Building Communities of Generative Interdependence

Abstract

Since the late 1990’s, colleges and universities have implemented mutually beneficial community engagement as a core dimension of educating students to develop professional skills grounded in working with communities to address pressing issues of social inequality and environmental regeneration. Such community-based learning programs are being expanded to counter rising authoritarianism, white nationalism, and violent extremism and to support generative, interdependent forms of democracy. In this essay, I explore how such programs could benefit by learning from the ethical insights of Indigenous traditions. I give examples of such work in theological education, and in middle school through higher education.