Engagement versus Participation

The Experience of Intense Engagement

ENGAGEMENT has become a buzzword in higher education. Research by Alexander Astin, George Kuh, and others has demonstrated that engagement in campus life contributes to students’ learning, increases their satisfaction with their college experiences, and reduces the likelihood that they will drop out. In addition, when students become engaged citizens during or after college, they can contribute to more just social systems and lead more fulfilling lives. Astin's research suggests that the benefits of engagement increase with its intensity, raising questions: What does intense engagement look like? What distinguishes it from mere participation? How does it happen? What can a college or university do to engage the largest number of students most intensely in campus and civic life?

In moments of intense engagement, the participant feels a profound sense of personal agency, well-being, completeness, and harmony with the world. Some experience a rush of energy, power, and confidence associated with genesis: the birth of a baby, a burst of artistic creativity, the start of a friendship, or the launch of a new venture. An intensely engaged person feels a sense of direct experience and expression of their whole, authentic self, not a version of themselves limited by neuroses or conformity with social expectations. Intensely engaged people can feel a close connection with the people and things around them and can become acutely aware of new possibilities. “I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world,” the protagonist of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf says, describing such an experience. “I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart” (p. 30).

In On Revolution, philosopher Hannah Arendt identifies these perceptions and feelings as a part of the legendary spirit—Arendt calls it the “lost treasure”—of the American Revolution and other founding moments. She asserts that the participants in these events were able to experience directly “the potentialities of action and the proud privilege of being beginners of something altogether new” (p. 235). Elizabeth Minnich, senior fellow at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, identifies the possibility of having such experiences as the most potent source of motivation for civic involvement, arguing that “what we crave [from civic life] is power, agency created with others that, successful or not, makes us feel more fully alive, more real, more who we really are and so happier than any membership or brand name ever can” (p. 13). According to Minnick, this “power” is “the ‘treasure’ of which Arendt wished to remind us, the ‘happiness’ of which Adams and Jefferson wrote, the ‘prize’ on which civil rights activists and many others in related movements have kept their eyes” (p. 12).

Finding the Lost Treasure: Commonalities in Peak Experiences

ALMOST TO A PERSON, the hundreds of participants in the Peak Experience Exercise at UMBC and other campuses have reported that their experiences of passionate engagement occurred under a specific set of conditions:

Creating Conditions for Peak Engagement at UMBC

WHEN A WORKING GROUP of stu-dents, faculty, administrators, and staff at UMBC formed in fall 2003 to develop a strategy for enhancing students’ engagement with learn-ing, we decided to respond to Maslow's and Palmer's calls. Over the previous decade, UMBC had made significant progress in increasing student enrollment and the percentage of students living on campus, improving academic programs, and building a strong reputation for scholarship and service. Campus culture had begun to change as more student organizations and events helped build a stronger sense of community. The Shriver Center, home to UMBC's service learning programs, was connecting students with Baltimore neighborhoods in need.

Yet important challenges remained. Too few students were meaningfully involved in campus life or civic projects. Too many were spending their time outside of class in isolation, missing both social and educational opportunities. And too many first-year students and sophomores were still not finding the support they needed to avoid dropping out of school. Many on our campus recognized the need to create a more engaging campus environment in which more students could find the information, motivation, and support they needed to succeed.

The working group initially consisted of four people with strong campus connections and a common interest in exploring new approaches to building community and enhancing the student experience. Partly because of the mix of personalities in the group, we sought to learn from one another's engagement experiences as well as engagement projects under way on other campuses. Our early discussions focused on the differences between the subjective experience of passionate engagement and that of mere participation, a theme that has been central to all of our subsequent work.

We realized that our initial focus on the intensity of students’ engagement would seem odd to some audiences. The words “passionate engagement” have a resonance in American culture similar to that of “love at first sight”: honored as an enchanting ideal but generally understood to be beyond the realm of human intention and control. But as we began to discover through the Peak Experience Exercise that many people become intensely engaged when exposed to the same set of environmental conditions, we gained confidence in our approach, reasoning that a college or university might stimulate intense engagement by creating those conditions. Working informally and opportunistically, with increasing support from our UMBC colleagues, our group began to make changes in UMBC's learning environment.

The Campus as a Community for Engagement

TWO DISTINGUISHING FEATURES of our working group's approach to engagement are that it has focused on civic engagement and it has not involved projects that place students in traditional civic settings—that is, communities in need beyond the boundaries of the campus. While such projects have indisputable value, we have focused on engaging students as citizens within the campus environment. Why?

Our working group reasoned that plenty of opportunities exist to make the campus a more democratic environment that encouraged spontaneity, creativity, and risk taking. We recognized that students who are motivated to engage in service to their community may find their confidence and will undermined by experiences in a campus environment that seem to discourage full involvement or cast them in the role of education consumers, not creators. A 2001 study by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, authored by Judith Torney-Purta, Rainer Lehmann, Hans Oswald, and Wolfram Schulz, supports this conclusion. The study included a survey of more than 90,000 students in twenty-eight nations about democracy, engagement in public life, social cohesion, and national identity. Results indicated that there is a connection between school and classroom dynamics and students’ perspectives on civic life. Researchers found that “educational practices play an important role in preparing students for citizenship. Schools that operate in a participatory democratic way, foster an open climate for discussion within the classroom and invite students to take part in shaping school life are effective in promoting both civic knowledge and engagement. Many students, however, do not perceive this participatory climate in their classrooms or these opportunities in their schools”(p. 176). Our working group reasoned that for engagement efforts to succeed, they must encompass practices across the campus that support students’ inspirations and reinforce their confidence as citizens. The values advanced by service learning projects should shape students’ experiences in their own campus community, not just when they leave campus to serve and model good citizenship for others.

A focus on campus practices makes strategic sense for another reason. Students in many civic engagement programs may experience “community” primarily as a place they visit to perform community service. While the students may feel ownership of their actions in targeted communities and a strong connection with the people they serve, the fact that they are not members of these communities colors their experiences. They are improving someone else's neighborhood, not their own. This feature of many community service experiences does not diminish their enormous importance, both to the students and to the communities they serve. But it highlights the need for complementary experiences in which students also gain skill and confidence in being active, engaged, and effective co-creators in their own communities.

Our response to these issues has been to conceive of UMBC as a community for civic engagement and to seek and create opportunities for students to participate in the civic life of the campus. Members of the UMBC community have no shortage of ideas about how to improve the campus or passion for those ideas. Students can now work in partnership with their professors, contributing to a common product rather than submitting completely to professors'judgments. Faculty and staff members work together as citizens of the community, and everyone is encouraged to take responsibility for raising new ideas.

Products of the Work

OUR CAMPUS COMMUNIQUÉS to stu-dents now focus on UMBC as a civic com-munity and highlight opportunities for them to become creators of campus life. Members of our working group have fostered connections among departments involved in communicating with students, including the offices of institutional advancement and student life. These departments worked together to identify the places in which students form their impressions of UMBC, college life, and their identity on campus. We have launched the “Make UMBC Yours” campaign, a multipronged effort to send current and prospective UMBC students the message that they can participate in creating their own UMBC education and experiences. “Make UMBC Yours” components include profiles of student “Difference Makers,” outreach messages aimed at new students during the admissions and orientation process, and a one-page engagement poster published weekly as a wrap around free copies of the Baltimore Sun. In addition, the working group collaborated with others to create an opportunity for new students to symbolically co-create UMBC in a Welcome Week activity in which hundreds of students painted their vision for their UMBC experience on a large piece of durable fabric. Staff members assembled the finished sheets into a single enormous work of art that will hang in the campus commons for at least as long as the students are in school.

Another major product of our group's work on student engagement is the First Year Council, an organization of first-time college students and new transfer students. Students created the First Year Council to respond to the confusion and isolation some feel during their first year on campus. A group of first-year students worked with staff to develop a structure, vision, and plans for the council, and within a year, some two dozen peer leaders were helping others build social connections within their class, disseminating information about campus events and opportunities through informal networks, and encouraging their peers to become co-creators of their college experience. In the process, members of the council are developing their ability to relate to older students, faculty, and staff; to lead groups; and to communicate with diverse audiences. “I became a leader at UMBC mainly due to the support I received and still receive from the First Year Council,” says sophomore Christina Stanley. “This group focuses on building friendships and creating leadership opportunities around our shared passion for improving the experiences of new students.”

One of the First Year Council's initiatives was to introduce silicone bracelets embossed with the phrase “UMBC First.” The bracelets are available to members of the campus community who have signed a commitment to help first-year students answer questions and solve problems. The bracelets allow new UMBC students to easily identify people willing to help them get acclimated to campus life. They have also contributed to a sense of community and common purpose on campus.

Efforts to help students see how they can engage in their campus community have affected the Student Government Association (SGA) as well. SGA leaders are increasingly proposing and developing creative initiatives, with meaningful results. For example, students complained for years that the space allotted for use by their organizations was unwelcoming and uncomfortable. Student organizations would store materials in this space but meet and work elsewhere on campus. With assistance from the student affairs staff, the SGA took the lead in funding a reorganization of the space, which now is a thriving hub of student activity. This sort of progress reflects SGA members’ training in leadership and engagement strategies and a growing sense of responsibility for making the Student Government Association a more effective resource for students.

One indicator of increased student engagement with the campus community is the growth of interest in campus elections. Unlike some of the other products of our work, this one can be quantified: voter turnout has increased from 935 (9 percent of the undergraduate student body) in spring 2002 to 1,265 (12 percent) in 2003,1,862 (18 percent) in 2004 and 2,365 (23 percent) in spring 2005.

The working group has also brought together members of the UMBC community who are interested in increasing students'political awareness and participation, most recently targeted during the 2004 national election. Staff and students worked together on a voter registration campaign; numerous campus offices distributed forms and linked their Web sites to those sponsored by Rock the Vote or the Federal Election Commission. Dozens of students were recruited and trained to serve as official election judges, and student leaders worked to offer free admission to campus movies to new voter registrants. On election night, students and staff jointly held a large returns-watching party, with free food and coffee. State elected officials addressed the crowd, and UMBC's provost encouraged students to continue their participation in the political process.

Finally, members of the working group and other campus citizens are planning a grant process that would encourage entrepreneurial approaches to campus issues. Through this process, the UMBC administration may, for example, challenge members of the campus community to collaboratively design civic engagement seminars. The best proposals would receive financial support to obtain materials, services, technical assistance, and administrative support.

Challenges and Opportunities

WHILE WE HAVE ENJOYED progress and support for engagement efforts at UMBC, our working group has no illusions about having infinite flexibility or unlimited resources. In a time of budget constraints, on a campus with more than 10,000 students, building a sense of the campus as a civic community co-created by its members is not a simple task and will depend on future decisions and actions of UMBC's students, faculty, staff, and administration.

Despite the constraints, we are bolstered by the knowledge that civic engagement has been closely linked to intellectual development in college and that even the most skeptical find it hard to dismiss citizenship and service as merely peripheral, feel-good activities. UMBC's work has been part of the nationwide acceptance of service learning as a central contributor to student learning, helping those of us who are involved in engagement work find a sympathetic audience on our campus.

Although we recognize the need to demonstrate measurable outcomes of engagement, the working group has elected to also pay attention to serendipitous opportunities even if their outcomes are hard to quantify. We could not have known or planned, for example, that the First Year Council would see in ubiquitous silicone bracelets elsewhere the seed of an idea for making resources more readily available to first-year students. Because of this openness to chance, our early conversations have primarily been conceptual and hypothetical. Understandably, we have encountered people who wanted us to focus on more practical issues such as timetables, benchmarks, and specific resource requirements or who have found our vision too vague or idealistic to embrace.

We face a similar challenge in trying to reconcile a strategy of campus-based civic empowerment with a higher education culture that sometimes places a premium on centralized control. Residential community directors strive to control misbehavior; faculty members, the learning environment; lawyers and program directors, liability risks; and everyone, budgets and information. In an environment of hierarchies, departments, divisions, requirements, rules, and regulations, advancing an agenda of widespread inspiration and empowerment may seem like a threat to order. In Leadership and the New Science, management guru Margaret Wheatley tells a story of children running around a playground, finding ways to have fun. She notes that “the very experiences these children seek are the ones [adults] avoid: disequilibrium, novelty, loss of control, surprise…. We avoid these things so much that if an organization were to take the form of a teeter-totter, we'd brace it up at both ends, turning it into a stable plank” (p. 75). In chaos avoidance, we may strip our campus environments of the conditions that stimulate students’ passionate engagement, promote their intellectual development, and foster personal growth.

One way we have addressed these challenges has been to ground our work in what we know about engaging environments. Instead of insisting on control, creating a structure or blueprint for civic engagement, and seeking a mandate from campus decision makers, we have approached the process of building our initiative as a civic enterprise in which many people participate and no one has complete control. Many of the people helping to achieve the working group's vision of an engaged campus do not even consider their work as part of a grander vision; they are simply acting on issues about which they already feel passion, connecting with other members of the campus community in ways that help them accomplish their objectives, and enjoying a stronger sense of community spirit and campus ownership.

We have also had the advantage of a thoughtful and entrepreneurial team of senior campus administrators who have encouraged and supported engagement at every opportunity. UMBC president Freeman Hra-bowski has encouraged students to view themselves as contributing members of the campus community by visiting SGA meetings and creating many other forums in which students can contribute to his work on campus issues. Provost Art Johnson has been a champion of our open-ended strategy and has welcomed new efforts by students to renew and reshape campus life. Charlie Fey, our vice president for student affairs, has helped us consider and identify new opportunities to build students’ skills as leaders. These administrators genuinely value students’ co-creation of the UMBC experience.

Working in a Time of Scarce Resources

TWO KINDS of scarcity loom as ongoing challenges to the long-term viability of our initia-tive: a shortage of time and a shortage of money. Time is important because our strategy involves much more widespread participation by campus constituents than would be necessary in an isolated civic engagement program. Already we are finding that many faculty members who are working toward tenure support our vision but will not become directly involved for fear of derailing their other work. Even the members of our working group have had to scrape together time to devote to advancing our strategy. Money to support engagement projects is also scarce.

Fortunately, we have every reason to believe that these shortages will continue to be counterbalanced by a steady infusion of student enthusiasm—an important resource. If the current pattern holds, as students feel increasing ownership of the campus community, they will find it natural and enjoyable to take responsibility as co-creators of the campus environment. Through their commitments of time, talent, and activity funds, they will continue to demonstrate a strong citizenship ethic and be integral to the process of building a better UMBC.

Toward Democratic Renewal

AS WE LOOK FORWARD to building on this foundation of engagement work at UMBC, there is another challenge we will face along with other developers of civic engagement initiatives. Civic life in the United States seems to have lost much of its power and resonance. Today's college students have spent their entire lives in a post-Watergate America in which there is widespread cynicism about public affairs and the viability of citizen efforts. The brief moment of national unity in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, saw millions of Americans giving blood or donating money to charities. Memories of that moment seem to be fading. Examples of what Harry Boyte, co-director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Democracy and Citizenship, calls public work—ordinary citizens working with others to develop and advance agendas, solve problems, and create resources—are relatively rare. How can campuses inspire students to engage intensely in civic life when so many adults are disengaged?

Our response is to approach our work as planting seeds for new growth of civic life in the United States. Our goal is not limited to encouraging students to vote, volunteer, or become more involved in campus life. Rather, we will help students find and create opportunities to become passionate, entrepreneurial civic problem solvers and co-creators. If they ultimately find that aspects of American civic life do not match their hopes, they will be prepared to serve as change agents, sources of democratic renewal, and, we hope, restorers of Hannah Arendt's “lost treasure.”

On college campuses across the United States, educators are helping students embrace their civic responsibilities, build their skills, and expand their knowledge. Beyond transforming the lives and attitudes of the students themselves, these educators’ efforts have raised expectations, changed practices, and strengthened many colleges’ and universities’ sense of purpose and mission in regard to civic engagement. Their work has helped make it possible for UMBC and other campuses (some of which are described by Anne Colby and her colleagues in Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility) to focus on this challenge: helping students bring a strong sense of personal agency to their civic participation. Some students have embraced civic life with a passion intense enough to inspire groundbreaking and enduring contributions. We believe educators must strive to meet this challenge as we all work to inspire democratic renewal and help students fulfill their potential as self-authors and human beings. Our common goal should be to ground our ongoing work in the lived experiences of highly engaged people.