Elaine Ward BA, M.Ed., Ed.D.
Elaine Ward has worked in Higher Education for eleven years. She worked 10 years at the University of Massachusetts Boston in multiple roles including as a lecturer, the Director of the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment, the Director of the Office of Student Services and as a member of the senior management team at the University’s College of Public and Community Service. Elaine currently holds the Arnold F. Graves Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Dublin Institute of Technology’s Center for Social and Educational Research in the Higher Education Policy Research Unit. Elaine is researching the value of Arts and Humanities Research for HEPRU as part of a collaborative project with the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and with the Norwegian Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFUSTEP) in Norway.
Prior to her years in higher education, Elaine worked in the social services field as a care worker and mental health counselor, both in Ireland and the US. Elaine bridged her work in the community with her work with her students and has taught undergraduate classes in adult learning theory, leadership, and community development and has co-taught doctoral and masters’ level courses in research methods and teaching and learning. Elaine also has experience supervising doctoral level dissertation research and has presented internationally on successfully completing the dissertation process.
Elaine is an active and enthusiastic researcher and has presented at regional, national and international conferences on the topics of access to higher education for immigrant students, adult learning, and the scholarship of engagement. Her work has been published in the New Directions for Higher Education series, and Advances in Service-Learning. Elaine is a Visiting Fellow at the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE), in Massachusetts and is active in a number of international research teams. Elaine is a core member of a US-based research team that studies institutions that received the Carnegie Foundation for Teaching’s Community Engagement Elective Classification since the classification was first established in 2006.
Elaine has studied both in Dublin and in Boston and received her doctorate in Higher Education Administration from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her dissertation titled Women’s Ways of Engagement: An Exploration of Gender, the Scholarship of Engagement, and Institutional Reward Policy and Practice has been nominated for numerous awards and is the winner of the New England Educational Research Organization’s Schmidt Award for Outstanding Dissertation Research 2009 and the International Association of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement’s dissertation of the year award 2010.
Elaine is an advocate of the public mission of higher education and her research explores how individual faculty and institutions navigate and operationalize this mission. Specifically, Elaine’s research interests include faculty motivation for community-engaged scholarship, the institutionalization of civic and community engagement, the relationship between academic institutions and the community and related theories of epistemology, and international perspectives of civic and community-engagement.
Elaine participated in a panel on New Ways for Universities to Engage with Regions and Communities:
http://hercdcu.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-ways-for-universities-to-engage.html
Elaine Ward is elected to the Board of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement: http://www.researchslce.org/
Elaine Ward is appointed Associated Editor for Dissertation Abstracts for the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement: http://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/index.php/jheoe/announcement
