Patti Clayton, PhD


Visiting Senior Scholar

Community Engagement

Email Address:  [email protected]

Get to Know Us

Patti is an independent consultant (PHC Ventures, www.curricularengagement.com) with over 20 years of experience as a practitioner-scholar and educational developer in service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) and in experiential education. In addition to her Senior Scholar role with the Institute, she serves as a Senior Scholar with the Center for Service and Learning at IUPUI and as Practitioner-Scholar-in-Residence with NC Campus Engagement. Patti has consulted with well over 100 colleges, universities, and higher education organizations in the US, Canada, and Ireland. She guides inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional scholarly collaborations, facilitates curriculum development and professional development across all partners in SLCE, and supports visioning and planning processes for community-campus engagement. She holds retreats to support graduate students, professional staff, and faculty in formulating and advancing their scholarly agendas and projects. Patti co-developed the DEAL Model for Critical Reflection, the SOFAR partnership model, the TRES scale and reflection framework for assessing and deepening partnership quality, and the DPI Model for Institutional Transformation. She was co-editor with Bringle and Hatcher of the 2-volume set Research on Service Learning: Conceptual Frameworks and Assessment and co-authored the Democratic Engagement White Paper with Saltmarsh and Hartley (https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1252&context=gse_pubs) and the Democratically Engaged Assessment White Paper with Imagining America’s Assessing Practices of Public Scholarship team (https://imaginingamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/DEA-WhitePaper_FINAL.pdf). Committed to co-inquiry practices, she was co-recipient of Clayton & Colleagues’ Distinguished Career recognition from the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement. Patti’s interests include operationalizing democratic engagement and transformational partnerships; designing SLCE for civic learning; conceptualizing place-engaged SLCE; integrating SLCE and relationships within the more-than-human world; and exploring the power of such “little words” as inforwith, and of to shape identities and ways of being with one another in SLCE. As one of ICEE’s Senior Scholars, Patti serves as a thought partner and collaborator on work related to engaged graduate education, professional development among all partners in community-campus engagement, community engaged scholarship, and transformational partnerships. She holds a PhD from the interdisciplinary Curriculum in Ecology at UNC-Chapel Hill.

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