scholarly journals Preparing students for community-based learning using an asset-based approach

Author(s):  
Lisa Garoutte ◽  
Kate McCarthy-Gilmore

One goal of service and community-based learning is to produce students who are more tightly engaged in the larger communities surrounding their institutions. Drawing on data from three courses, we argue that an asset-based approach plays a role in creating authentic campus-community partnerships that strive to engage students as members of the community from the outset and throughout their service learning courses. Asset-based activities help students come to understand the value of relationships amongst community members while also underscoring the value of their individual role in this group.  As such, students are more prepared for future work within the community.

Author(s):  
Simone Weil Davis

Informed by my experiences in prison/university co-learning projects, this essay centres two community-based learning practices worth cultivating. First, what can happen when all participants truly prioritize what it means to build community as they address their shared project, co-discovering new ways of being and doing together, listening receptively and speaking authentically? How can project facilitators step beyond prescribed roles embedded in the charity paradigm of service-learning to invite and support egalitarian community and equity-driven decision-making from a project’s inception and development, through its unfolding and its assessment? Second, the sheer fact of a project taking place in the marginal place between two contexts gives all participants—students, faculty, community participants and hosts—the opportunity for meta-reflection on the institutional logics that construct and constrain our perspectives so acutely. What can we do, by way of project-conception and pedagogy, to open up those insights? The vantage that “the space between” provides can bring fresh understanding of the systemic forces at work in the lives of the community participants. And the university’s assumptions about itself and its place in the world can also suddenly appear strange and new, objects of scrutiny for students and community members both.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Snider Bailey

<?page nr="1"?>Abstract This article investigates the ways in which service-learning manifests within our neoliberal clime, suggesting that service-learning amounts to a foil for neoliberalism, allowing neoliberal political and economic changes while masking their damaging effects. Neoliberalism shifts the relationship between the public and the private, structures higher education, and promotes a façade of community-based university partnerships while facilitating a pervasive regime of control. This article demonstrates that service-learning amounts to an enigma of neoliberalism, making possible the privatization of the public and the individualizing of social problems while masking evidence of market-based societal control. Neoliberal service-learning distances service from teaching and learning, allows market forces to shape university-community partnerships, and privatizes the public through dispossession by accumulation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 384-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna L. Morrissey ◽  
Joseph A. Beckett ◽  
Ross Sherman ◽  
Lisa J. Leininger

As undergraduate students prepare to enter the workforce and become engaged members in their communities, it is necessary for universities to provide students with opportunities and resources to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to be successful in their professional, personal, and social pursuits. Experiential learning is one approach that may be used to facilitate and strengthen the learning process for undergraduate students. Grounded in experiential learning, Kinesiology-specific service learning and internship programs can help students develop the skillset needed to be successful in their major and future careers. To best facilitate students’ learning, it is imperative that such academic programs build collaborative, sustainable and genuine campus-community partnerships. This paper presents a series of practical and successful partnership-building strategies from three unique institutions.


Author(s):  
Susan Haarman ◽  
Patrick M Green

One of the fundamental questions of power in the pedagogy of community-based research (CBR) is who gets to decide what is research worthy and what is the focus of CBR questions? The reality of the power imbalance in community-based research and learning is often reflective of a systemic disengagement with the broader community. Even when instructors and administrators are intentional in how they solicit feedback or think through the impact of their work, they may not know the neighbourhood. Prioritising the voice of community partners does not provide a simple solution, as the individuals we work with to organise community-based learning opportunities may not be residents of the neighbourhood. This article adopts a theory-building approach to this crucial question. Building on the work of Boyte (2014) and Honig (2017), community-based research is reoriented as ‘public work for public things’ (Haarman 2020). After establishing the ‘public work for public things’ framework, the article explores how this new framework impacts collaborative research by addressing the power differential and creating new lines of inquiry – specifically the practice of ‘elicitation of concerns’. Through the lens of critical service-learning pedagogy (Mitchell 2008) and a practitioner-scholar framework (Lytle 2008; Ravitch 2013; Salipante & Aram 2003), we then interrogate two community-based research courses we have recently taught, examining how a ‘public work for public things’ approach would have altered the course and its methods.


Author(s):  
Susan Root

I am thrilled to introduce the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement (IJRSLCE), the journal of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE). IARSLCE is an association of K-H scholars and practitioners dedicated to the development and dissemination of high quality research on service-learning and other forms of community-based learning and collaboration.


Author(s):  
Helene Krauthamer ◽  
Matthew Petti

This chapter discusses civic engagement and service-learning in higher education at an urban, land-grant, Historically Black College/University, with a particular focus on the challenges and benefits of service-learning for commuter students. After a discussion of service learning and how it exemplifies the Kolb learning model and effective educational practice, the chapter presents illustrations of civic engagement and extracurricular community-based learning in an English BA program through its two student organizations – The Literary Club and Sigma Tau Delta-Alpha Epsilon Rho. The chapter also provides an example of how service-learning has been implemented in a General Education program and specifically in a writing course. The chapter highlights the partnerships with community organizations that have developed, presents reflective testimonials about the impact of these experiences, provides recommendations for strengthening community-based learning, and concludes that service-learning/community-based learning results in a sense of community for all participants.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-144
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Oesterle ◽  
◽  
Leah Giorgini ◽  
Christopher Eckhardt

Experiences of sexual violence are commonplace among individuals within the LGBTQIA+ communities, with more than 63% of sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals experiencing victimization. Despite high rates of victimization, few individuals experiencing sexual assault seek services post-assault, with even fewer individuals within the LGBTQIA+ community accessing post-assault care. This is further exacerbated when considering the unmet treatment needs of sexual assault survivors and victims, where individuals commonly experience high rates of internalizing (i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety) and externalizing (i.e., substance use/misuse) symptoms for years after experiencing an assault. Although these experiences occur at alarming rates on college campuses, LGBTQIA+ college students may be more likely to seek services and treatment from off-campus providers for a variety of reasons, including privacy concerns and less rigid stereotypes in how services are delivered. Many college students and community members are unaware of their options for receiving post assault care off-campus and within their local communities. Therefore, in conjunction with the YWCA of Greater Lafayette, this service-learning project seeks to establish and build a relationship with a community-based provider responding to instances of sexual violence within the community. The first goal of this research is to support the YWCA in outreach efforts targeted to LGBTQIA+ victims of sexual assault, to increase awareness of the programs offered by the organization within these communities. The second goal of this research is to provide didactic trainings to community providers responding to sexual violence and assault to be able to more effectively deal with SGM individuals experiencing assault, and reduce the heightened barriers faced by this group in receiving post-assault care. Considerations as to how researchers can employ community-based participatory research frameworks to more effectively serve their local community will be discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-286
Author(s):  
Madelaine Cahuas ◽  
Alexandra Arraiz Matute

This paper explores how women and non-binary Latinx Community Workers (LCWs) in Toronto, Canada, negotiate their identities, citizenship practices and politics in relation to settler colonialism and decolonization. We demonstrate how LCWs enact a Latinx decolonial politic of belonging, an alternative way of practicing citizenship that strives to simultaneously challenge both Canadian and Latin American settler colonialism. This can be seen when LCWs refuse to be recognized on white settler terms as “proud Canadians,” and create community-based learning initiatives that incite conversations among everyday Latinx community members around Canada’s settler colonial history and present, Indigenous worldviews, as well as race and settler colonialism in Latin America. We consider how LCWs’ enactments of a Latinx decolonial politic of belonging serve as small, incomplete, but crucial steps towards decolonization. 


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Wood ◽  
Edward Hebert ◽  
Chris Wirth ◽  
Ali Venezia ◽  
Shelly Welch ◽  
...  

Successful campus-community partnerships provide universities enhanced visibility in the community, and offer university students opportunities to engage in real-world educational experiences through service learning and internships. In addition, the participating community agency/program benefits from an infusion of ambitious students that can help the agency/program further its mission, and increase its visibility and reach. Within the areas of health promotion and wellness, campus-community partnerships have become an essential component in the delivery of prevention services and the development of public health infrastructure. The purpose of this paper is to share the experiences of two universities in their development of campus-community partnerships in the areas of health and wellness.


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