Abstract
This article focuses on the challenges confronted by contemporary universities when they undertake ‘community engagement’ activities through the lens of an active citizenship workshop we have designed and implemented. We begin by concentrating on the very concept of ‘engagement’, unpicking its ambiguities and returning its complexities to where they belong – in social experience. As both practitioners and researchers involved in many years of ‘engagement’, we reflect on the aim, purpose and outcomes of such activities. Drawing on the theoretical traditions of educator Paulo Freire and philosopher Martin Heidegger, we apply our engagement activities and citizenship workshops to the aspiration of transformational change: both for those who participate in the activities and for us, as educators. We thus use ‘engagement’ as a guide to making better and more strategic interventions in the three sets of relationships inextricably involved in ‘active citizenship’ projects: ‘engaged research’ with academic and other partners; our own ‘engagement’ with the young people we work with; and finally, their ‘engagement’ as citizens with the rest of society.
 
 Keywords: Citizenship, engagement, active citizens, threshold, transformative change
Highlights
Over the last decade, we both have been involved in various aspects of ‘university community engagement’
A general understanding of engagement in the discourse of universities emerges as a ‘scholarly endeavour that cross-cuts teaching, research and service ... generating, transmitting, applying, and preserving knowledge for the direct benefit of external audiences ... that are consistent with university and unit missions’ (Michigan State University 1993, quoted in Doberneck, Glass & Schweitzer 2010, p. 9)
Going through each of the websites, two things become clear: first, that Australian universities consider community engagement as a way of responding to critics who have long accused them of being detached, undertaking esoteric research, being ‘ivory towers’ or adopting ‘leftist, ivory-tower thinking’; and second, that each institution touches on this concept of ‘mutual benefit’ in their interactions with the community
Summary
As in social activism, words can never be ignored, or they take a savage revenge. Participation is presented as distant, only available when certain legal and cultural markers are reached Such failings led us to design an alternative approach to our university-based civics engagement and education that presents the following principles: 1 Civic education should promote action-based learning to encourage a sense of agency and provide insights into the complex nature of both formal and informal political processes. This means that both the knowledge and skills of citizenship are taught along with promoting a ‘culture of citizenship’.
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