Reflection of Public Scholarship

“The teaching and research that occur in university settings matter tremendously, but these institutions are the educational equivalent of gated communities. Not all people can or want to gain entrance. I am now committed to working with people on both sides of the gates.”
--David Domke, “The Something We Can Do”
“Public scholarship provides a field for experiment, in which introspection and invention can be carried out sociably and publicly, yielding new relationships, new knowledge and tangible public goods.”
--Julie Ellison, “The Humanities and the Public Soul”

From Ellison and Domke’s articles, I learned that public Scholarship is the relationship built between the academic world and the public masses. As profound as the former sounds, the link to inform the latter is missing or weak. One used to say that going from easy or difficult is hard, yet going from difficult to easy is even harder, and this is exactly what a public scholar supposes to accomplish.
As a first year undergraduate student, I picture myself in between the prestigious academia and the general public. I’m an audience to my professors and a learner of professional knowledge, yet at the same time I generate my own critiques and skills based on what I am taught in class. In terms of informing the public in an affective way, I could convey the knowledge I have obtained in an academic setting to the public in a less intensive complicated way, because I had to once access and unpack it myself. This skill is critical to our research project in three stages: understand the academic complex; use it to research the public and the city; present it to the public in an accessible way. by feedback to the public, the purpose of our research is fulfilled in a greater sense, for the public is where the ideas lay and the actions taken.