COMMUNITY-ENGAGED PEDAGOGY: KEY ELEMENTS

Civic engagement. We are working to transform the curriculum of our political science department across subfields with civic-engagement education as a core element.

Community partnerships. Our courses include partnering with community organizations, involving the community-organization staff or members in course design, and using activities that bring an organization to campus and take students into the community to engage with its work as key course practices.

Learning objectives and community organizations. Given that leaders from community organizations shape some of the course learning objectives and class activities, student projects serve both student-learning and community-organization objectives. Student written work may include assignments that are shared with partner organizations.

COURSES

We have transformed multiple courses; this section discusses four in different subfields. The first course, “Women, Gender, and the Middle East,” taught by Nermin Allam, partners with a nonprofit organization led by women from the Middle East and North Africa. The main objective of the course is to provide students with the theoretical skills and empirical evidence necessary to evaluate and develop their own views on women, gender, and politics in the Middle East. They learn about key debates and theories in the subfield, gaining familiarity with current and past women’s movements in the region. Course assignments are designed to enable students to make connections between academic theory and everyday life in their communities. As part of the class, students work alongside the organization’s caseworker on client intake and on organizing cultural-sensitivity training workshops for educational institutions and service agencies. Through this work, students identify, tackle, and refute popular misconceptions and stereotypes that surround the image of Middle Eastern women and then share their findings. The final paper requires them to connect course readings and lectures to their experiences working with the organization.

The second course, “Human Rights,” taught by Janice Gallagher, partners with several regional organizations that work with immigrants and asylum seekers. Students learn the definitions of human rights and key international instruments for their protection and enforcement; they study specific movements for human rights protection and assess their effectiveness. Students’ participation in events sponsored by partner NGOs exposes them to local human rights issues, and they write papers reflecting on how to place these experiences within the context of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As they write additional research papers analyzing other countries’ human rights records and social movements, students gain awareness of these issues at home and abroad. One event worth describing is a partner NGO obtaining cultural visas for Mexicans who have family members in the United States. The group holds reunification events in the United States during which family members from Mexico—primarily older women whose children and grandchildren were undocumented in the United States—are reunited with family members living in the United States who they may not have seen for more than a decade. The university was able to host one reunification event but, given security concerns, it was not publicized. Our students therefore were among the only students in attendance. They welcomed the family members getting off the buses at the university, staffed information tables for more than 100 family members who came, interviewed family members after they were reunified, and assisted with the overall logistics. A documentary of this event was filmed, and several students also attended a subsequent event for US-based family members (see https://newestamericans.com/when-we-meet-again). Students unanimously expressed being emotionally moved by the experience. Days after the event, one student reflected that seeing families reunified made her question “[w]ho separates a mother and a father from a young daughter?.... While I know this immigration system in our country is absolutely screwed up, this really gave me a better idea of what that really means and affirmed the idea that we have work to do together to change things.”

In the third course, “Democracy and Citizenship,” taught by Jyl Josephson, hands-on work with a community organization contributes to the course’s objectives to teach about local politics, democratic theory, and the tradition of broad-based community organizing. In addition to reading about local democracy, students take part in the partner organization’s campaigns and write reflective and analytical papers about this work. Examples of actions that students engage in are door knocking to organize tenants, carrying out a petition drive for affordable housing, conducting a survey of parents of school-aged children, and collecting data on illegal practices of local landlords. One intentional outcome for the course is that students learn skills directly from the community organization. Early in the class, students write an autobiography of their first engagement in a “public action,” however they might define it. Students then learn about relational meetings and practice with their classmates. Later in the semester, after working with the organization on its campaigns, students again practice the relational meetings. They read about small-group issue meetings and hear about them from organizational leaders. Students then hold their own issue meetings, using their experience as university students as the “issue” that they discuss. This is effective in showing students how these meetings might work in the practice of community organizing.

In the fourth course, “Public Policy Analysis,” taught by Mara Sidney, students serve as policy analysts for partner organizations. Course objectives include learning the components of the policy-analysis process, from problem definition to comparison of possible solutions. Students also learn the roles of different institutions and actors in the policy process, as well as the role and format of policy memos aimed to help decision makers. They write a series of policy memos individually and in groups. Working as consultants to one or more local organizations, students understand hands-on the overarching course goal: to learn about and to practice the work of a policy analyst. Class members conduct research defined by the local organizations that they need to pursue their goals. The professor uses the policy issue of immigration as a focus. For example, working with a law school clinic, students learned about the implementation of asylum law. With assistance from a staff attorney, they conducted research about El Salvador and Turkey for two of the clinic’s asylum cases. Working with an immigrant-advocacy organization, students learned about agenda setting and lobbying by preparing summaries of interviews they conducted with immigrants who are ineligible for a driver’s license; this information was subsequently used in materials for state legislators. Students met with the organization’s executive director to draft interview questions and then traveled to the group’s headquarters to meet and interview its members, working with student or member interpreters as needed.

ASSESSING STUDENT LEARNING AND ENGAGEMENT

We consider three dimensions of assessment: Does student work show achievement of learning objectives? Does the engagement orientation of the course shape students? How do community partners assess the value of their involvement? Student learning is assessed through the course assignments described previously. These assignments often combine traditional academic assignments with community-engagement experiences. Most of us use a version of written reaction papers, in which students describe, assess, and reflect on their engagement work as it relates to course learning objectives. In some cases, student written work is shared with the organization either directly or in summary form.

To assess how students think about the impact of the community-engaged courses on their own attitudes, we developed a set of seven questions that become part of the student evaluation surveys at semester’s end. The survey uses a five-point scale ranging from “agree” to “neutral” to “disagree” on the following statements:

1. (1) My experiences in this class have enabled me to learn to conduct research that might inform policy.

2. (2) My experiences in this class have shown me that I can play a role in solving complex political problems.

3. (3) I believe that I have a responsibility to use the knowledge that I have gained through this class.

4. (4) This class motivated me to be more involved in community-based initiatives.

5. (5) My experiences in this class helped me to realize that it is important for me to vote if I am eligible to do so.

6. (6) My experiences in this class have helped me realize that it is important for me to be politically involved.

7. (7) My experiences in this class have helped me realize that it is important for me to challenge misconceptions about people who are different from me.

During the two semesters for which we collected data, we saw overwhelming positive feedback. Across all courses, students in percentages ranging from 54% to 100% reported agreement with the seven statements.

One of the most powerful aspects of each course is that students meet and engage with community members, including the leaders and staff of the community organizations as well as the ordinary constituents of each organization. This works differently in each class, but students consistently report that these interactions had a powerful influence. In the community-organizing class, a presentation by an organizer who was formerly incarcerated had a powerful impact on students, as reflected in their final papers. Another example is the human rights class, in which students got to know families affected by the immigration system.

Our community partners see benefits in working with students, including that—in some cases—students have gone on to internships with an organization. Each of us continues to work with the organizations; ongoing communication about what works and what does not has been crucial to maintaining these partnerships. One organization continues to partner with both the public policy and the human rights classes. The organization involved in family reunification deemed the event as successful and benefited from being able to use university facilities for it. One benefit for the broad-based community organization is that students do basic legwork that contributes to current issue campaigns, whether a petition drive or collecting data on abusive landlords. Students also have helped with routine tasks such as data entry and making calls to remind members about upcoming events. In general, ensuring that student work is useful requires ongoing coordination between the instructor and the organization.

RATIONALE

There are at least five reasons to do this type of community-engagement work in political science. First, it is part of the mission of political science: APSA has increasingly viewed the teaching of civic engagement as a core mission of the discipline (McCartney, Bennion, and Simpson Reference McCartney, Bennion and Simpson2013). In our view, this teaching must go beyond engagement with political parties and elections—which are important—but there is much more to the study of politics. Our model shows our students the many ways that they might engage in the political process and the many different areas of expertise in the discipline that could impact public life.

Second, it is a good practice for universities as anchor institutions. As colleges and universities in all types of settings come to view themselves as an essential part of place-based community building, it is important for them to be ethical and responsible actors in their communities. Doing this through the core practices of educational institutions (i.e., curriculum and pedagogy) is a way to create more sustainable and responsible relationships.

Third, this model incorporates many best practices regarding undergraduate student success. The movement for and studies of service learning have shown that engaged learning can contribute to student success, particularly when the experiences are sustained over longer periods, when they help students build relationships with faculty and with peers, and when they help students build networks in their areas of study. Showing students practical applications of the discipline through work with community organizations helps them to imagine their own career and future success by building relationships with community leaders.

The fourth reason is to fulfill the public purposes of higher education. We teach at a public university that, like many universities, views serving the public good of our community as a core part of its mission. This form of engaged teaching and learning provides a way for the university to serve “a larger purpose” (Saltmarsh and Hartley Reference Saltmarsh and Hartley2011).

The fifth reason to implement this type of pedagogy is simple: it is fun! We enjoy this mode of teaching, and engagement with students and our communities has enriched the way that we approach pedagogy in other courses as well. In conversations with students, many note that they enjoy their engaged classes and find themselves reflecting on these experiences long after the course ends. Students learn from our community partners rather than only learning about them. They express that they also believe they are making a difference in their community.

These courses were developed before the global pandemic, and we will need to redesign our methods depending on what is possible and the effects of the pandemic on our partner organizations. For example, the organizational partner for the “Women, Gender, and the Middle East” course was forced to shut down as a result of COVID-19 (Allam Reference Allam2020). Some organizations are continuing their work remotely or in hybrid forms, and we will adjust our coursework with our respective community partnerships.

INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORTS

An important element in these courses is that the community organization comes to campus and leads some aspect of the teaching. A second crucial element is that students actually engage with the work by going to sites where the organization carries out its activities. Accommodating and coordinating student schedules with community-partner schedules and needs can be problematic. For some of us, shifting our course to a once-a-week, three-hour schedule has made this more workable for students and for community organizations. It offers more flexibility for planning course activities during the semester that might require more time than a traditional twice-a-week course would allow. In each course, we started by trying to plan too many events with the organization, making the partnership less useful on both sides. As we fine-tuned the courses on the second and third times that we offered them, we planned fewer events but ensured that those events focused on the organizations’ objectives and student learning goals.

One obstacle to this pedagogy is that these courses require investments of faculty time and funding above and beyond conventional teaching. Funds are required for community partners (e.g., honoraria and the use of a partner’s resources), students (e.g., travel to partner offices and other work sites), and administrative support to coordinate course-related events. Faculty also take on extra course-planning work to include the input and needs of community partners while simultaneously advancing student knowledge of political science. We were assisted in developing these courses through Chancellor Cantor’s internal seed grant program at Rutgers University–Newark, which provided some of these funds. We have found, however, that once the initial work of building these partnerships has been done, the ongoing costs per course are mainly for student travel and compensation for the labor of our community partners. We are working on building a small department-based fund to support these types of ongoing activities.

IMPLICATIONS FOR RETHINKING THE POLITICAL SCIENCE CURRICULUM

There is growing support in the discipline for community-engaged scholarship and instruction. We believe this model provides several advantages in terms of student learning as well as relationships with the community. The literature shows that students gain more from their civic-engagement experiences when they create ongoing relationships with community groups and when they have opportunities for evaluation and reflection. This model provides these opportunities as well as a more responsible relationship between universities and their communities.