This dissertation was a basic, exploratory qualitative study which examined professional identity development of community-engaged practitioner-scholars through participation in a community engagement professional associations’ graduate student fellowship – the Imagining America (IA) Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellows program. Data collection occurred through semi-structured interviews with 15 PAGE Fellows alumni who self-identified as community-engaged scholar-practitioners and participated in the fellowship between 2008-2017.Data analysis focused on thematic analysis of interview transcriptions, using an inductive rather than a deductive approach to make meaning from the data, and two rounds of data coding. The first round used an open coding and categorization process, and the second round used a holistic coding process of theming the data focused on identifying big ideas across interviews. From this two-step process six major themes emerged across interviews, which were then divided into two sections. The first section, the people, focused on themes of participant backgrounds and ways of work. The second section, the setting, focused on themes of tension within the academy, new conceptualizations, new relationships, and new practices. The PAGE alumni who took part in this study were diverse in terms of identities, characteristics, and life experiences. Similarly, the way they named and went about their current work as community-engaged practitioner-scholars also varied. However, their values and motivations were similar and accompanied them on their journeys through graduate education, including the PAGE program, and into their future professional roles. The PAGE program provided a necessary space for participants to move toward greater alignment of their head, heart, and hands through new conceptualizations, relationships, and practices. This space of revelation, affirmation, and transformation was critical to not only their ongoing professional identity development as community-engaged practitioner-scholars, but also their ability to persist through graduation in the face of challenging higher education environments. While socialization is a commonly used lens to understand graduate student professional identity development, communities of practice and counterspaces are other critical lenses which provide even greater understanding of community-engaged graduate students’ experiences and identity development. In particular, counterspaces both acknowledge harm and promote healing as part of professional identity development. When rhetoric does not match reality for higher education institutions’ commitment to community engagement, community-engaged practitioner-scholars may find counterspaces to the academy are necessary and allow them to reset and reframe, collectively organize, and push back against normative socialization processes of the academy.
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