Rewriting Partnerships

Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning

Rachael W. Shah

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781607329596
• eBook ISBN: 9781607329602
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Winner of the IARSLCE 2021 Publication of the Year Award and the Coalition for Community Writing Outstanding Book Award.

Community members are rarely tapped for their insights on engaged teaching and research, but without these perspectives, it is difficult to create ethical and effective practices. Rewriting Partnerships calls for a radical reorientation to the knowledges of community partners. Emphasizing the voices of community members themselves—the adult literacy learners, secondary students, and youth activists who work with college students—the book introduces Critical Community-Based Epistemologies, a deeply practical approach to knowledge construction that centers the perspectives of marginalized participants.
 
Drawing on interviews with over eighty community members, Rewriting Partnerships features community knowledges in three common types of community-engaged learning: youth working with college students in a writing exchange program, nonprofit staff who serve as clients for student projects, and community members who work with graduate students. Interviewees from each type of partnership offer practical strategies for creating more ethical collaborations, including how programs are built, how projects are introduced to partners, and how graduate students are educated. The book also explores three approaches to partnership design that create space for community voices at the structural level: advisory boards, participatory evaluation, and community grading.
 
Immediately applicable to teachers, researchers, community partners, and administrators involved in community engagement, Rewriting Partnerships offers concrete strategies for creating more community-responsive partnerships at the classroom level as well as at the level of program and research design. But most provocatively, the book challenges common assumptions about who can create knowledge about community-based learning, demonstrating that community partners have the potential to contribute significantly to community engagement scholarship and program decision-making.

1

The Homeless Woman Who Spat on Me Is a Teacher

The Politics of Knowledge Construction

DOI: 10.7330/9781607329602.c001

One night in the summer of 2007, I stepped off a train into the muggy Chicago air and onto the elevated platform near my apartment. As I started forward, weary after a full day working as an AmeriCorps volunteer at a South Side school, I nearly tripped over two white garbage bags near my feet. My gaze traveled several feet forward, to an elderly woman with dark skin shuffling toward me in the yellow light, carrying two more bags. And then I looked beyond her, to a small heap of bags that rested on the concrete near the top of the stairs. Perhaps she was homeless, and moving her belongings? I smiled at her. “Want some help carrying those?”

She stopped. There was a pause. Then her eyes narrowed, and she spat on the ground next to me. She said, “I won’t be your service project.” And she continued moving forward. I stood silently as she dropped the bags and turned back to the pile near the stairs. I stared at the back of her loose, black shirt for several long moments before turning and leaving in the opposite direction.

This woman was one of my first community instructors. She taught me that community engagement is not always viewed the same way from different social locations. As I traveled on from that train platform to the University of Arizona to pursue the study of community engagement in rhetoric and composition, and then to University of Nebraska as a faculty member, that woman’s voice has stayed with me. In the midst of coordinating engagement initiatives in two writing programs, pairing hundreds of my students with local nonprofits through the years, spending summers teaching with civic leadership programs, and training K-16 teachers on public writing pedagogy, I’ve found myself wondering: what is it like to be someone’s community partner—or someone’s “service project”? How might community engagement change if university coordinators took these community perspectives into account? What can community partners contribute to knowledge about writing, pedagogy, and community collaborations? This book is an attempt to begin answering these questions and, particularly, to create epistemological and material space for community members themselves to offer their insights into the nature and best practices of community engagement. In this project, I synthesize a framework for knowledge construction in community engagement, critical community–based epistemologies, which can be used to inform pedagogy, program design, and research. I draw from this framework to outline a methodology for collecting community perspectives on engagement partnerships and discuss interviews with eighty-two community members involved in three common types of community-based pedagogy: classes that collaborate with underserved youth, courses that involve writing for nonprofits, and graduate education that incorporates community engagement. The book concludes with a series of program and partnership designs that highlight community perspectives.

I write with an audience in mind that includes scholars and teachers involved in community-based teaching across the disciplines, even as I write through the disciplinary frame of rhetoric and composition. Community engagement as a field—or, as some would say, as a movement—is wide reaching, with large-scale organizations such as Campus Compact, institutionalized engagement centers, thriving research journals such as the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, and even a nascent push to offer majors in service-learning (Butin 2010a).1 As one of the top three fields involved in community-based learning, composition has a long history of investment in this larger, interdisciplinary field of community engagement (Butin 2010b). Composition and rhetoric, a field focused on studying writing and communication, has matured in what Paula Mathieu calls its “public turn,” as scholars and practitioners engage with places outside of universities as sites of research, teaching, and intellectual partnership (2005). The field has continued to innovate within Tom Deans’s (2000) classic model of writing for, about, and with communities: creating projects for nonprofits through local collaborations or digital partnerships (Bacon 2000; Youngblood and Mackiewicz 2013), about communities in reflective papers about volunteering or action research (Herzberg 1994; Juergensmeyer 2011), and with communities in collaborative youth writing programs and wikis (Flower, Long, and Higgins 2000; Walsh 2010). Ninety-three percent of professional and technical writing programs involve community partnerships (Allen and Benninghoff 2004), and the field of composition now hosts a regular Conference on Community Writing.

Both composition and the larger field of community engagement have invested deeply in researching community-university partnerships, offering theories, stories, and qualitative and quantitative reviews. Yet there is a curious paucity of research on how community members themselves view and experience community engagement. Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth Tryon, for example, state in their review of research, “We [the community engagement field] especially don’t know how service-learning affects communities from the perspective of those who live and work there” (Stoecker and Tryon 2009, 7). While there are a few studies that seek the insight of nonprofit staff who collaborate with college students, even less has been published about those who receive the “service.” Amy Martin, Kristy SeBlonka, and Elizabeth Tryon (2009) write that to their knowledge, “There are no studies of client experiences with short term service learning” (62). With some intensive searching, I have unearthed a handful of studies that focus on the perspectives of community residents rather than nonprofit staff (e.g., d’Arlach, Sánchez, and Feuer 2009; S. Davis and Roswell 2013; Jorge 2003; Grobman 2017; Skilton-Sylvester and Erwin 2000; Wetzel and “Wes” 2013), but the fact that I can nearly count these studies on one hand troubles me. Why has there been so little published on community perspectives of community-based pedagogies? Why is community member knowledge so rarely tapped to impact teaching and program design? The answer to these questions—and therefore a potential solution to this imbalance—lies in the politics of knowledge production.

Tracing the Knowledge Gap: Academics in the Front of the Room

I was an eager first-time attendee at the 2012 International Association on Research in Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) Conference, particularly because this was the inaugural year for the “community fellows program” that sponsored the registration fees for nonprofit staff involved in service-learning partnerships. The fellows program was an effort to expand the role of community partners from recipients of university “help” to participants actively involved in collaborative knowledge production. I was looking forward to participating with community members and academics in this innovative conference structure, but I found myself troubled by one particular session. In this session, a woman in the back asked if there were any community fellows in the room, and when five people raised their hands, the woman proceeded to ask how community partners might want universities to study community engagement. I was shocked when a white academic at the front of the room answered her question, followed closely by another white academic from the panel adding his thoughts, and then the conversation moved on. The community partners remained silent; there was no space created for them to speak. I share responsibility as an academic who did not intervene.

This moment illustrates for me the epistemological dynamics John Saltmarsh, Matthew Hartley, and Patti Clayton (2009) identify in the “Democratic Engagement White Paper,” a position paper issued as a result of a summit on the future of civic engagement in higher education. The meeting sought to identify the reasons behind a perceived “sense of drift” in the movement, and a key argument of the paper is that “the dominant epistemology of the academy runs counter to the civic engagement agenda” (5). The academy’s focus on expertise, specialization, and neutrality invalidates the knowledges of community members, and thus makes deep partnership and the practice of collaborative knowledge production difficult. In other words, the narrowness of the types of knowledge that are considered worthwhile in the university means that the stories, experiences, and perspectives of community members are not truly considered “knowledge.” Therefore, community members often do not have opportunities to participate in research or practical problem-solving in university partnerships.

The authors call for a shift in the politics of knowledge production.2 This “democratic epistemology” (Saltmarsh, Hartley, and Clayton 2009, 5) has been applied in university-community partnerships to address social issues, through approaches such as participatory action research (Kinnevy and Boddie 2001; Reardon 1998), in which community members and academics collaboratively design and carry out research on public problems; rivaling (Flower, Long and Higgins 2000), a community literacy approach that encourages college students and community members to identify multiple interpretations of social issues; and community-based publishing (Cassell 2000; Goldblatt and Parks 2000; Parks 2009), which calls for academics to use university resources to publish community voices. Community members and university representatives have worked together to address problems such as food deserts, crime, workforce development, sexual illiteracies, and drug addiction (Flower 2008; Flower and Heath 2000; Licona and Gonzales 2013). Yet despite calls by scholars (Driscoll et al. 1996; Ferman and Hill 2004; Grobman 2015; Marullo et al. 2003; Stanlick et al. 2017) this epistemology only rarely seems to be applied to inquiry about community engagement itself, either in research or in practical areas such as program design.3 Even with firsthand experience of university-community partnerships, community members have not been viewed as knowledgeable about community engagement, which means they have not often been invited to contribute their perspectives.

Nadine Cruz and Dwight Giles (2000) identify several additional reasons for the lack of attention on communities in community engagement scholarship.4 First, they explain that community-based learning has historically focused on validating this “experimental” pedagogy for administrators and academics, which led to an emphasis on student outcomes and faculty experiences. Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth Tryon (2009), however, challenge this idea that the university focus is merely the result of a need for validation, arguing that this emphasis stems from an outright “bias” toward postsecondary interests over community interests (4). Indeed, Paula Mathieu (2005) argues that much service-learning functions to meet university needs, especially as a source of positive publicity for institutions of higher education. She points out that a key service-learning group, Campus Compact, was founded by three ivy-league presidents, and their mission statement explicitly frames their goal as countering the perception of ivy-league college students as materialistic and self-centered (95–96). Community engagement may be especially helpful to the image of English departments who are fighting, as Thomas Miller (2011) argues, to keep their relevance amid changing conceptions of literacy and increasing calls for accountability. Community-based learning offers students résumé lines, while also offering departments an opportunity to claim a tangible contribution to local communities, providing a defense to threats of funding cuts. In this focus on university benefits, the need to listen to community members—especially about potential problems with community engagement that might call programs into question—can be overlooked or ignored.

Another contributing factor to the relative absence of research on community perspectives is the problem defining “community,” as Cruz and Giles recognize. Does the term refer to the nonprofit staff and professionals who plan the partnership—the director of the LGBTQA+ center, the volunteer manager of the nursing home, and the instructor of the adult literacy class? Or does the term refer to the community members themselves—the youth at the LGBTQA+ center, the residents of the nursing home, the participants in the adult literacy class? Community engagement scholarship often seems to assume that staff members can speak for “the community,” as many studies use the term “community” when referring only to nonprofit staff participation (e.g., Vernon and Ward 1999). Yet community resident perspectives are often significantly different from the viewpoints of nonprofit staff (Kissane and Gingerich 2004), especially as the vast majority of nonprofit staff is white, middle-class, and college educated, and many clients do not share this background (Toupin and Plewes 1997). While both staff and resident perspectives are important, and this book engages both, the specific insights that community residents can make have been especially neglected.

Given these dynamics, the number of studies on community-based learning from community perspectives is limited. Perhaps the most substantial book-length study to date is Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth Tryon’s (2009) Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service-Learning. Stoecker and Tryon interviewed sixty-seven nonprofit agency staff who had participated in service-learning, and their book tackles several key themes, such as staff motivations for participating, the challenge of short-term service-learning, and dynamics of training and evaluating students. Articles on nonprofit staff perspectives report the need for communication and relationships with faculty (Bacon 2000; Creighton 2008; Leiderman et al. Gross 2013; Sandy and Holland 2006; Vernon and Ward 1999; Worrall 2007), the significance of service-learning’s drain on staff time (Bushouse 2005), the emphasis nonprofit partners place on educating students (Sandy and Holland 2006; Worrall 2007), the need for distribution of power (Creighton 2008; Leiderman et al. 2013; Miron and Moely 2006), and the importance of student motivation (Schmidt and Robby, 2002). A handful of resources have also been developed with nonprofit staff in mind as the audience, to orient staff to university culture and support them in evaluating potential partnerships (Cress, Stokamer, and Kaufman 2015; New England Resource Center 2000; Scheibel, Bowley, and Jones 2005).

The available literature narrows considerably as we move from nonprofit staff to focus on community residents. Scholars Dick Cone and Paul Payne (2002) offer a fictionalized story about a neighborhood deliberating about whether or not they should partner with a university in the development of an empowerment zone. The article touches on gentrification, situations in which the university did not follow through on grant money or sharing research, and the pattern of the university placing its own interests first. While this piece presents a fictional account, readers are asked to judge the story’s validity by the extent to which it resonates with their experience, and many readers may find themselves wincing in recognition as they read. In fact, many of these problematic themes are echoed in Harley Etienne’s (2012) study of community perceptions of the widely celebrated partnerships between the University of Pennsylvania and West Philadelphia for neighborhood revitalization. The collection Community Literacies as Shared Resources for Transformation (Larson and Moses 2018) seeks to prevent some of these problematic themes by involving community residents in analyzing a research partnership with a food market, emphasizing the importance of building relationships and recognizing the interconnected nature of development projects.

Regarding community engagement pedagogies in particular, I was able to locate only a handful of studies focused primarily on perspectives of community residents,5 including Latinx community members who interacted with Spanish-language students (d’Arlach, Sánchez, and Feuer 2009; Jorge 2003); African American adults in a literacy program staffed by university students (Skilton-Sylvester and Erwin 2000); and incarcerated participants in prison education programs (S. Davis and Roswell 2013; Wetzel and “Wes” 2013). These studies reveal several aspects of community engagement troubling to community members, such as culturally insensitive students, as well as benefits, such as the opportunity to exchange knowledge and overcome community members’ own stereotypes through exposure to a greater diversity of people. Strikingly, all of the studies emphasize the importance of personal relationships with students in maximizing benefits and minimizing harms.6

Here, then, is the bulk of what is known about how community partners experience community engagement pedagogies. While a few more studies certainly exist, the tiny percentage in light of the total volume of community engagement research is astounding. I anticipate that there is a similar lack of community resident voices in program decision making, given that I do not often see publications describing community leadership of programs. There is something more at play than a mere oversight of community partners, who comprise half of the engagement equation. This is not simply a problem of neglect, but an epistemological problem: the knowledge of community members is not viewed as valuable; academics have remained in the front of the knowledge production process. In order to address this knowledge gap, therefore, this book seeks to develop a theoretical framework that supports community-held knowledges in community engagement scholarship and practice. This framework not only provides a rationale for incorporating community knowledge, but also offers implications for how to facilitate—on the ground—the coproduction of knowledge. Whether the purpose is writing a book chap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Homeless Woman Who Spat on Me Is a Teacher: The Politics of Knowledge Construction
• 2. Relationality: Youth Who Collaborate with College Students
• 3. Networks: Nonprofit Clients for Student Projects
• 4. Openness: Community Members Who Work with Graduate Students
• 5. Rewriting Architectures: Program and Partnership Design
• Conclusion: Projects, Partners, or World Builders
• Appendix A: Community Engagement Openness Heuristic
• Appendix B: Community Grading Sheets
• Notes
• References
• About the Author
• Index