![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
There is growing pressure on Canadian universities to demonstrate their applicability and relevance in contemporary society. Community engaged learning opportunities can respond to this pressure, and can provide important benefits for both students and community partners with whom students work. In this paper, I draw on my experiences of teaching an undergraduate and graduate community engaged political science course over the last four years, to reflect on three particular tensions I have negotiated in the course’s design and delivery, including: (a) teaching about socially engaged research and/or teaching about theories of citizen participation; (b) balancing student learning and community benefit; and (c) negotiating the rigidity of academic institutions. I explore these tensions while thinking about my concurrent commitment to an intersectional political science pedagogy [Rasmussen, Amy Cabrera. 2014. “Reflection: Toward an Intersectional Political Science Pedagogy.” Journal of Political Science Education 10: 102–116], and by drawing on Bivens, Haffenden and Hall’s [2015. “Knowledge, Higher Education, and the Institutionalization of Community-University Research Partnerships.” In Strengthening Community University Research Partnerships: Global Perspectives, edited by Budd Hall, Rajesh Tandon, and Crystal Tremblay, 5–30. Victoria: University of Victoria] proposed framework for institutionalizing community-university partnerships in post-secondary institutions, and feedback from students and partners. Ultimately, I suggest that community-engaged courses, despite the noted tensions, offer important and un-realized potential to political science curricula.
Acknowledgements
I humbly acknowledge my work and presence on Indigenous territories, and am committed to continuously working toward respectful relationships. I am grateful to the many students and community partners with whom I have worked throughout the development of this course, and also to my thoughtful colleagues at CESI and across my institution from whom I draw ideas and inspiration. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers and the co-editors of this dialogues section for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Provincial ministries, which regulate post-secondary education, vary in name but serve comparable mandates across Canada.
2. Bivens, Haffenden, and Hall (Citation2015) define knowledge democracy as including: recognition of multiplicity of epistemologies and knowledge systems; knowledge as produced and represented in a “dazzling array of methods” that go well beyond text and statistics to include ceremony, drama … ; knowledge as produced in social movements, community organizations, … and elsewhere beyond the academy; and knowledge generated through partnerships as available and accessible to the broader communities … (9).
3. Search results tend to be articles about efforts to enhance civic and political participation. For example, three recent articles in the Journal of Political Science Education examine the connection between students’ community engaged learning and their civic behaviours or attitudes. One slightly older article (Bell, Mattern, and Telin Citation2007) describes a course that employs what the authors call “community-action learning”.
4. The University of Guelph boasts “a long history of commitment to hands-on learning, socially responsive research, local and global community engagement, and … ,” including in CSAHS, which “traces its roots back to the Macdonald Institute, founded in 1903 to educate young women in domestic sciences and thus improve the health and well-being of families and society” (CSAHS Strategic Plan Citation2017).
5. In the course outline, the word “citizens” is in quotation marks to remind students that while we use the term generally to think about people living in a nation state, many Indigenous people in Canada do not self-identify as Canadian citizens, and many migrants live precarious citizenship status.
6. The course was modified slightly to account for the different emphases between these two course codes, but the core component of a community-partnered project has been a consistent feature of both courses and so distinctions between the two are not made throughout this paper.
7. Taylor et al. (Citation2015) offer a comprehensive overview of community service-learning (CSL) programs in Canadian post-secondary institutions. They note that “CSL programs in Canada have diverse aims and approaches … [including] action research … [and] community-based research, … ” (1). Thus, while service learning may include research as a form of service, service learning is not inherently scholarly.
8. One example of this incompatibility is the time required to receive ethics approval. Even with modified course-based ethics procedures as available at my institution, a considerable amount of the ethics application approval process must be completed before students begin the course, which precludes their participation in that critical component of the community engaged learning experience.