gains highly warranted credibility.

Vaughan's (1988, 1991) work intersects with Boyer's around this idea. Vaughan sees the community college as the appropriate setting for identifying and meeting the practical needs of society, as the community college's mission is built on the provision of service. However, he laments that the type of scholarship occurring within the community college, because it is not produced or presented in the traditional fashion, is undervalued. Vaughan has extensively examined the factors contributing to this limited view of scholarship, including faculty attitudes and administrative support, and calls for a new perspective, one that understands scholarship as integral to the community college mission (Vaughan, 1988, 1991).

Both Boyer and Vaughan believe that the primary means of changing existing attitudes toward community college scholarship lie in the creation of a new system of rewards for scholars in all of higher education. They suggest that university professors need to be encouraged to teach in order to sustain scholarship and that community college professionals should be encouraged to participate in the two-year college discourse community and to develop their communicative competence within all of academe.

Teaching as Scholarship in the Two-Year College Discourse Community

Vaughan states that "it seems as if the community college may be at a turning point in its attitude toward scholarship" (1991, p. 10). Although it has proved to be a slow process, the idea of teaching as scholarship appears to have gained popularity among members of the academic discourse community. The 2000 American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) Conference on Faculty Roles and Rewards was titled "Scholarship Reconsidered Reconsidered." Its focus was on promoting Boyer's definition of scholarship, as outlined in his 1990 work, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. This work and Glassick's (1997) Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate were sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which leads the higher education discourse community toward a revolution in its understanding of the nature of scholarship.

At the 2000 AAHE conference, Lee Shulman (2000), the president of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching, argued that what makes an activity scholarship is that it moves beyond the innate human capacity to count and name. According to Shulman, scholars recount, rename, reflect, and teach. It is the act of reflecting on what we have done, he states, that is the fundamental factor in being able to do it well. In his speech, Shulman (2000) further argues that "teaching is the occasion for pulling together all the other scholarships ... teaching is the role we play in which we do integrative work" (p. 11). Referencing Boyer's call for a scholarship of teaching and engagement, Shulman (2000) argues that teaching is the means of transmitting knowledge to the next generation:

   The scholarship of teaching is problem posing about
   an issue of teaching or learning, study of the
   problem through methods appropriate to disciplinary
   epistemologies, application of results to practice,
   communication of results, self-reflection, and peer
   review. (p. 11)

Hutchings and Shulman (1999) explain that the scholarship of teaching has three main features: (1) It is public (i.e., community property); (2) it is open to critique and evaluation; and (3) it is relayed in a form on which others can build. Further, Hutchings and Shulman (1999) add that the scholarship of teaching "involves question-asking [and] inquiry and investigation, particularly around issues of student learning. A scholarship of teaching is not synonymous with excellent teaching, [but] requires faculty to frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning" (p. 13).

Despite greater attention to the scholarship of teaching within the two-year college discourse community, scholarship continues to be a topic of debate and of concern among community college professionals. At community colleges across the nation, faculty members are still trying to determine the hows and whys of valuing scholarship at their institutions. Eisner and Peshkin (1990) point out a potential problem facing proponents of the teachers-as-scholars paradigm. They assert that "practitioners ... seldom read educational research, and they often feel incompetent to judge its adequacy. For most practitioners in our experience, most conventional research is thought to be remote from practice, except, perhaps, when its conclusions confirm or support what they already believe" (p. 173). The operative word in Eisner and Peshkin's (1990) work is conventional; when faculty see scholarship as an outgrowth of teaching, perhaps they will not feel inadequate to judge its worth. However, Shulman (1999) points out another stumbling block that exists for faculty who wish to engage in the scholarship of teaching. He asks, "Where is the scholarly literature through which higher educators study exemplars of teaching and can build upon that work? With few exceptions, we don't have such a literature" (p. 16). Perhaps with growing interest and enthusiasm, more community college educators will begin to look to the early work of Patricia Cross and others to guide them in conducting classroom research. As Cross and Steadman (1996) argue, there is a "need to develop a teaching community ... [where faculty can] come together in thoughtful conversations about teaching" (p. xv). Cross and Steadman (1996) hope their book "will heighten the intellectual challenge of teaching, serving teachers as a tool to implement the scholarship of teaching" (p. xix).

Scholarship is not separate from the original (and current) mission of the community college. On the contrary, it is integral to it. But if community college professionals are to be encouraged to engage in scholarship, they must redefine and value community college scholarship in its own right. Understanding teaching as a form of scholarship creates new opportunities and builds a bridge for community college faculty through which they can join in the academic discourse in a new way. Once academe legitimates the scholarship of teaching, and community college faculty see this type of scholarship as a more deliberate form of what they do every day, they might begin to view it as integral to their profession. It is important to note, however, that engaging in discourse does not necessarily require that community college faculty publish written scholarship; participating in the discourse community by reading and implementing changes at their campuses is just as important as publishing in keeping the discourse community alive and well. This type of participation can begin immediately, as resources such as the ERIC database offer access to many documents written by community college faculty about specific teaching and learning practices on their campus.

One might argue that some community college scholars are already engaged in what Bogdan and Biklen (1998) call "practitioner research" (p. 212). In this type of scholarship, "the investigator is often a practitioner ... who wants to ... do what he or she does better." They "do not necessarily write reports. They translate them immediately into practical changes" (p. 212). In this sense, community college scholars can be seen as social activists. Their discourse is largely underground in that it flows within their specialized community; it most often takes the form of oral dialogue or text in arenas such as e-mail, electronic mailing lists, and discussion forums on the Web. The majority of their discourse may not reach the larger higher education community and thus may not be accepted as scholarship within that community.

The key to the legitimization of community college scholarship is in its assessment. In order to have their work deemed worthy, community college faculty and administrators must understand the convention of writing and the standards by which their work will be judged. Unfortunately, they often do not have a community of writers and readers to whom they can turn for advice and critique; there is currently no structured method for collaboration or evaluation of one's work. The perception from within the community college discourse community is that in order to have their work evaluated, faculty engage in the larger community; they submit their work to journals whose editorial staff consists primarily of members of the larger discourse community, and they allow their work to be judged by the standards and guidelines of that community. Community college faculty have to cross boundaries in order to participate in traditional scholarship. As one community college faculty member interviewed for a case study put it, "Scholarship is like a party; you can invite yourself there, but you might not be accepted; you can identify with scholars, but they have to accept you" (Kelly-Kleese, 2001, p. 99).

Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (1997) offer standards by which scholarly work, including the scholarship of teaching, should be judged. They state that scholarship should be evaluated on the extent to which it has clear goals, shows adequate preparation, details appropriate methods, has significant results, demonstrates effective presentation, and includes reflective critique. These standards are in concert with other assertions and discussions offered in literature on research in the classroom (Cross & Steadman, 1996; Mohr, 1996). Ford (1999) submits that the community college discourse community should focus on developing an evaluation process emphasizing quality teaching; scholarship should be seen as simply contributing to that end. It is essential to strike "a balance between teaching and scholarly performance measures in the context of the community college goal of excellence in teaching" (Padovan & Whittington, 1998, p. 227). A widening of the definition of scholarship to include teaching offers community college faculty a new avenue towards empowerment and engagement.

Indeed, a reconceptualization of community college teaching as scholarship has already begun to occur within the two-year college discourse community. Mohr (1996) offers these predictions about the future of teacher research:

   Teachers ... will be conducting research and presenting their
   ideas to their colleagues. Teacher-researchers will contribute to
   new definitions of what it means to teach. Teacher research will
   contribute to the knowledge base of the profession, and teacher
   researchers will participate as equal partners in the discourse of
   the profession. Teacher research . . . will reshape the
   understanding of how [students] learn and will transform our
   schools into learning communities. (pp. 117-121)

Because attitudes within the two-year college discourse community are changing, community college scholarship may take on a more powerful and influential status within the higher education discourse community. This may be a necessary step for community colleges. Vaughan (1984) states that in order for community colleges to remain an important force in higher education, they must continue to have open access and comprehensiveness, but faculty and administrative vitality must also be gained through scholarship. Similarly, Boyer (1987) argues, "While not all [faculty members] are or should be publishing researchers, they, nonetheless, should be first rate scholars" (p. 131). Thus, faculty should stay current in the profession, should know the literature in their disciplines, and should skillfully communicate information to students. In order to do so, however, community college professionals must redefine the meaning of scholarship within the two-year college discourse community and actively promote it in their colleges.

Conclusion

The following excerpt from a recent case study illustrates the realities of community college scholarship (Kelly-Kleese, 2001):

   Informant: I do individual research ... I'm adding to the
   discipline... [I share] at conferences and through articles and
   essays I've written. I'll also take that information and apply it to
   the classroom, with my students. So, I'm not just sharing it with
   the ivory tower individuals, but I'm also using that information
   to enhance what I teach in the classroom.

   Interviewer: Who are you communicating to when you are writing
   these articles and essays?

   Informant: Mostly university individuals and retired independent
   scholars. (p. 119)

At present, one might argue that community colleges can be more accurately defined as a speech community rather than as a discourse community because they do not produce much in the way of written discourse within their community; indeed, when they do produce what is traditionally accepted as scholarship, they do so with members of the larger discourse community in mind as their audience. But the boundaries of discourse communities are fuzzy and flexible, and there are no impassable barriers to community college faculty developing their communicative competence within as well as outside their discourse community. As Porter (1992) has stated, "We cannot accept the divisions as given or assume them as a foundation because to do so would be to miss the essential framework on which the [discourse] community is based" (p. 91).

By more clearly defining and delineating the boundaries of the two-year college discourse community, community college faculty will be better able to assert their own knowledge and power within academe. Keeping the unique mission of the community college in mind, faculty must focus deliberately on developing their communicative competence within academe while carving out their own individual voice. Redefining scholarship in the community college is essential to this process. Two-year college administrators must ensure that their campus communities are supportive of faculty members' scholarly endeavors. University professors must open up the lines of communication and allow for collaboration between the discourse communities. Finally, journal editors and peer reviewers must provide opportunities for community college faculty members and administrators to share their perspectives, their experiences, and their unique and important brand of scholarship.

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Christine Kelly-Kleese is Assistant Dean of Developmental Studies and Program Director for the Campus Learning Center at Durham Technical Community College in Durham, North Carolina. [e-mail]