Community Engagement Project Research Articles

The use of English to offer learner support and enhance perceptual skills development in South African township schools

Research has identified the underdevelopment of perceptual skills as a cause of lifelong learning struggles and the restriction of developmental progress in learners. The literature also indicates that early intervention is one strategy that effectively mitigates the long-term effects thereof through learner support. However, the inadequacy of in-service teachers’ skills to assess perceptual skills development, coupled with the implementation of the teaching and learning language policy, are issues for concern, particularly in South African schools.This article reports on a module-aligned community engagement project conducted with 87 pre-service teachers to assess the perceptual skills development of Foundation Phase learners as part of their work-integrated learning (WIL). The two selected schools used English as their language of teaching and learning. Two lecturers and eight Grade 2 and Grade 3 in-service teachers from Pretoria East schools participated in the project. Play-based pedagogy was used as a resource for assessment as a qualitative approach, thus inspiring in-service teachers’ and learners’ creativity and enjoyment at the schools.Kolb’s cyclic theoretical framework consisting of four cycles underpinned the project. Firstly, the project confirmed literature findings of teachers’ lack of skills to assess perceptual skills development using English in Foundation Phase learners. Secondly, the use of non-mother tongue language as a medium of instruction in early learning centres affected learners’ knowledge acquisition. Thirdly, the use of the foreign medium of instruction affected the learners’ speaking and listening skills, thus impacting language and cognitive development essential for learning.

Intergenerational Connections: An online community engagement project

Young adults hold many stereotypes about aging and older adults that formal education cannot always address. Interaction and community engagement projects with older adults can challenge and dispel stereotypes young adults hold about older adults. This semester-long project is designed for undergraduate students in interpersonal and relational communication classes to engage in intergenerational dialogue to ease social isolation, interact across generations, and dispel ageist stereotypes through community engagement. Courses Communication across the Life Course, Family Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Intergenerational Communication, Relational Communication. Objectives The purpose of this semester-long project is for participants: (1) to engage in meaningful conversation and dialogue with older adults; (2) to build relationships with community partners; (3) to learn skills in interacting across generations; and (4) to reflect on their attitudes and attitude change toward older adults.

Bethlehem Steel Legacy Project, Baltimore Museum of Industry, Baltimore, Maryland, in partnership with Tradepoint Atlantic

Review| May 01 2022 Bethlehem Steel Legacy Project, Baltimore Museum of Industry, Baltimore, Maryland, in partnership with Tradepoint Atlantic Bethlehem Steel Legacy Project, Baltimore Museum of Industry, Baltimore, Maryland, in partnership with Tradepoint Atlantic. Deborah R. Weiner and Joseph Abel, Curators; Claire Mullins, Director of Marketing; Beth Maloney, Director of Interpretation; Alexis Ojeda-Brown, Marketing Coordinator; Jessica Celmer, Education Manager; Mike Kuethe, Education Coordinator, Auni Gelles; Community Programs Manager, and Jane Woltereck, Director of Collections and Archives. Opened April 2019, ongoing. https://www.thebmi.org/stories/bethlehem-steel-legacy-project/. Morgan Miller-Scarborough Morgan Miller-Scarborough Independent Historian Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2022) 44 (2): 122–126. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.2.122 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Morgan Miller-Scarborough; Bethlehem Steel Legacy Project, Baltimore Museum of Industry, Baltimore, Maryland, in partnership with Tradepoint Atlantic. The Public Historian 1 May 2022; 44 (2): 122–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.2.122 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search The Bethlehem Steel Legacy Project is a multifaceted endeavor to preserve the history of the Baltimore industrial giant Bethlehem Steel and the people who worked there. Bethlehem Steel’s history spans from its beginnings at Sparrows Point in 1887 to the company’s 2002 bankruptcy and subsequent closure in 2012. In 2019, the Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI) partnered with Tradepoint Atlantic, the new owners and managers of the former Bethlehem Steel site, to embark on this multi-year community engagement project. This resulted in the creation of the exhibitions Fire & Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Bethlehem Steel, Shuttered: Images from the Fall of Bethlehem Steel, and Women of Steel. It would also go on to include the creation of a legacy brick garden, the award-winning podcast Sparrows Point: An American Steel Story, the From Point to Point blog, several published articles, the creation of Mill Stories:... You do not currently have access to this content.

Walking to Build a Critical Community-Engaged Project: Collaborative Observations of Neighborhood Change in Long Beach, California

Academic and community research partnerships have gained traction as a potential bridge between the university and local area to address pressing social issues. A key question for developing justice-oriented research is how to integrate best practices for creating genuine, authentic research partnerships. In this paper, we discuss the process of building a critical community-engaged project that examines how urban redevelopment changes neighborhoods within immigrant and/or communities of color. Focusing on Long Beach, California, in this article, we detail the development of a mixed-methods study that involves undergraduate students and community members as co-collaborators. We discuss the use and outcomes of co-walking as method, emphasizing observational findings, as well as the process of building team collaboration. We find that neighborhoods in Long Beach are changing rapidly in terms of the use of greening, increased technology integration within neighborhoods, and modern aesthetics, revealing that new residents will likely be younger and single residents with disposable income and no children. From this process, we identified a more critical question for the research project: “Development for whom?”. We argue that co-walking as method is an observational and relational process that assists with the foundational steps of building a critical community-engaged research project.

From OXALID to GlobaLID: Introducing a modern and FAIR lead isotope database with an interactive application

AbstractLead isotope provenance studies of archaeological artefacts rely crucially on the availability of reference data from raw material sources. The OXALID database, a collection of Excel sheets with Pb isotope data of ores and artefacts, is still the most cited data source in archaeometry. However, OXALID has not been updated for several years and contains almost exclusively data from Europe, particularly from the Mediterranean area. Digitalisation and open science philosophy currently revolutionise the use of machine‐generated data by developing digital data infrastructures. A modernised Pb isotope reference database, which is tailored for, but not limited to archaeometric research, is hence overdue. Here, we introduce GlobaLID, a FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) and extendable database and a web application with interactive and statistical tools for user‐friendly data handling up to publication quality. GlobaLID aims to be a collection point for worldwide Pb isotope data. It is designed as research infrastructure for Pb isotope studies in (for example) archaeometry, ore deposit and environmental geochemistry. As a community engagement project, GlobaLID invites scientists around the world to become active contributors to enable GlobaLID’s rapid growth. We released GlobaLID as a pilot study to showcase the infrastructure we build and provide a starting point for community discussion.

Service-Learning in the Ecuadorian Andes through Spanish, English and Kichwa Voicing

Abstract Community engagement projects create an avenue for university students and faculty to interact with local communities. These endeavors place together groups with different worldviews, cultures, and languages. Service-Learning (sl) has acquired novelty in academic circles; however, there has been limited research analyzing what happens with intercultural communication. This article attempts to fill this gap by asking how intercultural communication is shaped through sl. Research was conducted on a community engagement project in the Andean paramo of Chugchilán, Ecuador involving faculty, students, and members of the indigenous community. For the analysis, a blended design of transcendental phenomenology and sl methodology was used to analyze how participants perceive and make sense of their experience. From a linguistic perspective, we used both bilingualism and diglossia to analyze intercultural communication during the sl experience. The findings show that sl is a valid methodology that can increase intercultural communication while developing cultural competency between participants of the project. Finally, the study considers the revitalization of indigenous languages to be a fundamental step for a global intercultural world.

Investigating critical community engaged pedagogies for transformative environmental justice education

Effective environmental justice education poses unique challenges to both educators and students. For students, this pursuit is cognitively challenging at best and emotionally paralyzing at worst. It requires deconstruction of culturally produced narratives that uphold privilege, conceal complicity, and promote individual-level response to systemic problems. In this paper, we explore critical approaches to pedagogy, place, and community engaged learning, as well as their specific resonance with the challenges inherent in environmental justice education. We then thematically analyze student responses to two critically oriented community-engaged learning projects. Student experiences proved transformative as students came to see the structural elements that maintain environmental racism more clearly, demonstrated systems thinking, expressed feelings of agency, and articulated their own positionalities in thoughtful and constructive ways. From these data, we offer critical community-engaged pedagogy as transformative practice for environmental justice education.

10 - Strategies and Outcomes of Involving University Students in Community Engagement: An Adaptive Leadership Perspective

The purpose of this article is to compare how students and community members learned and applied their knowledge in four small-scale univer- sity–community engagement projects during 2013. It draws on the concept of adaptive leadership as an approach and analytical tool in a recently com- pleted community engagement and service learning action research partner- ship between the University of the Free State (UFS) Qwa Qwa campus and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Pietermaritzburg campus. The project was funded by the National Research Foundation, with additional support from the UKZN Teaching and Learning Fund and UFS Faculty of Education research funds. A total of twelve case studies involved sixty-five students, nine NGOs and four schools. In each case, students worked in teams in response to community requests for assistance. Projects included Saturday curriculum activities for schools, workshops for parents, assisting with film making or archiving, assisting with monitoring and evaluation of rural reading clubs, producing small organic gardens and assisting with a childcare development project. Each case study involved end of project interviews with students and community contacts and some interim ob- servations during the project implementation phase. This article compares four of the case study findings between the two institutions. It outlines how the concept of community engagement has evolved and briefly reviews the literature on community engagement, particularly in the South African context. It then introduces the theoretical framework and methodology. The findings suggested that the adaptive leadership approach contributed to stimulating shared ownership of learning.

Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace, Sites of Justice: Transforming the Relational Landscape of Yogyakarta

The collaborative “Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace” project seeks to transform the relational landscape of Yogyakarta by enabling new intergenerational conversations about the 1965 politicide in Indonesia and further injustices with other marginalized communities. This community-engaged project developed walking tours of (largely unacknowledged) sites of historic violence: a colonial fort turned national museum, a derelict office building, a refurbished bank. Through these tours, sites of past suffering are activated by unheard survivor testimonies, making visible historical injustice and its contemporary and enduring significance. Unsettling the dominant spatial arrangement of Yogyakarta, the tours rewrite the city as a space where injustice and persecution are experienced. Crucially, the tour is also a relational encounter, facilitating intergenerational conversations that challenge social and political exclusionary norms. It, thereby, enables a form of relational justice, which requires active involvement from fellow citizens, not solely redress from the state.

Caring Spaces: Individual and Social Wellbeing in Museum Community Engagement Experiences

ABSTRACT This paper explores the narratives of participants in museum community engagement projects in Scotland. Emphasis is placed on how taking part in museum community engagement projects can have a positive impact on the participants’ wellbeing. This qualitative study employed a dialogical research strategy, which involved careful and mindful choreography of the context and space within which interactions between researcher and participants emerged. Semi-structured walking interviews with five participants were conducted in the summer of 2019 at two museums in Glasgow: Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and The Lighthouse. All participants had taken part in at least one museum community engagement project in Glasgow. Participants’ narratives reveal the positive impacts that “caring spaces” engendered through museum community engagement work have on overall feelings of wellbeing, achieved through deep processes of critical reflection, which resulted in enhanced self-esteem and confidence, and a heightened awareness of participants’ situated ontology in the context of broader issues of social inequality and identities. Museum community engagement projects, when practiced and experienced as “spaces of care,” have a critical role in enhancing individual and social wellbeing amongst participants themselves, particularly in terms of identifying long-term educational and self-worth legacies.

Collaborative Media Writing: The Making of an Affective Practice

Language in practice-based research is often considered as an insufficient medium to explore and share the complexity of human experience. As a result, the potential of writing as a practice-based method, especially when related to non-fiction genres, has not been widely explored. In this article, I take a different stance. Based on the analysis of the process of writing media content in collaboration with 59 internal migrant women and a local communication NGO and community media outlet in Ecuador, I argue that language is not only cognitive, but also mediates affect and is itself affective. Paying closer attention to this intricate relationship between affect and language can turn writing into an embodied and affective practice-based method. When done collectively, this method can be leveraged by community-engaged projects to open an avenue for communities’ self-representation and meaningful participation in all the stages of the research process. As such, collaborative media writing as a practice-based method can strengthen the efforts and increase the impact of community-engaged initiatives aiming to amplify the voices of underrepresented communities and diverse groups.

The Texas Community-Engagement Research Alliance Against COVID-19 in Disproportionately Affected Communities (TX CEAL) Consortium.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic requires urgent implementation of effective community-engaged strategies to enhance education, awareness, and inclusion of underserved communities in prevention, mitigation, and treatment efforts. The Texas Community-Engagement Alliance Consortium was established with support from the United States' National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct community-engaged projects in selected geographic locations with a high proportion of medically underserved minority groups with a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 disease and hospitalizations. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of the Consortium. The Consortium organized seven projects with focused activities to address COVID-19 clinical and vaccine trials in highly affected counties, as well as critical statewide efforts. Five Texas counties (Bexar, Dallas, Harris, Hidalgo, and Tarrant) were chosen by NIH because of high concentrations of underserved minority communities, existing community infrastructure, ongoing efforts against COVID-19, and disproportionate burden of COVID-19. Policies and practices can contribute to disparities in COVID-19 risk, morbidity, and mortality. Community engagement is an essential element for effective public health strategies in medically underserved minority areas. Working with partners, the Consortium will use community engagement strategies to address COVID-19 disparities.

Website for Women Who Abuse Opioids: What Are the Essential Components?

Studies indicate opioid prevention programs should be designed differently for men and women. Since a website is an effective means of providing behavioral interventions, tailoring one to meet the specific needs of women is a logical step in assisting them to overcome opioid misuse. We identified essential components for inclusion in a website following a community engagement project.

Interview with Gordon Henry

Gordon Henry is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota and professor of American Indian Literature, Creative Writing and the Creative Process in Integrative Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. He is the author and co-editor of many books and collections, including The Failure of Certain Charms: And Other Disparate Signs of Life (2008). His novel The Light People (1994) won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Following some of the stages in his career and personal story, which he kindly accepted to share with me, this interview highlights some of the crucial key issues concerning Native American people and cultures, questions that still need a wider transnational space both inside and outside academia. Discrimination based on language has influenced the history of Native American people for centuries, starting from the forced education of the young in the 19th century and continuing in the 20th, in the context of Hollywood film productions. Linguicism, language-based racism (Phillipson 1992), is a topic that needs to be addressed in the light of the recent flourishing of extremist thought worldwide, which carries the abused rhetoric of ‘us vs them’ (van Dijk 2015) and, at the same time, spurs protest movements. This reflection goes hand-in-hand with the controversial topic of the appropriation of Native American cultural practices by old and new wannabes (non-people who are so much fascinated by Native American cultures that end up imitating them by, for example, choosing a Native name or emphasising certain aspects of the culture which they admire, often basing their beliefs on stereotypes), whilst people living in the Reservations are still neglected and the Native American and Alaskan Native population register extremely high suicide, homicide and alcoholism rates compared to the U.S. all races population (especially women). But, the efforts and educational programs aimed to preserve languages and cultures (like the Lakota Language Consortium or the Rosetta Stone Endangered Language programs), the vibrancy of the artistic scene in the visual, literary and music fields, the various forms of activism and community engagement projects (such as, for example, the MMIWG movement – Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls – the water protectors protest at Standing Rock, known as #NoDapl, or the prayerful journey called Run4Salmon in California) are also to be acknowledged as milestones in the process of regaining self-sovereignty by Native people. Against the background of these considerations, I am pleased and honoured to share thoughts, feelings and emotions with Gordon Henry.

Inclusive Storytelling: Community Reaction to Immigrant Youth Experiences in Atlanta

From 2016 to 2018, an interdisciplinary community-engaged project incorporating community-based participatory research methodology, explored how the role of storytelling is integral for the transference of knowledge, history, and sense of purpose. The outcomes help us understand how the views of receiving communities change over time with respect to migrants through their own stories, thus impacting the work of immigrant-serving organizations, such as Georgia-based Welcoming America, a nonprofit committed to implementing a variety of initiatives to cultivate welcoming cities and welcoming regions. Our project gauges the impact of the 2018 publication, Green Card Youth Voices: Immigration Stories from an Atlanta High School.

Localisation of SDGs in Higher Education: Unisa’s whole institution, all goals and entire sector approach

This paper documents the processes leading to the hosting of the University of South Africa (Unisa) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Localisation Indaba1 in November 2019. Of interest is how the programming, which started as a purely inreach community engagement project, ultimately embraced the whole institution, all SDGs and the South African higher education sector. Data was generated via two platforms, namely participatory action research and a survey evaluating the Indaba. The following cycles emerged: the development of a Unisa Management Policy Brief calling for the SDGs Localisation Indaba in 2017 (Cycle 1); the development of an SDGs for Society Research Stream as part of the Unisa Annual Interdisciplinary Academy and Summer School in 2018 (Cycle 2); and the SDGs Localisation Indaba in 2019 (Cycle 3). The Indaba led to the SDGs Localisation Declaration which resulted in the formation of the SDGs Liaison Committee. Several agreements were made to expand SDGs localisation at Unisa. Finally, the Indaba attracted many participants from outside Unisa, especially from other institutions of higher education. However, it took almost three years to realise the SDGs localisation dream at Unisa. The key recommendation is thus that those championing SDGs localisation should be prepared to continue moving forward despite delays due to management changes and processes.Keywords: Higher education, sustainable development goals, domestication, localisation of the SDGs Introduction

Managing project sustainability in the extractive industries: Towards a reciprocity framework for community engagement

Merely a peripheral discussion in project management up until recent years, sustainability has become a central issue in both academia and practice. Despite growing interest and research on sustainable project management, we still know little about how projects in the extractive industries, known for their significant local impact, can be used to foster inclusive sustainable development for local communities. Arguing that extractive industries have inadequately addressed the increasing demands of stakeholders for contributing to sustainable development, we build on the philosophical theory of capabilities and the principle of reciprocity to propose a new framework for community engagement and sustainable project management. The reciprocity framework for community engagement is based on the premise that a sustainable extractive project requires its promoter to nurture constructive and mutually beneficial relationships with local communities. By integrating moral considerations into our framework, we contribute to the paradigm shift required to embed projects in sustainable development by better balancing stakeholders' needs at the economic, environmental, and social levels.

Pedagogical Approaches to Human Trafficking Through Applied Research Laboratories

Human trafficking is a phenomenon that lends itself to hands-on pedagogical practices and undergraduate research that, in turn, can create localised knowledge with anti-trafficking stakeholders. Research labs focused on human trafficking are one-on-one or small group applied research settings that build a bridge between the university and anti-trafficking stakeholders over multiple semesters. In this paper, I argue that one way of involving students in the anti-trafficking field is through research laboratories, like the Human Trafficking Research Lab (HTRL) at Millikin University. I explore how the HTRL develops pedagogical practices to enable students to work collaboratively with a faculty member and carry out the research process from idea to final draft. Multiple learning outcomes were found, including mentorship, a larger understanding of political science as a discipline, data compilation, presentation and critical thinking skills, and job or graduate school placement. I determined that the HTRL at Millikin offers students hands-on experience with community-engaged projects, including grappling with the ethical implications of knowledge production in social justice advocacy.

Community engagement in engineering education: A systematic literature review

AbstractBackgroundCommunity engagement has recently become a focus in engineering education. However, systematic reviews that catalog best practices and identify research patterns and gaps remain scarce.PurposeThe purpose of this systematic review is to generate insights and findings by reviewing studies focused on community engagement programs in engineering education from 1980 to 2019. This review offers new findings for practitioners and researchers with a menu of proven ideas and provides directions for community engagement practice and future research.MethodArticles were obtained via keyword searches for “Engineering” AND “service‐learning,” “community engagement” OR “civic engagement” using available databases. Search constraints included the year of publication, peer‐reviewed articles, and articles written in English. The content analysis method was used to categorize, summarize, and evaluate selected articles. A total of 120 articles have been reviewed.ResultsThis systematic review identified recent trends in engineering community engagement programs. Undergraduate students were the main program participants. The vast majority of projects took place in the United States. Overall, community engagement projects increasingly recruited multidisciplinary students. Factors such as logistics constraints, cultural barriers, and disconnect issues were reported as major challenges to the success of engineering community engagement programs. Qualitative research dominated community engagement studies. The community partner remains a less‐studied subject. Research focusing on engineering graduate students in community engagement was rare.ConclusionsTo obtain a holistic understanding of community engagement in engineering education, additional research should focus on community partners' perspectives, graduate students in engineering, diversity, and holistic assessments.

Accelerating the implementation of SDG 4: stakeholder perceptions towards initiation of sustainable community engagement projects by higher education institutions

Purpose This paper aims to present the results of an investigation on how a reciprocal relationship between the University of Mpumalanga (UMP) in South Africa and the surrounding communities can be used to accelerate the implementation of sustainable development goal 4 (SDG 4). The aim of this paper is to establish stakeholder perceptions on the role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the development and implementation of sustainable community engagement (CE) projects geared towards the acceleration of SDG 4. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative methodology was adopted. This consisted of a presentation at UMP, an educational tour of the campus and discussion sessions with 3 education officials and 19 high schools representatives from Ehlanzeni District Municipality, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Content and narrative analysis were used to analyse the data obtained during the discussions. Findings The key findings indicate that a reciprocal relationship between HEIs and their surrounding communities can be used to accelerate the implementation of SDG 4 by positioning HEIs to take the lead with initiatives and implementation of CE projects. Research limitations/implications For HEIs to be in a better position to take a leading role in CE, they must guide without imposing, else it may lead to stakeholders losing interest. Practical implications The importance of a mutual working relationship between HEIs and communities becomes paramount, as it may lead to the realisation and acceleration of SDG 4 through CE. It is suggested that HEIs prioritise CE and also involve communities from the conceptualisation of any project. Originality/value The paper raises awareness and demonstrates the importance and possibilities of using CE towards the acceleration of the implementation of SDG 4 by HEIs.