An International Partnership Proposal to Strengthen Community Engagement Practice

Abstract: This talk will describe our vision for an international partnership involving the University of Pretoria in South Africa and Merrimack College in the USA. The partnership will provide a space for faculty development pertinent to the planning and implementation of service learning and community engagement courses. The focus is an international initiative to strengthen higher education community engagement through faculty development, onsite training, and online communities of practice. The partnership will build upon the existing relationship between the two institutions and our shared commitments to community engagement; diversity, equity, and social justice; and to our local marginalized communities. The talk will explain the rationale for our collaboration and the structure and plan for this project as well as intended outcomes and benefits.

Narrative: This talk will describe our plan to create an international community of practice among faculty members from the University of Pretoria (UP) and Merrimack College (MC) who are involved in community engagement initiatives in their respective local communities, specifically, communities that have been historically marginalized and underserved. The project will provide faculty members with resources, strategies, and tools to advance their work with community engagement students, practitioners, and communities.
This proposed project intends to directly address one need and two opportunities. New faculty members at UP have identified a need for practice-based knowledge and skills in inclusive and equity-minded community engagement so that they can revise their syllabi and incorporate best practices in the service learning components of their course. This way, their students can be more effective in undertaking their service learning activities and can derive greater benefit from these activities. MC’s Community Engagement Program instructors have substantial experience in teaching and practicing community engagement in the field. However, there are limited opportunities to share them. The MC Community Engagement Program also needs to “test” how its current set of syllabi resonate in the international field, given an anticipation of having more international students in the future who are interested in the global elements of community engagement. Lastly, UP and MC have an ongoing collaborative relationship. While knowledge exchange has been happening between the two institutions, there are more areas for sharing and collaboration. This project is an excellent opportunity to deepen this existing relationship.
This is a two-year initiative which includes a series of five on-ground workshops and five online debrief sessions. Google sites will be used for sharing and archiving resources. A core leadership team will manage the project. Instructors will participate in regular planning meetings. The initiative includes a needs assessment, midpoint assessment, and final evaluation. The goal is to advance social cohesion through a partnership that extends faculty knowledge, impacts their behavior, and thus creates conditions for strengthening local communities.
Through this project, UP and MC will share practices and tools that strengthen the practice of community engagement for student learning and community betterment; identify community engagement practices which are assets-based, inclusive, and culturally responsive; and develop resources for faculty which can be used to strengthen equity and social cohesion in the surrounding communities of the two institutions through a deepening understanding of our similar national histories and current-day realities of systemic oppression. Resources will enhance instructors’ course development and implementation which will, in turn, strengthen students’ learning and community impact.
UP has a mandate to incorporate service learning and community engagement in their courses. There are existing course modules at UP that incorporate service learning and community engagement. There is an orientation on how to use these modules, but there is no training on the theory and practice of community engagement as it relates to culturally responsiveness, socio- economic inclusion and asset-based approaches. New faculty members are in need of practice-based knowledge and skills in community engagement that is grounded in a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens and particularly a racial equity lens so that they can revise their syllabi and incorporate innovative practices in the service learning components of their course. Presently, there are 210 registered community engagement or service learning modules at the Community Engagement Unit. Instructors teaching these modules require professional development in order to work in collaboration with local communities respectfully and reciprocally.
MC has a long history of and an extensive background in field-based community engagement. Its Community Engagement Program instructors have substantial experience in teaching and practicing community engagement but limited opportunities to share this expertise with other faculty. Additionally, MC seeks to assess its course offerings to gauge the extent to which global perspectives are a part of them. This is important because the program has moved to online course delivery, making it more accessible to individuals overseas. Given the potential of having more non-US students in the program, MC needs to incorporate global perspectives into the teaching of community engagement.
UP and MC have an ongoing collaborative relationship and knowledge exchange through which they have identified several areas for continued sharing of expertise and resources, co-creation of knowledge, tools, and practices, and collaboration for professional development and scholarly dissemination. This project aligns with the strategic plans of both institutions through its focus on diversity, community engagement, global perspectives, and research and provides a unique opportunity to deepen this existing relationship. Both UP and MC are institutions dedicated to creating and developing service-learning in the field that has real world implications. To this end, the two institutions see this as an opportunity to transform some of the current research and ideas around what service-learning can be and can do.
The project builds upon both institutions’ existing relationships with and commitments to historically marginalized communities. UP, Mamelodi is one of the campuses of the university and is situated in a township east of Pretoria. Mamelodi was created during the Apartheid government in 1953 when black citizens were forcefully removed from the suburb of Lady Selborne in the city centre of Pretoria and relocated to Mamelodi (Ralinala, 2002). This campus is seen as the social innovation hub of UP and serves the local community.
MC is situated adjacent to the City of Lawrence, a city with a high population of immigrants, particularly Latinx immigrants. Historically, Lawrence has welcomed waves of immigrants from Europe, Canada, and the Middle East and played an important role in the country’s labor movement. The city has the highest poverty rates in the state and among the highest in the nation with over one of five people living in poverty and two in five children living in poverty. Unemployment rates in Lawrence are high and nearly a third of residents have not attained a high school diploma. Similar to the UP’s campus in Mamelodi, MC has an outreach arm in Lawrence called Hands to Help which was established in 2015.