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Who can Relate?

Rather curiously, Bringle, Clayton, and Price entitled their article, “Partnerships in Service Learning and Civic Engagement,” when one of their key arguments is to problematize the use of the word “partnership” to characterize all campus-community relationships. A partnership, they note, exhibits certain qualities like reciprocity, that every relationship does not enjoy. Zooming out in this way allows a broader frame of analysis to assess the qualities and features of specific relationships.

At the same time, they choose to zoom in to the words “campus” and “community” commonly used to describe the type of relationships formed between those associated with a university/college and those associated with the broader community. As Taofeeq notes, this gives scholars a new unit of analysis in the study of the relationships between students, faculty, administrators, community organizations, and residents in the context of service learning or civic engagement. I can easily see the usefulness of the author’s formulation of this unit of analysis, as it allows us to greater clarity regarding how these dyads relate to one another.

However, the article left me with a few lingering thoughts and questions.

1. Are these relationships truly dyadic? What about situations in which one relationship is filtered through or complicated by another? A student might only relate to the administrators of a university through faculty, or a resident might only relate to a faculty member through their students. These aren’t clear, straight lines connecting one to another, but a series or network of connections. And each relationship is sure to influence the other.

2. The categories that make up the SOFAR acronym are not mutually exclusive - students, faculty, and administrators are all also residents of the community, many students are active in community organizations, etc. Does the SOFAR model allow us to account for overlapping roles, and the ways in which multiple identities influence relationships?

3. While I can see how the SOFAR model could be useful to scholars researching and writing about service learning and civic engagement in attempts (like this one) to identify empirical evidence about effective relationship-building between individuals and groups, does this model have any real-world applicability outside of the academy? Would a community organization or resident find this model useful in analyzing the ways that they relate to various university actors?

Finally, while only marginally addressed in this article, thinking about the relationships that take shape in service learning and civic engagement got me thinking about a persistent concern of mine: that “campus-community partnerships,” those with closeness, equity, and integrity, are often relationships between two individuals - one student or faculty member and one representative/staff member of a community organization. Between those two individuals, a relationship is built and a partnership is formed. Many successful projects can be borne of such relationships and they often enjoy longevity. 

But, can we really call this a campus-community partnership, just because one individual is associated with a university and one individual is associated with a community organization? How does the university really come into play in that relationship, and how can the relationship be sustained beyond those two individuals? I’ve seen situations where the faculty member applies for internal grants in order to work with community partners, but the university is not really entering into the relationship. I’ve also seen many cases in which the individual staff member at the community organization has moved on to a new position, leading to a breakdown of the partnership; or conversely, where the student graduates or the faculty member moves on, and likewise, the relationship dissolves. As a graduate student who might not be in New Orleans after my graduation date, I want  to ensure the sustainability of my project, and I think the university must take some accountability in that. Thinking purely in terms of dyadic relationships doesn’t seem to be a great way to transform individual relationships to campus-community partnerships.

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John Saltmarsh: Not a Great Researcher

A little bird told me that I might have the opportunity to meet John Saltmarsh at the Imagining America conference at UC Davis, so I figured I should do my due diligence and read his book chapter on the plane to California. As I read "Changing Pedagogies," I found myself nodding along in recognition of the need to foster active and collaborative forms of teaching and learning in universities, and tie them to community-based public problem-solving. But, I didn't really feel as though I was hearing anything new...

Much of what Saltmarsh proposed in "Changing Pedagogies" reminded me of the ways in which the Zapatista education system functions within the community, honoring many ways of knowing and pushing against expert-centered frameworks of teaching and learning. I thought of Gustavo Esteva, a "deprofessionalized academic" in Oaxaca who leads the Universidad de la Tierra - a place I have visited and been inspired by, a "network of learning, study, reflection, and action," founded in response to the "recognition, particularly among indigenous peoples, that the dominant state-supported educational structure prevented their children from learning what they needed to know to continue living in their communities and contributing to the common good of their communities and the sustainability of their territories." In this free and community-led university, anyone can teach a course and all participants are both teachers and learners. The goal is not to produce knowledge, but to "be deeply immersed in processes of social and political change, centrally dedicated to the exploration of options and innovations for the creation of political, technological, and cultural alternatives."

It's not that I couldn't see the validity and importance of Saltmarsh's ideas about engaged pedagogies as subversive strategies that force us to reexamine epistemological assumptions which ideally would lead to institutional change. It just seemed to me that Saltmarsh was hitting on many of the pedagogical principles and practices that have already been developed and established in institutions of learning outside of the U.S., models of education that have fundamentally restructured the university as institution and successfully connected classroom learning and community change. To me, Saltmarsh's idea of democratizing teaching and learning through recognizing and valuing students' and practitioners' knowledge, de-centering teachers, and working with community partners seemed obvious, or perhaps, dated.

Which is when I realized just how far behind universities in the United States are when it comes to implementing, encouraging, and supporting effective models for community-engaged teaching and learning. This lag was further felt as I listened to well-meaning professors of Nursing, Spanish, and Art, among other disciplines, present their work at a conference focused on civic engagement while clearly lacking any understanding of or familiarity with ideas such as those proposed by Saltmarsh. Saltmarsh writes about changing pedagogies as they are practiced in institutes of higher education in the United States, and in the 17 years since his book chapter was first published, those changes have not been realized. It is a disparaging state of affairs that necessitates the writing of an article like "Changed Pedagogies," as Saltmarsh notes at the beginning of this piece. Saltmarsh writes with the understanding that "...higher education lost its image as a social institution fostering the public good and instead became widely perceived as a market-driven institution existing for the private economic benefit of upwardly mobile individuals" (p. 332). He proposes radical pedagogical reform because the failure of the university to fulfill its civic mission and the failure of teaching and learning in undergraduate education have signaled the need for such reform. While inspirational models for implementing such reforms do exist, the typical university in the United States (and elsewhere) is still in denial of these failures.

When I met John a few days later at dinner, in his humble introduction to our group, he made a point of saying that he feels he is "not a great researcher." While I had been studiously preparing myself to meet someone who is known as "kind of a big deal" in academia, his introductory remarks reminded me how entrenched even I still am in models of "academic expertise." I laughed at his "not a great researcher" comment, and he went on to say that he sees himself as a just a human, not a person who is able to make positivistic, scientific statements about social reality. This reminded me of my friend Gustavo once again, and I think both he and John provide examples of how we might move beyond notions of hierarchies of knowledge and expertise, and how we might work to subvert institutional norms while embedded in university structures.

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Let’s Role

I greatly appreciated the tangible, hands-on approach to sketching out the arc of a public scholar and the many concrete suggestions for how universities can support community-engaged scholarship at the graduate level that Sylvia Gage describes in her article, “Arcs, Checklists, and Charts: The Trajectory of a Public Scholar?” I found Gage’s approach to framing public scholarship through role-based thinking rather than trajectory or path-based thinking useful and more suited to the realities of the ways that community involvement interacts with the various spheres of our lives. 

The "Roles of Engagement” exercise Gage uses to help scholars identify and integrate their various roles and projects is not unlike an Eco-Map - a collaborative drawing exercise therapists often use with clients to map out the various spheres of social life which they interact. Both tools provide a more holistic and connected view of who we are and how that is influenced by the outside world, emphasizing multiple identities and actions and how these intersect. Further, this role-based model rests on the argument that trajectory-based thinking fails to account for the realities of community-engaged scholarship as an ongoing process. That is, community engagement or public scholarship is not something one attains at the end of a journey or upon completion of a series of steps, rather, it is a way of being, thinking, and acting that is cultivated and practiced, maintained over time. It is not an end-goal or a stand-alone achievement, but an ongoing commitment to certain principles and values not always reflected in the traditional academic path. I would, however, like to engage further with ideas about how to cultivate community-engagement within the “academic trajectory,” as Gage focuses mainly on her own alternative career path.

I’m excited to workshop this approach in our seminar, as I think it will be a fruitful activity for all of us individually, and help us to identify the places where we overlap collectively. I am somewhat concerned about the idea of defining “what you are for,” however. To me, this seems a rather deterministic and closed question, and somewhat at odds with the role-based mentality. I think we are all able to serve many purposes, envision many futures, and the idea of distilling that down into one defining purpose for my very self causes some friction for me. But maybe doing the activity will allow me to gain clarity on that, and I certainly see this Roles of Engagement map as an evolving, living document that can and should change and be updated over time.

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Healing through Humanities

 McGowan’s book chapter “Can the Humanities Save Medicine, and Vice Versa” presents the union of humanities-based thinking with medical education as a successful case study of interdisciplinary possibility. McGowan sees each of these respective fields as able to contribute positively to the other (humanities giving medicine a focus on holistic wellbeing, medicine giving humanities models for collaborative research practices), but it is through their hybrid form as an interdisciplinary enterprise, McGowan contends, that they will save the university.

Ari has helpfully already pointed out a pretty significant thorn in the side of any interdisciplinary enterprise wanting to make structural change at the university level - capitalistic thinking and neoliberal models of education that dominate the university system. McGowan touches on this, highlighting the need for us to change our “commerce-based model of university education,” but he seems to think such change can take place through “non-departmental” forms of organization. Taofeeq underscored one of McGowan’s points, that the positivistic, lab-oriented science disciplines, like medicine, tend to see themselves as engaged in a collective enterprise, and perhaps that is a model from which the humanities and social sciences can learn. However, I think there exists a far more pervasive and over-arching academic culture of competition and “publish or perish” that transcends disciplines and is therefore, all the more difficult to combat. That type of university culture is rooted in capitalistic modes of knowledge production.

So, how can we bring the humanities to bear on other disciplines and on broader university change? McGowan speaks of proponents of the humanities as humanists, or having a “humanities sensibility” - but how do we go about instilling that across disciplines and making it a part of the university culture? I’m no education expert and so McGowan’s suggestion of cultivating a humanities sensibility by “attending more consistently to a general education” is a more sound solution than anything I can offer. 

What I will contribute that resonated with me in this piece is the power of story, and maybe that points some small way forward. Early on in this chapter, McGowan mentions that storytelling is the key to emotional health and common understanding. This just happens to be one of the key premises of my research and community project. In line with the potential healing power of stories, McGown references the value of narrative medicine, and goes on to state:

“The characteristics of the humanities - which include attention to context, questions of meaning and value, and a focus on intersubjective interactions and individual motivations - encourage us to attend to worldly factors that pertain to human wellbeing” (139).

From my point of view, these characteristics of the humanities are connected to and by storytelling - the primary vehicle through which humans make meaning of their lives. With a growing interest across many fields in narrative forms of inquiry, I wonder how story might be leveraged as a useful meaning-making device that might allow us to bring humanities to bear on the greatest challenges of our time.

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Rollin with Reflexivity in Research

 The week spent reading Matt Sakakeeny’s book Roll with It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans reverberated for me as a New Orleanian, as an academic, and as a storyteller - all subject positions that Matt touches on in his reflexive writing about his role throughout this impressive research project. Walking down Frenchmen this week, listening to the current manifestations of the very music Matt was writing about reminded me of my place as a member of the New Orleans community. In my everyday life in New Orleans, I share in many of the same everyday experiences as my research participants, though we simultaneously occupy many different social locations and subject positions. But I appreciate how Matt writes about himself in this way, as a part of the community and its culture of music, not just a researcher of it. I think this is important to remember as a unifying thread in community-engaged work. We are all forming and shaping this community together, simply by being members of it. I believe it is important to carry that idea with us in our community-engaged scholarship, closing in on the traditional researcher’s safe distance.

As an academic, I appreciate Matt’s work as an achievement of public ethnography. I recently read an article in Qualitative Sociology by Herbert Gans entitled “Public Ethnography: Ethnography as Public Sociology” and found Matt’s book to be a great example of this methodology. Public ethnography is characterized as different from academic ethnography in that it focuses on concerns and issues relevant to a non-academic population. In other words, public ethnography engages with subject matters that are relevant and of interest to the average community member, and Matt’s book surely does just that. Not only does he focus on the concerns and issues of the musicians that he writes about, many non-academics in New Orleans and beyond are interested in brass band music, its practitioners, and its culture, so he chose a subject of social significance outside of academia. Further, public ethnography is not written using technical English or “acaemese,” clearly exemplified in Matt’s more journalistic and narrative writing style. And finally, whether or not an ethnographic work becomes public is up to the public, not the researcher. In this case, I think a broader public has received the book and distributed it within non-academic circles, though I’d like to hear more from Matt on that point.

As a storyteller, and a person who wants to work with storytelling modalities as a research methodology and therapeutic tool, I was very moved and inspired by the book’s overall narrative construction and Matt’s direct engagement with his work as a an act of storytelling in the conclusion. The book is essentially a series of vignettes, Matt sharing the stories that were shared with him either through dialogue or participation. Of course, academic analysis is included, but not in such a way as to present definitive research “findings.” Instead, he actively engages with issues of representation and voice throughout, recognizing his own role in both acting in and shaping the narrative. One particular passage resonated with me strongly, so I’ll close with that: 

“By imposing order on events in an attempt to create coherence, we are all active narrators of subjective knowledge, not passive conveyors of objective truths” (p. 182).

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Co-producing Community Projects: Reflections from a Conversation with Adam Bush

It has been really inspiring to read others' posts about their conversations with Adam, and helped to think through how to get the most out of my conversation with him. Since I wasn't able to meet him in person, we video-conferenced today, and I still need time for further reflection and processing, but am feeling very energized from the conversation.

My planned dissertation research centers around co-producing digital narratives with youth who have experienced trauma, in ways that will be therapeutic, transformational, and healing. As a social worker, I am designing a narrative therapy based intervention that utilizes digital tools for expression, and hoping to partner with a few community groups to implement it as a youth program. Adam was able to suggest several local organizations that would make good partners. One of them was the Center for Restorative Approaches, directed by Troi Bechet, and it just so happens that I am taking her course in restorative approaches this semester, so that was a refreshing synergy.

I also talked with Adam about the tendency I have seen for community partnerships to really be built upon relationships between individuals rather than relationships between institutions. In some cases, this is not a problem, but as a graduate student who might move on to another city after graduating, I wanted to think about how to maintain those partnerships long-term. Adam helped me think about creative ways to ensure such projects have a lasting legacy, to ensure the partnership outlasts me. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this as well, as we make connections here in New Orleans.

I was also able to talk with Adam about what I feel is a disconnect between how we conceptualize these projects and our research related to them, and how the university or our programs conceptualize research and dissertation-writing. There is always bureaucratic red tape, like IRB, but I'm thinking of a deeper disparity regarding how community work is de-valued or perceived as not academically rigorous. Adam pointed me in some useful directions for ensuring that research methodologies are seen as vitally embedded within our community work, rather than side projects that are carried out in one sphere and written about in another. I think for many of us there are not sharp boundaries between our community projects and relationships, our research and academic production, and our personal lives and stories. Talking with Adam helped me to embrace that and not shy away from including my story in my work.

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The Politics of Listening in Higher Education

Harry Boyte’s “Architects of Democracy” (2004) makes a clear contribution to scholarship on civic engagement in higher education, illuminating many of the challenges to political engagement entrenched within university institutional culture, and suggesting several feasible pathways toward realizing higher education’s “potential power to be a force for democratic change.” (p. 159). In addition to succinctly summarizing many of Boyte’s main points, my colleagues have critiqued his work for a failure to emphasize interdisciplinary dialogue as a path toward civic engagement in the classroom. Noting the vital need for students and faculty of different disciplines to communicate with one another, especially on overlapping areas of interest, Ana Maria highlights an important area of potential civic engagement within the university setting that Boyte seems to have missed. Continuing this conversation beyond fostering dialogue, I would like to consider the ways in which listening might be emphasized as a political act.

Boyte helps us to understand the individualistic and insular cultural norms of the university, considered as institution within broader society, that constrain the higher education institution’s ability to realize its political potential. In short, academics experience great difficulty in including public dimensions in their work. Boyte draws attention to academics’ discontent these practical and conceptual challenges, and advocates, among other things, relationship-building across what he calls “silo cultures” (p. 141). Drawing from Alinsky-style community organizing principles, Boyte suggests that one-on-one meetings are an effective way to bring everyday politics into academic professional life. He states:

“One-on-ones shatter stereotypes. They also produce connections across lines of difference. Finally, they are schooling in public life, teaching engagement with people who see the world in different ways” (p. 143).

This particular style of organizing has proven effective in certain settings, but has also been widely critiqued by contemporary organizers for its machismo style and failure to validate horizontal approaches to organizing (Shutz & Miller, 2015). But getting back to Boyte, specifically, I think his views on how to enact civic engagement across disciplines within the university setting would benefit from a consideration of the politics of listening. One-on-one meetings might offer a great many benefits, as Boyte mentions, but they are designed for organizers to connect individuals more closely to a movement, usually through a somewhat one-sided conversation that ends with an “ask.” Authors like Susan Bickford (1996), and more recently Kate Lacey (2013), go beyond dialogue and speech acts to recognize listening as a political activity in and of itself.

These scholars have highlighted the importance of a focus on listening alongside speaking, as two interdependent actions that have political potential only when considered together. According to Bickford, listening in everyday situations of dissonance requires us to take up certain “relations of attention,” and “actively be with others” (p. 23). In this way, listening is “a crucial political activity that enables us to give democratic shape to our being together in the world” (p. 19). Like Bickford, Lacey contends that listening is a political action and rejects the active/passive, public/private binaries that posit speech and writing as active/public and listening as passive/private. Instead of focusing on the dialogic ideal (assuming all speakers inhabit equal positions of power), Lacey is concerned with “the qualities, practices, experiences and interpretations of listening as a communicative activity in the public sphere” (p. 5).

Thus, I argue that in addition to Boyte’s suggestions for realizing the university’s political potential as an agent of civic change, listening as a political activity should be considered an additional pathway toward civic engagement in higher education, and new listening skills must be developed. We must develop a democratic sensibility with regard to listening, so that contrary opinions are listened to in a way that is “bound up with the process of reaching political judgment through granting a hearing” (Lacey, p. 197). We must learn to listen out from a position of openness with the aim of understanding and consequent action, a requirement that is often neglected in the academic world of publishing and lecturing.