Relational versus Transactional Community Engagement: An Experience of the Benefits and Costs

Learning through community engagement (CE) is widely considered a high-impact practice with the potential benefit of accelerated cognitive development, deeper learning and moral reasoning compared to traditional classroom approaches. However, not all efforts of community engagement are alike. We see insufficient distinction in articles on community-engaged learning to enable faculty to design an experience of CE learning that meets their learning aims and are experienced as successful by all participants. To serve faculty members’ ability to establish successful CE experiences, we propose a framework to differentiate the forms of CE and their associated features. This paper makes clear the differences in forms of CE using two primary axes, the compatibility with learning objectives and the scope of shared societal commitments between the collaborators. Within this framework, there are four types or forms of CE, each with different consequences for the students, the faculty, and the community partners. Through narratives of project partners, faculty and students, we contrast the experiences of two types of CE projects and their impact on participants. From this two-year case study involving 88 freshmen, 16 faculty members and 15 community partners, we conclude that successful CE learning requires that all participants have an awareness of the type of CE project that is intended. This paper implies that appropriate choices in the initial phases of creating the community-engaged collaboration are critical to a result that satisfies the participants. Background and motivation Community-engaged learning is often recognized as a high-impact practice in higher education. Advocates note that learning in the context of producing something of social relevance gives meaning to what are normally abstracted concepts in science and engineering . Additionally, authentic community-based projects, unlike the practice of reproducing known technical solutions to closed-form “problems,” contain all the complexity that one encounters in “real life.” As such, learning through community-based projects are opportunities for learners to develop critical professional competencies 4 such as “understanding of the human condition, cultures and society; an ability to work effectively with public policy, business and government;...an ability to work in synergy with persons from other disciplines , including both other science and engineering fields and non-science/engineering fields.” (p. 2). However, while community-engaged (CE) learning contains the promise for developmental benefits for engineering students, the actual benefits (and costs) of this type of pedagogical format is often omitted in published narratives of “successful” initiatives. Additionally, what constitutes “success” also varies. Indeed, authors often recognize that there are differences between the broad spectrum of community-engaged learning, such as volunteerism, service learning, and community-based project learning, but “service learning” or “community engaged learning” is often cited as an undifferentiated pedagogy with presumed general characteristics of working with non-university partners in the learning process. In this paper, we present an organizing scheme that differentiates the type of community-engaged learning based on two dimensions: the degree of overlap with the learning objectives for the students and the scope of P ge 24037.2 the shared societal commitments between the participating organizations. This framework allows those who would seek to participate in community-engaged learning to see into the potential benefits and costs of the type of CE that they are envisioning. The framework also supports that possibility of “success,” where we define success as meeting the expectations of the participants. We begin with describing the theoretical basis of the organizing scheme and the methodology by which it was derived. Theoretical foundations and methodology We begin by recognizing that a learning collaboration across students, faculty and community partners, is a dynamic human system. In the general case of CE, humans are designing together. It is widely recognized by organizational behavioral researchers that the visible actions (“events”) of a dynamic human system are rooted in the underlying and hidden mental models that the participants hold. Peter Senge popularized these organizational dynamics in his books on systems thinking, based on anthropologist, Edward T. Hall’s metaphor of an iceberg, Figure 1, where the tip represents the visible actions (the visible 10%), which proceed from the 90% of the iceberg structure that is hidden beneath the surface: patterns of behavior which have created the events; beneath the patterns lie organizational structures that cause the behavioral patterns; beneath the organizational structures lie beliefs and values out of which the structures have formed; beneath the beliefs and values lie mental models and paradigms. Figure 1. Iceberg model of the dynamics in a human system, adapted from Edward T. Hall. Because these mental models that lie at the foundation of the iceberg are second nature to those who hold them, they function in “the background” and are literally invisible to the participants. In the model of the iceberg, they are deeply hidden beneath the surface. The decisions and actions of the participants, however, are correlated to these invisibly-held schemas. In the design arena, this is known as “Conway’s Law,”, where the structural dynamics of the design team (e.g., hierarchical, egalitarian, etc.) get unconsciously embedded in the design. Events Patterns of behavior Organizational structures