KerryAnn O'Meara
University of Maryland
Associate Professor of Higher Education, Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education, College of Education
Biographical Abstracts
KerryAnn O'Meara is at the forefront of the movement to regard and embed community-engaged scholarship in academic reward systems, faculty careers, and graduate education. Her research and engaged practice outlines organizational practices for full participation of faculty in community engagement and the assumptions and biases that constrain faculty agency.
Notable Achievements
Dr. O'Meara is at the forefront of the movement to regard and embed community-engaged scholarship in academic reward systems, faculty careers, and graduate education. Her research and engaged practice outline organizational practices for full participation of faculty in community engagement and the assumptions biases that constrain faculty agency. Nominees' most notable achievements; what they have done to enhance the visibility and stature of community engagement scholarship, practice, and policy-making.
Dr. O'Meara's contributions might be best categorized in three areas: research, engaged practice, and mentoring. Her scholarship focuses on organizational practices that support full participation of engaged scholars and, how engaged faculty assume agency to achieve their engagement goals amidst cultures that are biased against their full participation. She was one of the first to study campuses that reformed their promotion and tenure policies as suggested by Ernest Boyer and Gene Rice to understand the consequences of these actions via survey, case study, and multi-method designs. She has studied engaged faculty navigating inhospitable work environments, the strategies they use to confront norms that question the legitimacy of their work, and structures for embedding engaged scholarship in graduate education and faculty careers. She published 25 peer-reviewed articles, a book, an edited book, a monograph, an edited monograph, 13 book chapters, 12 scholarly magazine and quarterly papers, 40 reports, and 15 working papers and essays. Dr. O'Meara is an engaged scholar herself, and has worked with hundreds of campuses, associations, and faculty senates to reform their promotion and tenure guidelines to better regard engaged scholarship. Her work has been cited in important disciplinary association policy documents on reward systems (e.g. MLA, AERA, Imagining America).
Finally, Dr. O'Meara is an active mentor of graduate students and emerging scholars. Excluding reports, her vita shows 20 published or in press works with 25 different graduate students (11 MA and 14 Ph.D). She received IARSLCE's Early Career Research Award (2008) as recognition for her work.