Engage Students in Community-Based Learning

L&S Instructor Example: The Community as an Actor in University Research

Revel Sims, Associate Professor, Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture

Professor Revel Sims incorporates mixed-methods action research in the field of housing and community development into his courses. This work is often based on collaborative research oriented around critical urban questions such as demonstrating the link between gentrification and displacement or forms of housing exploitation.

What do you do? Through my collaboration with the Tenant Resource Center (TRC) we developed a research plan and engaged a special graduate class to clean, quantify, and map evictions in Dane County at the neighborhood level. The resulting report influenced public discourse by revealing the connection between race and housing insecurity in the city. More recently, my collaboration with TRC has moved into questions of Latinx/e housing specifically. After initial conversations about concerns and objectives, I mobilized a special topics course in the Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies Program and employed TRC’s rich in-take data to collaboratively develop a research protocol and instrument that students in my class used to interview Spanish-speaking renters in Dane County. Through a qualitative analysis of the data, we found that despite institutional exclusion and a hesitancy to reach out that are often elevated in the literature, Latinx/e renters often seek the support they need to resolve their housing issues but face specific challenges in the housing market that make negotiating housing concerns and activating housing choice a less effective or available strategy.

Why do you do it? I came to academia from the field of education and work with community organizations. I believe that academic research plays an important role in shaping public discourse and policy formation. My training in the Community Scholars program at UCLA and the institutional support for the Wisconsin Idea here at UW-Madison have shown me that there is a long tradition of engaged scholarship that embraces the normative positions I hold. From this basis I seek to build relationships with likeminded organizations that uplift justice and challenge inequality in the field in of housing. Toward this end I bring my shared interests with community partners into the classroom through the creation of curricula that ground the work of community-based learning and engaged scholarship to facilitate the production of collaborative research projects.

What impact does it have on students? I believe the impact on students is twofold. First, in applied, service- or community-based learning projects with community partners, students learn beyond the classroom in terms of both the subject matter as well as the important roles that relationships and values play in grassroots efforts. The latter are especially challenging to assimilate because they are not easily comprehended through the certainty and uncomplicated structure of classroom settings that have a definite beginning and end. Second, I feel that most of the students in my classes are generally altruistic at heart. Working toward something “bigger” that “matters” helps to nourish the desire to make education meaningful.

What might you change in the future? In the contemporary context, there is an almost ubiquitous emphasis on technological solutions to urban problems. Smart cities will magically solve congestion; green infrastructure will incrementally make our planet more livable; digitized connections will usher in a more democratic polis. My reading of urban history tells me that this attention is fundamentally misguided. Thus, I believe that universities need to give more attention to engaging with the pressing social and spatial injustices that make the transformations underfoot real and lived. Addressing these concerns is not achievable through well-defined research questions, easily available data and positivist methods alone, but involves a normative orientation toward opening the university to new actors and extending its vast resources outward to serve the needs of those who experience injustice of urban change.

Guiding Questions

1. What goals does the community partner have for the collaboration? How might you ensure the course provides students sufficient structure to meaningfully meet those goals?
2. What feedback loops can you have with the community partner to understand how the project is progressing and the partner’s overall experience with the course?
3. How might the course provide opportunities for students to learn relationship skills that can apply to their work with the partner and/or the community?

L&S Instructor Example: Fostering Authenticity and Generosity through Reflection

Lindsay Flowers, Assistant Professor of Oboe, Mead Witter School of Music

Professor Lindsay Flowers connects with multiple community partners and organizations in the music education and youth engagement space to determine projects and partnerships that students can plug into as part of the course. Partners have included Gigi’s Playhouse, Middleton Community Orchestra, Gilda’s Club, Stoughton Resettlement Project, Odyssey Project: Junior Music, OutReach LGBTQ+ Community Center, Renaissance Senior Living, Monona Public Library, and the Henry Vilas Zoo.

What do you do? Effective reflection requires one to be vulnerable. Each semester, the first task at hand is to break through everyone’s ego barrier (myself included)! How do we do this? While every semester is unique due to the student personnel in the course, we begin with mini-presentations where each student shares an example of an artist (it doesn’t even need to be a musician) whose collaborative work elevates a cause. Leading with a reflective assignment that celebrates the work that someone else is doing is a gateway for someone to share something that they care about and practice assessing the effectiveness of the partnership. Then when we reflect upon our own work, I remind my students to remember this first assignment when their reflection both celebrated and critiqued the work that someone else was doing.

Why do you do it? I have found that when one’s ego fades, one can lead with generosity, which I consider to be true confidence. At Mead Witter School of Music, I work with my students on developing authenticity and confidence in their creative work, oftentimes that is in the area of Music Performance. Then when they are in Music 608: Music Community Engagement, they experience bringing their authentic, vulnerable, and generous selves into their collaborations with community partners, Madison-based social services agencies. The students select a non-profit organization that they admire and find a connecting point to create a program or event that can use music as a tool to elevate the cause.

What impact does it have on students? My students repeatedly write in their reflective journals that their artistic passion is freshly fueled after experiencing their artistry making meaningful and measurable impacts with a community who does not typically or who are unable to attend their traditional music concerts. This conclusion is never reached with ease of success, but through commitment, communication challenges, dealing with perfectionism, and learning to adapt one’s project vision. Other small group reflective conversations have revealed that being able to perform in these moments has led to learning how to overcome one’s performance anxiety from the practice of performing with generosity over ego.

What might you change in the future? I want the students to more quickly identify who their community partners will be so that they can have more time working steadily together throughout the whole semester.

Guiding Questions

1. How might you demonstrate the intellectual value of reflection and ensure students do not treat it simply as busy work?
2. What varied reflection formats could you provide to students (e.g., in-class discussions, journal entries, reflection papers)?
3. Do your students have a clear understanding of how to reflect? How can you prompt students toward more sincere, critical reflection?

L&S Instructor Example: Persuasive Campaign Messages: Extending Classroom Boundaries to the State of Wisconsin

Douglas McLeod, Evjue Centennial Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Professor Doug McLeod teaches a Creative Campaign Messages course for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the UW-Madison. In this course, students partner with UniverCity Alliance to provide opportunities and work in teams to create a strategic communication plan including an integrated set of print, broadcast, and social media messages to help towns and counties in the state of Wisconsin to achieve organizational goals.

What do you do? All of the students in J445: Creative Campaign Messages are SJMC majors, which means they have already had a series of strategic communication skills courses to prepare them for the project-based learning experience in J445. They have had J202 (a professional writing boot camp course), J203 (an applied research course), and J345 (a project-based strategic course, all of which train students in the skills that they use in J445. Once they get into J445, we engage in a project in which students research a consumer brand and create a portfolio of messages to promote this brand. Sometimes, we also have an additional project creating campaign messages for a local client. So, by the middle of the semester, students have been trained on research, strategy and creative messaging such that they have already experienced the process that they will use for the UniverCity Alliance project.

Why do you do it? One of the most important reasons for our participation in this community-based, service learning project, is to provide my students with opportunities to apply the strategic communication skills that they are learning in class by engaging with real-world clients. Working with community organizations from around the state takes students outside their comfort zone of everyday experiences and encourages them to think outside the box. With the support of the Morgridge Center, my students are able to travel to meet with clients in communities around Wisconsin. Following the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, my students bring the knowledge and skills they are developing in our classrooms to assist the people and organizations of the state of Wisconsin.

What impact does it have on students? The students get to apply the knowledge and sharpen their skills through the “learn-by-doing” approach of project-based learning. Not only do these experiences prepare students for jobs in strategic communication, but they also develop an appreciation of local government programs and the benefits of public service. The immediate reaction of UniverCity Alliance project clients has been very positive. Some of them have contacted me after the course is complete with follow up questions and/or to inquire about student interest in continuing with them.

What might you change in the future? I am constantly working to innovate new assignments and activities into my project-based learning courses. Many of these changes are driven by the constant evolution of research techniques and media technologies such as social media.

Read more about the Creative Campaign Messages course in this SJMC article!

Guiding Questions

1. How might you structure your course to provide students opportunities to understand the community that is being worked with, as well as relevant content and history related to the community or issue?
2. How might you make explicit the professional skills surrounding the community engagement, such as professional communication, collaboration, and technical skills?
3. What role does the community partner have in the course? How might you provide them opportunities to suggest readings, present about their work, or otherwise orient students to the project?