Community Matters: Service-Learning in Engaged Design and Planning

Mallika Bose, Paula Horrigan, Cheryl Doble, Sigmund C. Shipp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317907756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Winner of the EDRA 2015 Book Award!

Community Matters: Service Learning in Engaged Design and Planning explores issues that resonate with a diverse group of design and planning educators drawn to the challenge of supporting greater community building and empowerment while combining learning with practice. The book explores such questions as:

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• How do we foster mutuality and reciprocity in community-academy partnerships?

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• What conflicts, challenges, limits and obstacles do we face in our service-learning studios and projects?

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• What evidence do we have of our impacts on students and communities and how are we responding?

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• How are we being attentive to the contemporary environmental and societal issues?

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• What is our role as both designers and agents of societal change?

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• How are we innovating to enable greater capacities for individuals, future practitioners and communities?

This book provides compelling evidence that educators should be adopting engaged pedagogies, research methods and theories through which they can bring together education, practice and scholarship at the boundary of community and academy.

Chapter 1

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Taking stock

Perspectives on community matters

Sigmund C.Shipp

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As a part of the 2011 National Erasing Boundaries Symposium held at Hunter College, David Scobey (executive dean at the New School for Public Engagement) and Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. (professor of urban and regional planning at State University of New York at Buffalo) presented keynote addresses that focused on the symposium theme, Why Community Matters. This chapter summarizes their speeches, pointing out how they define the role of the engaged academy and its commitment to communities here and worldwide. In doing so, the chapter provides the context for the other chapters in this book.^*

David Scobey began his talk by sharing the story of a service-learning project he was involved with during his tenure at the University of Michigan. The project involved Scobey and his students working with community partners to undertake a design process helping revitalize Ann Arbor’s Broadway Park. This three-acre park, fronting the Huron River, is a historic site in the city’s center.¹ Over time, the park and its signature bridge fell into disrepair; it retained little usefulness except to the homeless men who lived there. The site of the park was the anchor of the old Black neighborhood, the mill district, and its working-class history. Reflecting a commitment to the community stakeholders, Scobey comments that the project participants “ended up proposing a set of designs for the park that incorporated the history of the park as one of the important themes for the reclaiming of this public space by the river.”

Another story of engaging university faculty and students in neighborhood revitalization was shared by Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. Taylor’s service-learning project took place in a gritty, poor African-American neighborhood located near downtown Buffalo, New York, in the shadows of the prestigious Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. Taylor oversees the service-learning projects at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which give inner-city kids the opportunity to revitalize their community. There is a commitment to working together with stakeholders to formulate tasks that allow students to better understand their neighborhood. Essentially, the neighborhood becomes a classroom and laboratory. The students work on urban farms that make use of the ample local vacant land. The task of urban agriculture is designed to help students grasp the social, economic, and political complexity of urban life in their community. For example, given that vacant land is often a consequence of environment polluting processes, organic gardening techniques are taught as a way to remediate and improve the soil. Harvested produce from the urban farm is used in the school cafeteria lunch program. The greening of the abandoned site turns an eyesore into a landscape filled with flowers and plants. “For us [at the university] it was our message to them that says the purpose of education is not only to provide students with the skills needed to earn a living, but most importantly, to acquire the ability to recreate a world worthwhile living in,” says Taylor.

Each speaker went beyond the descriptive and anecdotal to explore critical theories that illustrate the importance of service-learning and why community matters. In his discussion of the Broadway Park project, Scobey acknowledges the preeminent role of all involved: the university, students, faculty, and the community partners. As Scobey explains, co-creation and democratic engagement “actually make forms of knowledge and meaning and design that we couldn’t have done so well if it weren’t for community partners.” In other words, community involvement results in better outcomes in terms of processes and products.

Taylor’s discussion of the Buffalo project considers theories that explain why communities matter. Communities provide a context that determines behaviors and outcomes, with the inner-city neighborhood providing an especially critical contextual environment. Taylor asserts,

[I]t is the location where spatial and built forms combine with a tangle of social problems suppressing life, spawning crime, violence, drug abuse, obesity, and poor academic achievement. We cannot understand the problem of underperforming schools without taking into account the daily struggle of parents to survive, the psychological impact of living in a foreboding violent prone neighborhood environment . . . and how our kids have the problem of obesity and sedentary living, which affects academic achievement. Efforts to understand and reform public schools without studying these issues relationally and without accounting for neighborhood context are bound to fail.

The concept of place is related to the idea of community as context. Taylor feels that a synergetic relationship exists where

the people act on the neighborhood and the neighborhood place acts on people. Consequently, the neighborhood place will either increase or decrease a person’s life chances. The behaviors of individuals and families are linked to the built environment and efforts to revive distressed communities must recognize this relationship. Academic engagement and service-learning, if successful, must fully embrace this linkage as a means to identify issues relevant to stakeholders and important to fostering relationships.

Moreover, Taylor contends that “the hope for improving inner cities is tied to universities that are people-centered, democratic, cosmopolitan, egalitarian and engaged institutions. They have the power to create the radical transformation that is needed to make life better and build a vibrant democratic participatory society.” The engaged university and service-learning in community renewal embraces the reality that “neighborhoods matter in the lives of people.” Essentially, Taylor sees the commitment of universities as a way for them to be faithful to their democratic mission and social compact.

The history of the engaged university’s faithfulness to a democratic and social mission cycles between highs and lows; each cycle impacts the faculty and students’ commitment to making communities matter. From the late 18th to mid-19th centuries, most universities took a conservative approach when dealing with communities. At that time, institutions of higher learning made research, big science, and eventually, the Cold War their focus. This emphasis would push local issues and the urgent problems facing immigrants, Blacks, and the poor to the margins of academic life.

However, the national mood would change and shift the priorities of universities. The assassination of MLK reaped vile rebellions, exposed the desperation of inner-city Blacks, and foisted on universities a need to reach out to communities where the poor and minorities lived. In response, universities opened their doors to thousands of Black students, professionals, and administrators. Taylor notes, “this happened overnight.” Shortly thereafter, the huge increase of a Black presence on campus and White student unrest changed the traditional White university. The newcomers and the White students demanded courses in Black and gender studies and greater university ties to communities. These events and activism in the 1960s and 1970s would lead to the creation of the engaged university.

Taylor continued by indicating that the engaged university would be transformative. It would make great strides in changing the culture of higher education and responding to community needs, in part by popularizing the service-learning pedagogy and critical strategies. Community, academic, and professional partners would develop participatory strategies and theories and create constructive dialogues that made communities significant priorities. Nationally, organizations such as the Campus Compact² and Anchors Institutions Task Force³ would bring together university presidents, faculty, and administrators to further the cause of academic engagement and its promise for inner-city renewal.

However, the engaged universities’ allegiance to communities began to ebb as another ethos surfaced. The growing popularity of the entrepreneurial university, based on the business creed and market-driven behavior, emerged in the 1990s as a consequence of globalization, neo-liberalism, and, importantly, dwindling public support for higher education. In contrast to the engaged university, this breed of university placed the ethos of entrepreneurship at the center of collegiate life. Taylor explains that “they adopted a growth model and prioritized their relationships with business, intending to develop an intimate relationship that would eventually end in a match [between] the university and business.” To facilitate these economic undertakings, the entrepreneurial university changed the entire culture of the institution: university administrations placed more emphasis, for example, on the natural sciences while the social sciences would shrink or face dismantling. The issues of social justice, equity, democracy, and, thereby, matters involving the community became minor players at these institutions. However, in Taylor’s opinion, the retrenchment of the university from community-wide problems of poverty, bad housing, discrimination, environmental degradation, and climate change is delusional: “They can’t wall themselves off from urban problems that affect the well-being of staff and students and indeed citizens in all quadrants of the city.”

The walling-off syndrome relates to Scobey’s description of the boundaries that thwart university community engagement. “I guess I would call this [separation] the geography of inside the university versus out there in the community. In other words, there’s a boundary that’s problematic and that needs to be traversed,” Scobey explains. The boundaries between universities and place are paradoxical. On one hand, the universities are attached to the place where they are located; for example, they depend on local companies to provide services while most faculty live in local neighborhoods. On the other hand, Scobey points out that

the academy is a detached network of connections that ignore local communities. More value is placed on being the presidents of disciplinary associations than being an important person on your home campus, which is seen as provincial. Given these realities, the model of academic engagement and service-learning represents a counter-normative reality. It says that “the local” is the place where creative and innovative action takes place.

Given the challenges that have been noted, Scobey and Taylor focused on the theme of collaboration as a method that guided the development of their service-learning projects and their focus on why communities matter. Scobey indicates that in democratic ways, collaboration breaks down boundaries that divide the university and communities. Taylor explains, “this monumental task [of reviving poor neighborhoods] can only be accomplished by building a collaborative between the university and distressed communities. There is no other way, if community really matters.”

Going beyond domestic examples of service-learning, Scobey considered the theme of the engaged academy and globalization. Globalization in the digital age has produced new forms of engagement as a result of technologies and social networking. To help us think and respond to these changes, Scobey asks the following questions:

How do we talk about boundaries being erased when every week they are being redrawn in the network of new global communities? Are boundaries the right cartographical metaphor to understand what is the underlying meaning of our work to create the democratic community? What does engaged learning of the engaged academy look like in a world that’s global and affected by digital technology?

He answers his own question by declaring the need for service-learning pedagogy to train students to work not only in rural and urban neighborhoods but also to go further if community building and boundary crossing are the goals that service-learning wishes to achieve. “We need to be and we need for our students to be citizens who are at once local, national, global and digital. We’ve only started to figure out what that multiple kind of citizenship engagement means.”

Professors Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., and David Scobey provided a variety of perspectives and themes underscoring the importance of community for engaged universities involved in service-learning partnerships. For example, the Broadway Park revitalization in Ann Arbor, the urban farming project in Buffalo, and the shift of the university from engaged to entrepreneurial reflect a concern about the importance and welfare of the community. Community is ground zero for all that service-learning can bring when faculty and students help local residents resolve challenges and achieve well-being. To paraphrase Scobey, the work that is completed in poor neighborhoods could not be completed without community partners. Without a doubt, the centrality of community signals the need to elevate and continue the discussion about this essential component of academic engagement. The essentiality of community also demands something of the pedagogy as we train students to be future planners, landscape architects, and architects. Mastering the theories and techniques of each discipline is not sufficient; students must learn how to operate with sensitivity and competence at the community level, where lives are lived and challenges are confronted.

Notes

*  All quotes in this chapter are from the transcripts of the keynote addresses by David Scobey titled “The Place of Engaged Learning in a Glocal and Virtual University” (April 29, 2011) and Henry Louis Taylor Jr. titled “The Engaged v. Entrepreneurial University: How Neighborhoods Matter during the Second National Symposium, Educating at the Boundaries: Community Matters” held in Hunter College, New York City (April 29–30, 2011).

1. This project was undertaken by Scobey at the University of Michigan, where he taught for 16 years.

2. Founded in 1985 by the presidents of Brown, Georgetown, and Stanford Universities and the president of the Education Commission of the States, Campus Compact is the only higher education association that promotes university civic engagement and formation of community partnerships. Approximately 1,200 college and university presidents belong to Campus Compact, and they represent some 6 million students.

3. In 2009, the national Anchor Institutions Task Force, coordinated by the University of Pennsylvania, advised the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) how to form anchor institution–community partnerships. As a think tank, the Task Force helps create long-term strategies and supports the role anchor institutions can play in creating economic and community development.

Section 1

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Partnering to advance productive community dialogues

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Chapter 2

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Partnering, because community matters

Cheryl Doble

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Introduction

Changing practices

Design and planning programs have a long tradition of providing service to communities, but much of that work was based on a service model that treated the community as a client. This expert–client relationship was typically not collaborative, student work took place in the studio, and the relationship generally ended when the service was delivered. Since the 1990s, however, design and planning programs have moved toward service-learning, an educational approach that involves collaboration and exchange between a community partner and an academic partner to address a community-identified problem or need. Service-learning relocates the place of learning from the classroom to the community context, where issues, realities, and variables are shaped, influenced, and activated by real-world values, issues, constraints, and opportunities. This approach meets an academic need to provide critical learning experiences and gain knowledge that is impossible to learn “inside” the conventional classroom. It also meets community needs through co-learning and collaborative problem solving between the community and academic partners that provide usable outcomes that enable the communities to meet identified needs (erasingboundaries.psu.edu).

As the place of learning moves from the classroom to the community, faculty, students, and community members take on new roles and responsibilities. While students practice familiar disciplinary skills, they are faced with complex real-world issues, problems, and community contexts. They are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Why community matters
• 1 Taking stock: Perspectives on community matters
• SECTION 1 Partnering to advance productive community dialogues
• SECTION 2 Original seeing: Beholding community
• SECTION 3 Co-imagining alternative worlds
• SECTION 4 Changing from within: Recasting academic communities
• SECTION 5 Outcomes matter: Creating an evaluative community
• Index