Discussion Area for INLT Post-IGC Workshop paper on Community Engagement
read paper - Community Engagement
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Comments / Threads So Far
- Comment on Community Engagement paper (from Eric Pawson)
- Comment on Community Engagement paper (from Michael Bradford)
- Comment on Community Engagement paper (from Amy Griffin)
Subject: Comment on Community Engagement paper
From: Eric Pawson, University of Canterbury, NZ
Date: 23rd June 2006
Posting:
It seems to me that a challenge that this group faces is the development of a common language by which community engagement can be understood in different places. A lot of the terms here are new to me and I'm not sure, for example, what 'community enterprise projects' and 'service learning projects' are. And although I've heard of 'volunteerism', I don't know if more is implied by this term than is by 'volunteering'.
Perhaps one way forward would be the development of some sort of schema, or diagram, that identifies different takes on community engagement and their location one to the other, and provides some simple definitions.
I'm interested that in an American context, the term clearly seems to be about student learning. In New Zealand, it doesn't seem to mean this necessarily. Community engagement is one of eight fundamentals of my university's planning and profile regime, and encompasses the activities of faculty as much as of students. So it describes engagement with Pasifika communities for example, and links with Maori iwi (tribal groups) with the purpose of narrowing cultural distances and encouraging more Pacific Island and Maori students into tertiary education. In this sense it might mean meeting 'community needs' (the ref in the paper to Elfin and Shearer 2006), but in the broader sense of mutual responsiveness.
Subject: Comment on Community Engagement paper
From: Michael Bradford, University of Manchester , UK
Date: 24th June 2006
Posting:
I think there is an issue about exploiting the community - maintaining their involvement for another set of students to benefit. There is working with the community so that they get the most out of it and so that they make the most of the students' experience. There is all too often an underlying assumption that all students benefit and even that all comunities benefit. If we see where they do not then we might be able to take actions to improve the situation.
Subject: Comment on Community Engagement paper
From: Amy Griffin, The University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Aus
Date: 30th June 2006
Posting:
One of the first things that came to mind when reading this paper is what you mean by community, when you use the term community engagement. Does it refer to people and organizations who are in the local university catchment, but not associated with the university, does it mean the whole nation, or does it refer to people and organizations that have some connection to the discipline? I think to some extent, this is an issue of scale, and you can also ask whether the community that you hope to help students engage with can be virtual. It seems to me that this is a fundamental issue to deal with when you define exactly what you mean by community engagement.
A second point I would like to raise has do with something you said in the first paragraph of the introduction, in which you make a statement that "An overarching theme with community engagement is that students are involved in 'real world' situations and must make decisions based on....". What exactly do you mean by engagement? Does your statement imply that finding a part-time job in the student's field while also studying constitutes community engagement? When I was an undergraduate, I worked for my state's natural resource management agency as a GIS technician, but I'm not sure that that experience is one that would come to mind when I hear the term 'community engagement'. Is every experience (with a community or in isolation of a community) engaging - what are the necessary conditions that need to be fulfilled for an experience to be engaging? Building an awareness of the issues that communities face among students and how their discipline can help in community issues? Or is it something deeper than that? I would argue that there is a need for students to be reflexive (and for their instructors to help them develop the skills to be reflexive) before I would say they have successfully engaged with the community.