Enhancing Student Learning, Teaching & the University’s Mission in the Community

CSC News & Reflections
Fall 2004

In the summer 2004 issue of News & Reflections, Mary Beckman, Associate Director of Academic Affairs & Research at the Center, explored some of the changes within the community-based learning field and in the expression of CBL at the Center for Social Concerns (read the article). In the following Q&A, she continues this exploration, articulating the elements of a broad “community engagement pedagogy.”

Question: You have described how community-based learning can enhance student learning as well as make meaningful contributions within local communities. Are there any other goals we ought to think about?

Answer: Indeed there are. What I’ve spoken about so far is mainly a course-based kind of pedagogy for undergraduates. Students are involved in the community as an integral part of for-credit classes. Service-learning, however, can also be viewed as a mode of learning and a way of contributing to the off-campus world for faculty, graduate students, other constituents of the university, and for the university itself. Let me use the term “community engagement pedagogy” now as a broader term to encompass what I’m talking about.

This includes community-based learning through formal class work. But it also involves civic participation of faculty members. In other words, the Center’s pedagogy offers faculty members opportunities to be civic actors themselves, not just vicariously through their students. And they learn through such action just as students do.

For example, Chemistry Professor and faculty fellow Dennis Jacobs developed his community-based learning course — Chemistry in Service of the Community — because he himself wanted to use his own chemistry skills in the community. By participating with students in testing for lead in soil and paint around houses in a largely low-income neighborhood in South Bend, his own desire for civic participation has been given an avenue.

Also, faculty research, as well as undergraduate student and graduate student research, is included in this wider pedagogical vision. A major educational aim of the university is that students learn to do research through their course work. Such research is, ideally, modeled by the scholarship of their professors. Faculty members can do something called community-based research (CBR). CBR is a type of research that is done, ideally, in response to needs that are articulated by local community organizations that don’t have the capacity — time, money, and expertise — to do the investigations themselves. Therefore, it is a kind of service. The research question is addressed by faculty or students, with greater input from representatives of the organizations being served than generally occurs in academic research.

Recently the Center gave a grant for community-based research to a team consisting of a faculty member, a graduate student, and a representative of a community organization. One aspect of the study was to learn what caused guests of the South Bend Center for the Homeless to return once they had found independent housing. The need for this research was articulated by the Center for the Homeless, which then helped to formulate the questions for the study, among other things. The graduate student had the learning experience of doing research that contributed directly to a local organization, under the guidance of the faculty member who was likewise practicing a kind of research as service, and learning more about homelessness in the process.

Q: How does this approach benefit both faculty members and a university’s civic engagement goals?

A: Faculty members can seek publications from this type of research, though it is not the type of scholarship generally found in the highly ranked journals within many disciplines. This work, though, does provide the faculty member with an outlet for civic participation, as well as an exciting method of facilitating the learning process for both graduate and undergraduate students.

As far as the university goes, such scholarship clearly is a form of service the university is offering to the community. By supporting this type of faculty civic engagement, it takes on a clear role as civic participant.

Q: Are there other results this community engagement pedagogy achieves?

A: In academic courses, it enhances students’ learning, including their learning about how to do research, while contributing in meaningful ways to the community. It offers students multiple views of civic participation, and gives them practice in a number of these, in addition to direct service. For faculty, it offers opportunities for civic participation, and possibly for publications. It also provides a method through which the university itself can be seen as a contributor to the community, not only because it offers student volunteer hours, but because of the high-level expertise it brings through faculty involvement.

Sometimes faculty members as well as students get involved in community coalitions that come together to address social challenges locally. When this occurs, a mode of civic participation not yet addressed here is modeled for students.

Q: Can you cite an example of how we are practicing this last aspect of community engagement pedagogy?

A: Chemistry professor Dennis Jacobs is a participant in a coalition that is addressing the issue of lead poisoning broadly in the community. By acting with other organizations — a local hospital, the city, and more — he and his students witness how organizations can come together to act for change. This coalition model shows students just one more way they can contribute in their communities, while offering faculty members yet another way that they themselves can engage as civic participants. Through the faculty member and students, the university itself is represented in efforts for improvement locally. Such coalitions would emerge ideally from this community engagement pedagogy.

Q: A pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning. It is an educational method. You’ve explained how students and faculty are teaching and learning through this community engagement pedagogy. But what about the university itself?

A: By supporting faculty civic participation, whether that participation takes the form of facilitating students’ various roles in the off-campus community, or engaging themselves in CBR or involvement in local coalitions, the university opens itself to a valuable avenue for learning about the community in which it is located. It can learn much about how it is viewed by nearby residents, what city issues it might want to take a role in, and the like.

The university identity as an ivory tower that isolates it from real communities is falling by the wayside. Universities across the country are, increasingly, finding substantive ways of interacting with their near neighbors. Support for a community engagement pedagogy on the part of academic leadership, community and public relations officials, development offices, and other university departments, opens the door to creative, collaborative relationships between academia and the environment it should view as “home.”