There are many reasons for me to write this book. The titleâHuman Development and Community Engagement through Service-Learning: The Capability Approach and Public Good in Educationâencapsulates what I see as important aspects of community engagement (CE) and service-learning (SL) in higher education, those that are fundamental to achieving the transformative goals of higher education in and through CE and SL. These goals include, among other things, to advance the common good by developing and sustaining communityâuniversity partnerships built on co-knowledge production, dissemination and utilisation; and an ethos of trust, respect, equal voice and deliberation, reciprocity, solidarity and mutual benefits. I first heard about CE and SL with their various monikers or expressions in 2011 when I embarked on higher education studies. Ever since, I have interacted with a number of local and international students, lecturers, practitioners, authors and policy makers involved in CE and SL, attended a number of meetings, symposiums, workshops, conferences and institutional CE and SL forums. I have also taught an SL course for four years at undergraduate level and offered numerous workshops on CE and SL. The conversations that took place in these spaces and my experience of teaching an SL course made me realise that CE and SL have a lot of potential to enable universities to work with external communities to advance human development and the common good. However, these conversations and my experience also made me uncomfortable about how practitioners, administrators, lecturers, students and external communities think, talk about and practise CE and SL. This provoked me to begin to ask some critical and pertinent questions that guided my doctoral degree in Higher Education Studies, which I was awarded in 2017.
Broadly, I asked questions, which are still fresh and unresolved in my mind, and they include but are not limited to: (1) What is the definition of community and who is the community? (2) What parameters are used in identifying the community the university works with and the kind of activities and practices involved? (3) Who serves or researches who in a CE and SL context and why? (4) How are CE and SL coordinated given the number of actors involved and their varying objectives, demands and expectations? (5) Do CE and SL have any influence or impact for the university and communities and how do we know? (6) How can universities use CE and SL to connect with and contribute to the wider society to which they belong? (7) Who benefits most in and through CE and SL? (8) Whose voice is dominant and undermined in CE and SL? (9) Are all CE and SL partners equal? (10) What kind of experiences do diverse students bring into communities, what narratives do they develop in CE and SL, and what influences those experiences? (11) Under what conditions can CE and SL achieve their central aims such as enhancing knowledge projects, pedagogical practices, fostering social justice, cultivating citizenship capacities and developing common goodâoriented graduates and professionals? (12) Can universities be contributing to reproducing and entrenching inequalities and injustice under the banner of CE and SL? (13) Are CE and SL about going to the community to search or look for poor people and their challenges? (14) How do we establish a CE and SL partnership where partners can work together, not just as a one-off but as a purposeful and systematic programme of transformative change? (15) Do definitional dimensions of CE and SL revolve around a knowledge project that is inclusive and socially conscious? (16) What does it mean to be an engaged university in a post-modern world of the knowledge economy, digitalisation and the emerging notion of a 4th industrial revolution (4IR)? (17) Can CE and SL enable universities to develop the kind of students needed in the twenty-first century and in an increasingly complex and unequal world? (18) Using South Africa as a main frame of reference, how are universities in the Global South1 contributing to help to develop communities and the wider society in their own âGlobal Southâ way?
Nevertheless, the questions listed above are not new, as they have dominated local and international debates about CE and SL and the broader social purposes of higher education for the past couple of decades. Each question I have identified here could serve as topic of a whole paper or even a book. In this book, I engage precisely with the theory and philosophy of knowledge of CE and SL by touching on some of these questions. This book sets out to provide an analysis of two key issues pertaining to CE and SL. One is to offer an expansive understanding of the values of CE and SL from the standpoints of human development and the common good. Second, it offers alternative ways of thinking and re-imagining CE and SL, particularly when they are designed and implemented in the context of extreme poverty, inequalities and power differentials, which are some of the characteristics of Africa and South Africa. In doing so, the book is crafted in a constant state of questioning the normative, dominant and hegemonic ways of thinking and practising CE and SL. I deliberately stay away from the impractical disciplinary division and separation of the practices of CE and SL, as well as the pedestrian and unnecessary distinctions of teaching, research and scholarship. In my view, these three are legs of the same table. The broader contribution that CE and SL offer is that they unify the epistemic, axiological and praxis, fundamental issues which often are separated because of artificial boundaries between people, institutions and societies. CE and SL unify knowledge and practices within the, to use an agrarian and Bourdieuan concept, âfieldâ of human development. Thus, I unapologetically try to uncover CE and SL processes and practices that we take for granted despite their unfortunate consequences for the people involved. While I draw from my own experience and positionality, I do not dismiss the foundational undergirding of and approaches to CE and SL; instead, I intend to engage with topics that we often overlook when we design, implement and evaluate CE and SL. To this end, the book takes a humanistic approach to CE and SL to inform policy and practices that strive to make CE and SL more inclusive, empowering and equitable in pursuit of human development and the common good. While arguing for such critical purposes, I also warn against positioning CE and SL as a panacea for addressing deep-seated social, economic, political, cultural and environmental (ecological) challenges facing society today. Rather, the book intends to argue for CE and SL as potential mechanisms for advancing human development and the common good under certain conditions.
In writing this book, I became somewhat overwhelmed by the breadth of the subjects and the amount of work produced by CE and SL authors in a higher education context. Making a decision about what to exclude proved to be more difficult as much as deciding what to include. Three substantive areas receive less attention, particularly from the Global South. These are a critical understanding of CE and SL and their trajectory in the African higher education context; the contribution of CE and SL to advancing human development and the common good and the enabling and inhibiting conditions; and the ongoing paucity of the external communityâs voices and experiences of CE and SL in the literature. The last item on the absence of community voices is increasingly worrying me and I am inclined to support Maybachâs (1996, 227â228) view:
We have ignored the effects and voices of the service recipients [partners] to the point where we determine our involvement on the basis of the cause for intervention rather than really examining the effects of our service [or partnerships].
While the questions I raised and Maybachâs comment are the raison dâĂȘtre of this book, overall I approach CE and SL as a repertoire and/or pathways through which universities and community partners can work together to contribute to human development and the common good. I hope that, because of reading this book, you will start to appreciate the value of CE and SL. In addition, the book will enable you to understand the complexities and tensions of C...