Enacting a Co-created Service-Learning Course: Community and Faculty Perspectives from an Intergenerational Oral History Project

Abstract: This topical discussion roundtable will explore a case-study of an ongoing multi-course partnership that brings together local, BIPOC-identifying older adults with first-year and advanced writing students to develop, produce and archive oral history narratives. The case-study offers insight into a co-creative process through which community representatives, faculty and administrators are involved in designing and executing new service-learning courses. The goals are to: develop a course-community partnership that foregrounds community knowledge and priorities; support a community-engaged writing curriculum that advances social justice; and develop a sustainable, equitable and inclusive framework for community-engaged course development. The presenters bring extensive experience in community engaged service-learning partnerships and can draw on quantitative and qualitative data to inform discussion and analysis. The presenters all participated in a unique community-faculty fellows program through the Center for Community Engaged Teaching and Research at Northeastern University, which guided the course co-design process. The process gave rise to the course at the center of this case-study, and it offers a model for frameworks and best practices that could be scaled-up and/or replicated by other partnerships or institutions.

Narrative: We will explore a co-creative process through which community representatives, faculty and administrators are designing and executing new service-learning courses. Taking a case-study approach, we will examine a multi-course partnership starting Fall 2023 that brings together BIPOC-identifying older adults with first-year and advanced writing students to develop, produce and archive digital oral history narratives. The presenters participated in a co-created curriculum design process led by Northeastern University’s Center for Community Engaged Teaching and Research (CETR). This discussion seeks to engage multiple perspectives in a community-course partnership, and offers a model of a co-created, community-engaged learning experience for analysis as well as potential for replication and expansion.

The goal of the project is to build a sustainable, co-creative framework in which older adults take the lead in shaping and digitally producing narratives, while university students learn through practice the skills of ethical and inclusive storytelling and archiving. The community organization partner and co-presenter represents LBFE Boston, which provides intergenerational enrichment programs for older adults, and has partnered with universities since 2015. The faculty collaborator and co-presenters have taught several service-learning courses in Writing Studies. The case-study is piloting a unique tandem partnership with both a first-year and an advanced writing course taught by the same instructor. The site of the project is a senior center that primarily serves under-resourced families and immigrant populations. The student and older adult participants represent a range of social identities: multi-lingual, intergenerational, economically and geographically diverse.

Key Questions:
How can a co-creative process integrate community knowledge, perspectives, learning goals, and institutional structures?
How can course co-designers enact a process that aligns student learning and action with community goals and social justice?
What strategies (re-)align pedagogy and curriculum with a co-creative process?
How can partnerships be (re-)evaluated in a way that centers/foregrounds principles like genuine relationships; justice and equity; and sustainability?
How can a writing curriculum help students and partners engage in a co-creative process around storytelling and digital literacy? Can such projects help foreground community knowledge, in academia and beyond?

This partnership is relevant in the context of scholarship that calls for service-learning models that center community participants, anti-oppressive practices, and social-justice outcomes that are truly focused on the welfare of that community. Our approach also seeks to foreground the deep social knowledge that community members bring to any collaboration. The project will engage older adults in the Codman Square area of Dorchester, who speak English, Spanish, Cape Verdean, and Haitian Creole. The intergenerational aspect of this project allows for a mutually beneficial collaboration. Older participants are able to share their life stories while younger participants are able to share their digital literacy, and all can form new social connections. The process engaged here aligns with the principles and practices outlined in Dr. Tania Mitchell’s exploration of critical service-learning (2008), and “moving from doing for to doing with” per Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2000). As Dr. Rachel Shah (2020) and others have pointed out, the writing, composition and rhetoric field has played a large role in developing and deploying service-learning curricula, and this community-based writing curriculum aims to be part of that evolution. The principles and practices presented here are applicable to a range of practitioners, and the discussion aims to broadly explore how educational programs can integrate community-driven goals and missions.

The participants in this panel are part of a pilot cohort that received institutional guidance and support. To respect the time and professional contributions of community partners, the facilitators (CETR) secured funding to compensate all participants. The case study offers a potential model for replication or expansion. The proposed facilitator of the roundtable is also a participant in this original cohort and will be able to offer comparative reflections from her own co-curricular design experiences during the past year.

The ongoing case study is an opportunity to gather and analyze qualitative and quantitative data reflecting the experience and outcomes from the perspectives of learners, community participants, and partnership designers. Since its founding in 1979, the Boston chapter of Little Brothers-Friends of the Elderly (LBFE Boston) has sought to alleviate loneliness and isolation among the city’s low-income older adults. LBFE offers on-site intergenerational social and educational opportunities and instructor-led programs within public and affordable senior housing and senior centers. To support the intergenerational component of programs, LBFE Boston has partnered with service-learning and community engagement programs at several colleges and universities since 2015. LBFE staff have a clear vision of the places where challenges and misalignment can occur between course and community partner. The opportunity to co-create a course and community placement helps address many of the challenges that occur when trying to align the learning goals of a course with the work and logistical capacity of community organizations. Co-creation is both a significant time and resource investment, but it also holds the potential to net a significant return on that investment, as course and community needs and agendas are brought into alignment from the outset.

LBFE Boston partners with Northeastern’s Public Evaluation Lab (NU-PEL) to support data collection and program evaluation. Through this, and intern surveys and digital artifacts, LBFE is able to capture the impact students experience through their service.

From the faculty perspective, this case study is an opportunity to examine how co-creative practices and principles can be reflected in pedagogy and curriculum. The faculty presenters have taught with service-learning models for nearly a decade. This pilot project is part of an evolution toward: prioritizing community perspectives, missions and activities; and, de-centering the professor as the course leader and knowledge-keeper. The faculty presenters can offer insight into how these moves are enacted in terms of: classroom practices; making connections between (writing) curriculum and community-engaged activities; building sustainable relationships/projects; and, tools that have been useful in preparing students, including the Principles of Non-Oppressive Community Engagement (Northeastern University Social Impact Lab) and Critical Service-Learning Reflection Tool. Available data sources include student surveys, sample published work-products, and reflections. Data is gathered and accessed per IRB protocols.