In 2021, Paul Schadewald, Senior Program Director for Community-Based Learning and Scholarship at Macalester College and a Field Leader with the Bonner Foundation and Network, was awarded the NCPH Book Award, along with colleagues Rebecca Wingo and Jason Heppler, for the new book Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy. The NCPH Book Award recognizes outstanding scholarship that addresses the theory and/or practice of public history or that includes the products of public history work. Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy was recognized as the best book about or growing out of public history published in 2019 or 2020. Schadewald works within the Macalester College Civic Engagement Center, a center that was established more than thirty years ago and is home to a Bonner Leader Program.
Paul Schadewald has also served as a Field Leader with the Bonner Foundation, providing mentoring and guidance to staff and faculty who were part of the Bonner Pipeline Professional Development project. At Macalester, Paul focuses on working with faculty especially to integrate community-based learning and research into academic courses. Paul coordinates Macalester's work with Project Pericles, another association of 30 institutions that promotes civic engagement. Paul has been leading the process of curriculum mapping with two disciplines, History and Geography, as they work to embed civic learning and engagement in their majors. Paul coordinates the Project Pericles’ Academic Civic Engagement Faculty Leadership. Paul also co-leads the summer “Urban Faculty Colloquium," which has been recognized as an innovative national model for educating faculty for community-engaged learning. Paul is also a member of the National Advisory Board for Imagining America, a national consortium that supports and brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just democracy. He was part of Imagining America's Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship. Previously, Paul was part of IA's collaboratory on assessment, working to develop a rubric and resources on Civic Minded Professionalism.
The new much-needed volume Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy offers practical examples of collaborative digital history work that foreground shared authority and community-based partnerships. The nine case studies, most of which are co-authored by academic and community partners, are accessible and engaging, with a pronounced focus on the democratizing and collaborative elements of digital history. Going beyond the familiar territory of the power of digital history projects to help enact social change, the case studies model partnerships structured around egalitarian power dynamics and demonstrate the value of such digital community engagement projects to a diverse range of community organizations, as well as institutions of higher learning. The volume fills a critical gap in current public history literature, and in addition to being required reading for public historians pondering any kind of community work, also has great potential for classroom use.
The “products” described in the essays are diverse, ranging from digital archives and web portals showcasing artifacts and interviews to podcasts, “History Harvests” (pedagogically driven community digitization events), and digital storytelling projects. The case studies feature partnerships with groups ranging from civil rights organizations and grassroots coalitions combatting police violence and homelessness to the Girl Scouts of America. Despite the diversity of products and projects, the essays center upon exploring a handful of core themes from multiple vantage points, namely establishing meaningful relationships between partners; navigating financial challenges and shifting political fortunes; and practicing shared authority in all phases of a project. Not only do the projects themselves amplify voices too often marginalized (in both past and present), but thanks to the commitment to co-authorship, so does the volume itself. Furthermore, the editors’ steadfast insistence on an open access edition of the book despite the costs takes the commitment to accessibility a step further, ensuring that this sophisticated reflection on community engagement in the digital sphere will reach a diverse readership. You can order a copy of Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy here or from your favorite local bookseller.