Drawing on the Local: Collaboration and Community Expertise

Abstract

A short history of community/university collaboration is buried in the phrase “service learning.” In the grammar of its implied narrative, the agent, actor, and source of expertise—the server—is the academy not the community. And the act of learning is more often a personal reflection by students on a broadening experience than it is a public act of shared knowledge making. But what if we attempted to turn the tables: to transform service into a collaboration with communities and learning into a problem-driven practice of mutual inquiry and literate action? And what would it take to do so? Our reflection on this issue comes in part from watching these questions come to life in an unusual forum—a community problem-solving dialogue with 180 stakeholders, including leaders in the urban community, leaders and staff from city youth organizations, and university faculty and students. This event, Drawing on the Local: Carnegie Mellon and Community Expertise, framed the problem in this way: How do we first acknowledge, then draw on and at the same time nurture and give voice to community expertise (where “we” refers to universities, faculty and students engaged in service learning)? 1 The structure of a community problem-solving dialogue invites participants to explore open questions by mounting an active search for rival hypotheses grounded in multiple and alternative ways of knowing. Consider, as this group did, some of the more general answers posed by the traditions of philanthropy, the settlement house movement, and progressive education.