When Academic Institutions Reflect on Their Role Beyond the Campus

 “We educate our students to be responsible citizens and responsible community members … That is one of the most important ways that higher education institutions do impact their local communities,” Dr Audrey Falk, programme director of community engagement at Merrimack College, a US private Catholic institution founded in 1947, told a webinar organised by the University Social Responsibility Network on 4 June.

The webinar, attended by almost 100 academics from across the world, listened to four panellists from the US, South Africa and Australia on the various ways impact assessments are factored into higher education institutions’ community engagement activities.

Falk said the definition of impact depends on the theory of change adopted by an institution and the change that it seeks to make in the community. However, she argued: “If we want to have a longer-term impact, we really have to have sustained partnerships.”

Sustained partnerships with the community are what the University of Pretoria (UP) in South Africa is developing, and last year, a six-member team from Germany’s University of Konstanz visited UP to learn more about their community engagement programmes.

South African toolkit

Dr Martina Jordaan, head of community engagement at UP, said the institution, which has 56,000 students spread over seven campuses and nine faculties, builds community engagement into 226 modules and involves more than 20,000 students working at 323 sites.

Last year, in collaboration with its community partners, who are also co-opted to monitor and evaluate student assignments, UP prepared an impact-focused toolkit to assist lecturers involved in curriculum-based community engagement modules “to show them what the steps are and how they get to the point where we want to be”, she said.

“The idea of this toolbox is to guide universities to identify current community engagement practices, reflect on the achievements and areas for improvement in the engagement efforts, and engage in collaborative discussions with community stakeholders to develop the most strategic and impactful approach to the community engagement,” said Jordaan.

Asked by University World News how the university ensured that the community is not exploited in the process, she said: “We really tried to make the community partners co-designers of the courses. And it's very important that they also take the responsibility to assess the coursework or the outcomes of the projects and what the students did with them.

“Making them co-facilitators makes them more responsible. We want to move them to the point of being mentors instead of just observers and acceptors. And if they are mentors later on, then that is part of the development of the community”.

UP’s Moja Gabedi gardening project is a good example of how this process works. Just four years ago the Moja Gabedi site, close to the university in Hatfield, was an eyesore, buried under 3,000 tonnes of garbage and attracting criminal elements.

UP’s Unit for Community Engagement got the university’s agriculture and occupational therapy students to work with the community as part of their studies.

Now, the space is a farmland producing 100% organic vegetables and fruit for the community, and the occupational therapy students conduct life-changing healing sessions with homeless people drawn from the local community. It has become an example of how a university can regenerate a ruined space with the community.

Jordaan told University World News the students develop personally and have an enriching experience in the process. “The students are most responsible if the community is actually assisting them,” she said.

Australian pathways approach

Dr Megan Donnelly, director of societal impact and evaluation at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, said the university has embedded societal impact into its new 10-year strategy. The strategy has nine pillars, she said, with five pillars representing impact pathways and four representing impact focus areas.

“The impact pathways are essentially a bit more typical of a university. They are about our transformative education, our innovative research, our genuine engagement with our partnerships and our communities,” said Donnelly.

“Our impact pathway four is around our culture and our people, and five is around improving our environment so that we're more agile and more effective in the way that we work,” she noted.

Donnelly said the impact focus areas are what differentiate this strategy “from the rest” and are currently being applied to the special educational needs of Australia’s indigenous people, which have been neglected for generations. As a result, their involvement with higher education has been negligible.

According to Donnelly, Australia’s schoolchildren have also grown up with very little knowledge of the Aboriginal perspectives of their history and culture.

UNSW has employed several Indigenous-identified staff and works in close partnership with a range of Aboriginal communities to develop new curriculum material on Aboriginal culture for the local Little Bay Community for Schools.

First-year UNSW students also undertake a community-based course called Indigenous Perspectives in Education, with Indigenous perspectives embedded in every course in their first-year programme.

“Cross-cutting themes such as inclusion, integrity, social justice and indigenous knowledges are critical to how we pursue all of our impact focus areas. And they will also be critical to the way that we measure impact across our strategic initiatives,” said Donnelly.

“The purpose of impact evaluation is essentially to capture and elevate the impact across everything that we do,” she said. “So it’s not just research and education, although they are obviously core, but also how we engage – and our operations and governance practices as well. And the goal is to keep us accountable for societal change.”