New Perspectives of Reciprocity in Community-Engaged Learning: A Case Study of a First-Year Post-Secondary Knowledge Exchange Project in an Over-researched Urban Community

Abstract

This paper describes key discoveries and lessons learned about the practice of reciprocity in community-engaged learning (CEL). We draw from an example of a multi-partner, multi-year, CEL project that addresses a community-identified priority to access jargon-free research findings about their community. Our project benefits community members in an over-researched, equity-deserving, inner-city neighborhood without requiring the direct presence of large numbers of university students in the community. In this collaboration, first-year undergraduate students in introductory academic writing courses at the [Canadian post-secondary institution] create publicly accessible infographic summaries of research articles arising from studies that have taken place in [an over-researched inner-city] neighborhood. First-year students, in their position as novice scholars, bring helpful perspectives to the task of knowledge translation. As apprentice researchers not yet immersed in disciplinary languages, they are cognizant that the specialized types of discourse used in research writing are often not accessible to readers outside the academy. Pairing students with community-engaged researchers leads to multi-directional benefits: students develop their knowledge translation skills in an authentic research writing situation; researchers benefit from publication of supervised, student-authored infographics of their scholarship; and over-researched communities gain access to relevant research findings. A community-embedded institutional unit is crucial to the project’s success, providing the resources, relationships, and boundary-spanning expertise required to ensure this project is successful from the perspective of the community and the university.