Student success
This project examines the role that community engagement plays in enhancing students’ educational success, with underrepresented students as a primary focus. Specifically, the project investigates the relationship between students’ involvement in a variety of community engagement experiences (e.g., service-learning, community service) and students’ academic performance (grade point average), academic progress (units completed), and college completion. In addition, the project explores the relationship between community engagement participation and several mediators of student success, including sense of belong, boundary spanning, and academic engagement.
Why community engagement?
Research studies have found that the engagement of students in organized community engagement experiences the development of several factors that mediate educational successful, such as academic engagement and motivation, self-efficacy, empowerment, and self-esteem. These findings suggest that engaging students in community engagement — especially those who are less engaged, motivated or confident in their abilities — can enhance students’ capacities to succeed academically. In light of these findings, we are investigating the extent to which different approaches to student community engagement fulfills this promise of educational success.
Why underrepresented students?
Compared to other students, underrepresented students — first generation students, students of color, students from lower socio-economic backgrounds — are disproportionately more likely to lack self-efficacy and motivation for academic learning, and are more likely to drop out of college. Given the potential of community-based learning and engagement experience to influence these factors in positive ways, we are studying the relationships between underrepresented students’ participation in community-engaged learning and their academic engagement, academic success, and overall academic performance (e.g., college completion.
Our assumptions
We believe that through the engagement of students in community-based learning and broader community engagement efforts, colleges and universities can help their students, especially those from underserved communities, see colleges and universities as places that address important societal issues that are meaningful to them. By providing community engagement programming, institutions of higher education can be more effective in helping their students bridge a growing cultural campus-community divide by cultivating partnerships with diverse sets of communities, both those that represent students’ backgrounds as well as those that expand students’ horizons. We believe that campus climates that offer such engagement can help students who aspire to make the world better see higher education as a place to fulfill their goals and dreams.
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Community-university partnerships
The changing nature of community-university relationships
Historical models where universities come in as experts and problem solve for communities are fading, for such approaches do not acknowledge the expertise and knowledge that reside outside of the academy, nor do they adequately engage communities as partners committed to the success of the university created approaches. Instead, they reinforce ideas of university experts as outsiders who come and solve problems as intellectual exercises, writing up their experiences for their colleagues. The First in the World project challenges these traditional approaches to community outreach, and recasts community-university partnerships in a way that is more with missions of universities, which purport to address societal challenges and problems in more collaborative, meaningful, and sustainable ways. The prevalence of this more collaborative, mutually beneficial approach to community/campus partnerships is increasing as universities find their places in societies of an information and urban age. In part, the role of universities has been defined externally, as critics of universities raise questions about whether or not the research produced by universities, and particularly public universities, is actually worth the public investment. The response we provide to those who raise such issues is that universities have always created knowledge that enhances the public good. But now, our approach is to incorporate more fully the participation of community partners in developing, implementing, and assessing university’s partnerships with communities.
‘Mainstreaming’ community engagement
In addition, the First in the World Project seeks to move university community partnerships from the margins to the mainstream of the academy’s work. Historically seen to fulfill universities’ outreach and public service missions, our project focuses on mainstreaming community engagement by integrating it more fully into universities’ research and teaching missions. In particular, our project focuses on increasing ties between universities and communities through the engagement of our students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, in community based educational experiences designed to enhance their educational success while addressing society’s most intractable, grand challenges.
Different approaches for different institutional contexts
As the literature on community engagement work suggests, context matters. We have realized this in our work to date across the six universities that are part of our project. There are qualitative differences in how each institution engages its students with communities. Much of the approach depends on whether or not the universities are located in the communities in which their students live, or whether students move to a different community to attend their universities. The latter types of institutions lessen their involvement in their local communities, and a challenge is primarily about linking students to new communities like their home communities within existing community-university partnerships. In contrast, for the former case, community engagement of students is relatively high, and thus we seek to explore ways in which engagement can help identify ways that help local communities develop a stronger sense of partnership and trust with their local institutions.
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Best practices for student-community engagement
We believe that institutions of higher education can be more effective in helping their students bridge the cultural campus-community divide by building and engaging more deeply in partnerships with diverse sets of communities, both those that represent students’ backgrounds as well as those that expand students’ horizons. We also believe that students from underserved communities need to see colleges and universities as places that address important societal issues that are meaningful to them. We believe that campus climates that offer such engagement can help students who aspire to make the world better see higher education as a place to fulfill their goals and dreams. Through the engagement of students in community-based learning and broader community engagement efforts, colleges and universities can offer academically-based, community-engaged learning opportunities that allow students, especially underrepresented students, to bridge the campus-community cultural divide and to connect their studies with their lives.
This project is focused on securing a stronger linkage between students’ lives within and outside of higher education by improving the ways we engage under-represented students in high impact community-based learning experiences. The project seeks to identify the best practices for building sustainable, mutually beneficial campus-community partnerships and collaborations that facilitate these experiences for students. We explore and illustrate how these campus-community collaborations have the potential for sending a public message about the role colleges and universities can play in actively and meaningfully addressing complex community issues and grand challenges.
Based on findings from the extant research on the effects of community engagement on college student learning and development, we seek to gain a better understanding of how students who participate in well-designed, meaningful community-based learning experiences can:
- improve their understanding of the role and importance of higher education,
- establish a stronger sense of belonging to their college or university,
- enhance their overall engagement with academic work and other aspects of collegiate life,
- persist in their studies, and ultimately find educational success through graduation.