Transgressive Partnerships: Community engagement in a South African university

Martin Hall

doi:10.5130/ijcre.v2i0.1327

Abstract

Conceptualizing community engagement as intertwined with teaching and long-established approaches to research requires a consideration of the epistemology of knowledge itself. What is accepted as legitimate knowledge? And what is the scope of the university’s role in recognizing and validating forms of knowledge and defining curriculum boundaries, understood as the ways in which the university disseminates knowledge that it has validated as authentic? A working understanding of community engagement would include service learning, problem-based teaching and research that addresses specific wants and needs, the pursuit of alternative forms of knowledge and challenges to established authorities that control and direct research systems and the allocation of qualifications. This article considers why this kind of engagement has remained on the margins of the traditional university in South Africa – via a case study of community engagement at the University of Cape Town – despite a decade of clear public policy and asks: why does there appear to be resistance to its inclusion despite a number of incentives that include moral affirmation for contributing to social and economic justice.

Highlights

Community engagement, along with teaching and research, is one of the three principles of the South African Higher Education system
Lazarus (2007) noted that, while by 1999 most institutions had included the concept of community engagement in their mission statements, only one had operationalized it in the three-year rolling plan required by the Department of Education
Institutions are generally reclaiming the contested concept and labelling service-learning with their own terminology or saying that they will do service-learning in their own way’. These observations are supported by the outcomes of institutional audits completed by the Higher Education Quality Committee between 2004 and 2008, which show that universities are at widely varying stages in conceptualizing community engagement practice (Hall 2009a)

Summary

Introduction

Along with teaching and research, is one of the three principles of the South African Higher Education system. Given UCT’s general position that community engagement is best expressed through the practice and scholarship of teaching and research, the strategy that has been developed for taking engagement forward has been to identify and describe cases of good practice through an annual Social Responsiveness Report.

Results

Conclusion