- Written in collaboration with Shinta Hernandez, chair of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, Montgomery College
Faculty have always found that engaging students in community-based projects yields more enthusiasm for learning. Students find the projects less boring and more relevant to their daily lives. And the faculty find assessing such projects less arduous.
Boyer described a higher education curriculum with a cross-disciplinary focus on social issues that “would enrich the campus, renew the communities, and give new dignity and status to the scholarship of service” (quoted in Zlotkowski, 1998, 1).
But there should be more to community-engaged pedagogy than service learning. We would like to extend the term to be more reflective of the open movement and focus on community-engaged open pedagogy.
Rubin et al. described five dimensions of community-engaged pedagogy: 1) relational approach to partnership building, 2) establishment of a learning community, 3) organic curriculum model, 4) collaborative teaching mechanism with diverse faculty, and 5) applied learning.
That sounds like open pedagogy, where students are placed at the center of the learning process as creators of information and not just consumers of that information. Students are partners with faculty in developing content, content that is shared back to the knowledge commons for others to use. This focus on student agency is critical, we believe, for deep learning to take place.
We see community-engaged open pedagogy as a high-impact practice that Vaz (2019) claims “helps students develop skills that are essential in the workplace and that transfer to a wide range of setting – such as communication, problem solving and critical thinking.”
At a recent Teaching and Learning Summit offered by Achieving the Dream, Karen Cangialosi talked about “The Power of Open Pedagogy” and discussed a plethora of opportunities for students to engage in open pedagogy: creating ancillary materials for OER textbooks, using open Google Docs to work collaboratively, sharing open blogs, developing Wikipedia entries, creating web annotations, and working on renewable assignments, to name a few.
These open pedagogical techniques can be viewed as high-impact practices, taking both students and faculty out of their comfort zones. They require planning, collaboration and active engagement.
We have opted to focus our efforts on community-based open pedagogy in the area of renewable assignments, co-facilitating a Montgomery College fellowship centered on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
The set of 17 UN SDGs addresses a wide range of social issues designed to achieve and maintain global justice. We thought it would be an opportunity to connect Montgomery College’s focus on social justice with open pedagogy.
The first-ever work of this kind was launched during the summer of 2018, when 13 Montgomery College faculty participated in the fellowship. This summer the fellowship is operating in partnership with Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Canada. This international partnership serves as the beginning of a collective approach to transforming the teaching and learning environments and to improving the world.
Faculty fellows work in teams to create several renewable assignments, which must meet the following criteria: 1) interdisciplinary, 2) openly licensed, 3) basis on at least one SDG, and 4) mandatory community or civic engagement element for students. These assignments are designed to place the students in the community through experiential learning and in the center of their learning process. This type of assignment is likely to make the students’ learning more engaging and more collaborative, and ultimately, this open educational practice may increase overall student success.
More details, including examples of faculty assignments and student projects, are available at https://www.montgomerycollege.edu/offices/elite/unesco/.
Engaging students in the learning process to improve their communities is a win-win for all involved: faculty benefit from having more engaged students, students win by engaging in assignments that mean something to them, and the communities win as a result of a focus on improvement the quality of life within those environs.
References
Tessa Hicks Peterson (2009) Engaged scholarship: reflections and research on the pedagogy of social change, Teaching in Higher Education, 14:5, 541-552, DOI: 10.1080/13562510903186741
Rubin CL, Martinez LS, Chu J, Hacker K, Brugge D, Pirie A, Allukian N, Rodday AM, Leslie LK. Community-Engaged Pedagogy: A Strengths-Based Approach to Involving Diverse Stakeholders in Research Partnerships. Progress in Community Health Partnerships 2012 Winter; 6(4): 481–490. doi; 10.1353/cpr.2012.0057
Vaz R. High-Impact Practices Work. Inside Higher Ed June 2019. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/06/04/why-colleges-should-involve-more-students-high-impact-practices-opinion
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Dr. Michael Mills 