Mining the Messiness: Examining the nature of productive discomfort in students’ community-engaged learning experiences and their lessons learned

Abstract: This study aims to illuminate how community-engaged learning in an undergraduate course facilitates student growth through the experience of productive discomfort. Brought about by situations and events within the community, this state of balanced comfort and frustration is conducive to student learning and growth with respect to important CEL themes. Using student reflections from multiple course sections across several semesters, we provide vignettes and insights that illustrate challenging situations and/or moments of discomfort and frustration to explore how students respond, and what they learn.

Our research questions include:

What kinds of community engagement experiences and interactions generate meaningful learning?
In what ways do students demonstrate learning and growth from experiences of “productive discomfort” in CEL courses?
How does community-engaged learning humanize a curriculum’s perspectives on power and influence?

We intend to engage round table participants by providing an overview of the study, including methodology, conceptual frameworks, and preliminary findings. We will invite participants' insights, questions, and considerations to help shape the remaining aspects of the research process, including data analysis, implications, and dissemination opportunities. We are particularly interested in sharing our conceptual frameworks and preliminary themes, and getting a sense of how they resonate with others in the field.

Narrative: Project Purpose and Research Questions:

This study aims to illuminate how community-engaged learning in an undergraduate course facilitates student growth through the experience of productive discomfort. Brought about by situations and events within the community, this state of balanced comfort and frustration is conducive to student learning and growth with respect to important CEL themes. Using student reflections from multiple course sections across several semesters, we provide vignettes and insights that illustrate challenging situations and/or moments of discomfort and frustration to explore how students respond, and what they learn.

Our research questions include:

What kinds of community engagement experiences and interactions generate meaningful learning?
In what ways do students demonstrate learning and growth from experiences of “productive discomfort” in CEL courses?
How does community-engaged learning humanize a curriculum’s perspectives on power and influence?

Theoretical or Conceptual Frameworks:

Drawing on Vygostky’s (1978) zone of proximal development, Mezirow’s (1997) transformative learning theory and the La Fever’s (2017) Medicine Wheel for curriculum design, we identify both how and what students can learn through a curated experience that combines community interactions, reflection, discussion, and engagement with curricular content. We are also interested in using a lens of reparation to explore how students learn to identify and repair harms they may have caused through their engagement. We might draw on the resources compiled by the Higher Education Reparations Engagement Network to determine tools and principles to guide this aspect of our analysis, but this is one of the elements on which we would like to collect feedback.

Research design, methods and findings, including participants, setting, data sources, analysis and implications:

This study involves qualitative analysis of written student reflections collected across multiple sections of a Power and Influence community-engaged learning course over 2-5 semesters. The course is situated in the School of Management at an urban Jesuit university on the West Coast where undergraduate students take at least one community-engaged learning course to fulfill a graduation requirement. The course is always taught by the same instructor, who is a tenured associate professor. The data set includes over 50 reflective essays from undergraduate students..

We are using a deductive coding process, looking for evidence of transformative learning experiences, spiritual and emotional development, and acts of reparation. We are also using inductive coding to help us illuminate themes related to the nature of experiences of “productive discomfort” and the types of responses students enact.

We intend to use the findings from this study to propose a conceptual framework and/or set of principles to intentionally facilitate students’ spiritual and emotional learning from experiences of productive discomfort in CEL courses to build their capacity to repair individual and systemic harms and advance social justice.

As researchers and practitioners of community engagement, we feel it is important to disclose our positionality, knowing that it influences everything from what and how we teach, to the research questions that interest us, to how we conceive and implement our research processes. One researcher is a black military veteran and former software engineer who now applies his doctorate in Organizational Behavior and Management as a tenured business professor who has instructed CEL courses for over 10 years.. The other researcher is a white, cisgender, able bodied, middle class woman with a terminal degree who has worked as a community engagement professional (CEP) for over 15 years. Both researchers work at an urban Jesuit university on the West Coast, and approach their work with a critical analysis of power, privilege, and oppression, and a deep commitment to interrogating the systemic nature of injustice.

Scholarly Significance:

Student experiences and outcomes are still under-researched in the field of community-engaged learning. While we have identified service-learning, or community-engaged learning, as a high impact practice that facilitates student engagement and retention (Kuh, 2008) and have conducted some research on student civic outcomes (Steinberg, Hatcher, & Bringle, 2011), there are very few studies that focus on social justice learning outcomes. By social justice learning outcomes, we mean students developing a nuanced understanding of social inequities, examining the roles of individuals and institutions in perpetuating inequities, and building capacity to disrupt inequity and advance justice (Bowen, 2014). At the course or program level, we may rely on survey tools, interviews, and reflective assignments to help us understand student learning, but we are often seeking to illuminate the positive experiences and civic learning outcomes. This study focuses on students’ experiences of “productive discomfort” during community-engaged learning to determine whether there are common types of experiences, and analyze what students take away from these experiences that allow them to develop their capacities to enact social justice.

How ethical research was ensured:

The data for this study was gathered initially as a graded assignment in one of the researchers’ courses. The reflective assignment was designed to help students demonstrate learning in alignment with course learning outcomes. It was not initially intended to collect data for research purposes. We are now interested in examining this data, accumulated from multiple sections of the course over the past few semesters, to illuminate student experiences of productive discomfort and learning they’ve articulated from these moments. The researchers will remove all information that could identify individual students to ensure anonymity in analysis and dissemination. We are currently applying for an IRB exemption with our university’s Institutional Review Board.

Agenda for Roundtable

Discussion:

Introduction to presenters, institution, and Power and Influence course
Overview of data set, process of analysis, and preliminary findings

Discussion: Invite participants to share questions, insights, advice about how to move forward with the research process and dissemination of findings
Invitation for participants to consider how they can pursue more systematic examinations of these pedagogical processes and outcomes

3-4 Key words:

Community-engaged learning
Student outcomes
Humanistic education