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COMMUNITY-ENGAGED COURSES

PLAYBOOKGeorgia Institute of Technology, Serve-Learn-Sustain

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT 4

GLOSSARY 6

HOW TO USE THIS PLAYBOOK 7

PRINCIPLES 8

PLAYS FOR COMMUNITY-ENGAGED COURSES 9

BUILD A STRONG FOUNDATION 10

1. Create a Tentative Plan 10

2. Identify Stakeholders 11

3. Learn More 12

4. Select a Community Partner 13

5. Plan Together 14

6. Put It in Writing 15

SUPPORT STUDENTS AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS 17

1. Set Mutually Beneficial Expectations 17

2. Establish Partners and Students as Leaders 18

3. Monitor Progress 19

4. Address Challenges 19

5. Evaluate 20

6. Wrap Up 21

GROW THE RELATIONSHIP 22

1. Solicit Honest Feedback 22

2. Document The Work 23

3. Spread the Word 24

4. Make New Connections 25

5. Share Resources 25

6. Stay in Touch 26

www.serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/teaching-resources-toolkit 2

ACTION GUIDES 28

1. Building New Relationships 29

2. Collaborator Agreement Template 31

3. Conflict Resolution 34

4. Cooperative Community Partnerships 38

5. Critical Community Engagement 42

6. Documentation 45

7. Dos and Don'ts for Community Engagement 46

8. Georgia Tech Public Relations and Media 48

9. Getting to Know Community-Based Organizations 50

10. Participatory Action Research 52

11. Pre-Engagement Training 57

12. Project Planning and Management 66

13. Reflection 69

WORKS REFERENCED 72


ABOUTOne of Georgia Tech’s most important relationships is with the city of Atlanta. Atlanta, one of the fastest growing cities in the country, is home to nearly 250 neighborhoods, each with their own distinct histories and identities and where countless community groups are working towards positive social change. New developments such as the Atlanta BeltLine, the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the re-development of Northside Drive and other changes in and around Georgia Tech’s campus make Tech’s engagement in Atlanta’s communities more important than ever.

This playbook has been developed, in part, based on the Community Engagement Playbook the authors wrote through a collaborative process with stakeholders across Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods—the neighborhoods adjacent to campus—where new plans and changes are currently underfoot—to facilitate constructive engagement and to mobilize community-led development and change.

Based on the successful receipt of the playbook in public offices and neighborhood associations across the city, the playbook has been adapted to serve as a Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS) tool, to help Georgia Tech faculty and staff design and lead successful community engagement initiatives that follow best practices for working with community partners.

In addition, the playbook and the concept of community-engaged courses has been developed to follow SLS’ framework for high-quality service learning and community engagement. Important features include:

Addresses human and community priorities as defined by the community (local, state, national, or global), often through experiential learning opportunities.

Structured reflection explicitly designed to foster learning and development that connects the engagement experiences with course goals, including learning about the larger social issues behind the needs an engagement is addressing.

Reciprocity between the community partners and the course so that both community priorities and student learning goals are addressed and all partners involved contribute to determining what is to be learned as well as engage in learning themselves.” 1

The playbook emphasizes long-term relationships and community engagements, whose very structures help create and nurture sustainable communities. Successful community

1 See: Jacoby, Barbara and Associates. Service-Learning in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publications, 1996), qtd in: Georgia Tech, “SLS Learning Outcomes,” https://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/documents/sls_learning_outcomes_cetl_teaching_principles_0.pdf.


http://ourcommunity.is/engaged/

engagements should lead to learning and growth for faculty and students, but they should also produce results that community members, leaders and organizations are happy with.


GLOSSARYCommunity-engaged teaching/research: The incorporation of course-based or research activities that involve collaborations between faculty and/or staff, the students, and at least one local community-based organization and that contribute to public good.

Critical community engagements: Community-engaged teaching or research that address social justice issues and focus on contributing to social change, challenging traditional power dynamics, and building strong relationships.2

Community partner (“partner”) or community-based organization: We define these as organizations that work to contribute to the common good in a specific community by addressing issues of social justice; due to the ethical considerations involved, our emphasis is on grassroots, community-led organizations (as opposed to government agencies or major nonprofits).

Projects: We use the word projects to refer to well-thought-out, planned activities that are conducted over time (either in a course or as an ongoing research project) that provide reciprocal benefits to faculty and community partners. Projects can produce various outcomes, including: reports, interactions, events, experiences, or simply be designed to build relationships for future collaboration.

Stakeholder: Any individual or group that will be affected by, or can affect, the problem or issue of focus, the outcome of a particular engagement process, or the ongoing work of an organization.

For other key terms and concepts used throughout this playbook, see: Serve-Learn-Sustain, “Big Ideas,” https://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/big-ideas .

2 See Mitchell, Tania D, "Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models," Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 14, 2 (2008): 50-65.


https://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/big-ideas

HOW TO USE THIS PLAYBOOKThis playbook is designed as a resource for faculty and staff seeking out strategies on how to design successful engagement processes to reach higher levels of community engagement in their teaching, learning, and research. The emphasis is on teaching but many of the plays, and a few of the accompanying guides, are equally relevant for community-based research. Strong engagement is built on authentic relationships, shared commitments, and ongoing dialogue. As you look through the plays described here, keep in mind that not every play is relevant for every project or course. The playbook is more like a collection of key ingredients than a recipe. Depending on the task at hand, the discipline you are working from, available time and resources, and the identified issues of the community, different plays will be needed. This playbook includes the following material:

Overarching ethical principles that have been adapted from SLS’ Big Ideas – key concepts that we teach and research at Tech that will help prepare students to create sustainable communities. The principles guide the work of community engagement and how to integrate teaching and research responsibly.

Plays are strategies rooted in best practices that direct engagement work. The plays are arranged in six essential areas of activity.

Each play is accompanied by a checklist to provide examples and more detailed guidance to make it easy to implement the play.

Some plays also have dedicated action guides with thorough details on a specific task or topic within a play.

Each of these steps provides more detail: principles provide guidance on the plays, each of the plays is composed of a series of steps in the checklists, and some of the steps have dedicated guides to aid implementation. As you move through the playbook, you will find visual icons corresponding to specific principles next to the plays that feature these principles. This will help you select plays to implement specific principles during a community engagement project, course, or research initiative.


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/big-ideas

PRINCIPLESValue Community: Seek to understand community members’ individual and collective goals, needs, and skills. Build projects based on respect for the work of community partners and fulfill a community need as defined by the community. Ensure that the impact your project will have on the community is one that builds from and complements this work and that there is community buy-in for your involvement. Community members should be involved in every stage of the project or course to facilitate greater cultural understanding, ethical practices, and authentic relationships.

Honor Multiple Ways of Knowing: Seek out those who are often excluded from academic partnerships; honor their ways of working and knowing (e.g. experiential, spiritual) however different than your own. Teach students to value multiple ways of knowing and learning before sending them out to work with community partners. Provide equal access and opportunity to all by giving diverse groups the support they need to be actively involved; remove and do not allow discrimination or barriers.

Develop Long-term Relationships: Seek out partners with whom you envision building long-term relationships; work to understand partner’s goals and ensure that student participation will benefit the community group; emphasize the importance of engaging in work that benefits the community partner, is sustainable, and connects students to the partner’s mission; set outcome goals that will build the capacities of the community to take over and build from the work completed during the engagement.

Work Collaboratively: Promote and invite accountability, and openness in conversations and deliberations; create a culture in which you, partners, and students share information—on agreements, transactions, practices, research, and rules and regulations—and welcome and act on feedback; establish clear communication channels. Aim for reciprocity in relationships; students, faculty, and community members should act as both teachers and learners.


PLAYS FOR COMMUNITY-ENGAGED COURSESThe plays in this guide have been clustered into three areas of concentration:

Build a strong foundation, including the plays: Create a Tentative Plan, Identify Stakeholders, Learn About Needs and Interests, Select Community Partner, Co-create Goals, and Make an Agreement

Support students and partners, including the plays: Set Expectations, Establish Partners and Students as Leaders, Monitor Progress, Address Challenges, Evaluate, and Wrap Up

Grow the relationship, including the plays: Solicit Honest Feedback, Document, Spread the Word, Make New Connections, Share Resources, and Stay in Touch

These areas are to help you focus your attention on the pieces of community engagement most relevant to your teaching and research. Whether you are starting fresh with a new community partner, and you need to establish a basis of trust and shared understanding, or whether you are continuing a long-standing partnership, the plays are a flexible set of strategies and concrete steps you can combine to help ensure a successful and sustainable community partnership.


BUILD A STRONG FOUNDATION BEFORE THE COURSE

From creating a plan for your course that incorporates the key elements of engaged teaching to selecting and planning with a new community partner, this set of plays offers tips and tools to prepare you for the start of the semester.

1. CREATE A TENTATIVE PLAN

2. IDENTIFY STAKEHOLDERS

3. LEARN ABOUT NEEDS AND INTERESTS

4. SELECT COMMUNITY PARTNER

5. CO-CREATE GOALS

6. MAKE AN AGREEMENT

1. Create a Tentative Plan

Based on learning outcome goals, create a tentative plan for your community engagement project. Focus on a specific issue or task for which clear assignments can be given, but wait to decide on specifics until you’ve found a community partner (you’ll need to collaborate with them on the details). Be open to creative ideas for making your content connect to community organizations’ needs (e.g. a statistics class working with a criminal justice reform initiative to analyze data).

Checklist for creating a plan:

What curricular goals will this project meet and how will I measure them?

What do you want the students to learn?

Which SLS learning outcomes will the course be designed to teach and how will I measure them?

How might the process or final product appeal to potential community partners?


How large is the scope of the community engagement component of this course?

How can I structure the project to ensure accountability and high-quality student work?

How hands-on should I be and how much should I leave up to students and partners (this will likely depend on the level of the course)?

What support can I seek out to help me design the basic framework for this engagement project? For example, how can SLS’ Service Learning and Community Engagement Nuts and Bolts help me?

Is it possible to plan this course so that my relationship with the partner can extend for more than one semester? (Feedback from community organizations is that semester-long engagements are often too short3).

How might I structure the course so that community partners can develop or co-develop the details of the engagement project?

Guide: Project Planning and Management

2. Identify Stakeholders

Identify and get to know the community members, organizations, and agencies working closely on work relevant to the content of your course and take note of their specific interests and positions in the community. Talk to a broad range of people and ask questions to identify patterns of leadership and community support for specific initiatives or organizations. Consider and get to know a diverse set of stakeholders—especially those who may not be actively engaged or easily reached.

Checklist for identifying stakeholders:

What impact(s) could the project have on the community at large (both in the short term and long term as well as both positive and negative)?

How can I effectively partner to maximize impact?

Are any of my colleagues currently working closely on the same issue/topic? Could they be a partner or support the work in some way? Do they have strong existing relationships with community partners that would make sense to build upon?

3 See Restaino, Jessica, and Laurie Cella. Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-learning and the University (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013); Stoecker, Randy, Elizabeth A. Tryon, and Amy Hilgendorf, The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009).


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/faculty-resource-guide


Which stakeholder groups have the capacity to take an active role in the project (see SLS Big Idea: Asset-based Community Development)?

Could this project partner with multiple groups?

a. Is there a respected coalition of organizations already in place?

b. Would having multiple partners be feasible based on my course curriculum and time restraints?

c. What resources will be required to successfully have desired impact?

Are there online groups that work with the issue? Does it make sense to include an online engagement component, either with a community-based partner or by working with an online community?

3. Learn More

Once you’ve established the broad strokes of your project and identified stakeholders, begin the process of learning more about the specific, and diverse, interests involved. Patterns of leadership and community buy-in are never simple and require some careful attention. Laying the groundwork ahead of time can lead to a stronger long-term relationship with community partners and better results for your collaborative projects and engagements.

Checklist for learning more about possible partners:

Start your search with the end goals in mind. Most of the time you will want a community partner that represents the broad interests of the community, works to be inclusive to all community members, and is well respected by key stakeholders.

For your purposes “the community” may be an entire neighborhood or it could be a more specific segment of the neighborhood’s population (e.g. the formerly incarcerated).

Plan to do background research, listen to and learn from a diverse set of stakeholders, and ask questions about the work currently being done and how it is perceived of by a cross section of residents.

Learn about organizational history and any history with Georgia Tech, funding streams, and structures.

Attend community meetings such as a neighborhood association or an NPU meeting or a topic-specific meeting (e.g. on the city’s plans to redevelop a park).

Ask those with connections for introductions to key contacts.


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/asset-based-community-development

Bring different groups together for a meeting or an event to discuss the topic/project and how it might be useful to a broad set of partners.

Actively work to ensure that you seek out possible partners that will allow you to reach the less accessible stakeholders.

When describing your project to possible partners:

Keep in mind that community partners will be deciding whether it is in their interests to work with you as well and it is okay for them to say no or not at this time.

Be transparent about your teaching and research goals, limitations, and students’ skill levels and awareness about the issue/s.

Emphasize your flexibility and willingness to structure the project so it will benefit partners and so it is not a burden on their time.

Be prepared to talk about how community organizations and members are often over-researched and under-supported and explain how your work/project aims to change that historical dynamic.

Explain that once a partnership is established, you will work closely with them to co-create the project design (goals, scope, student expectations, procedures, expectations for final deliverables, and grading student work).

Keep in mind that strong relationships with the right people/organizations are key for high quality engagements (see guide to Critical Community Engagement).

Guide: Getting to Know Community-based Organizations;

See also SLS’ “Learn More About Community Organizations” Tool

4. Select a Community Partner

Carefully select partners based on your background research and planning, as well as anticipated future community engagement goals. If possible, work with an array of partners to ensure representation from diverse interests, needs, and ways of working. Choose partners that have broad community support, but also that you connect with and can imagine working with in the future.

Checklist for establishing strong partnerships:

Find partners that can work on the project at hand, have a direct interest in the learning goals of the course, but that also share interests that may lend themselves to future


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/learning-more-about-community-organizations

collaborations.

Mutually agree on project scope and purpose, a set of shared values, measurable outcomes, and accountability measures.

Select partners whose strengths you draw from but also aim to increase one another’s capacities.

Balance power, and establish transparent and open processes for decision making and feedback.

Communicate clearly and openly, working to understand one another’s needs and interests and developing communication channels that work for everyone.

Gauge whether partners can work directly with students to set expectations and identify tasks appropriate to the course and the students’ skills and abilities.

Ensure that partner organizations and point people are accessible, i.e., offices are close to MARTA and ADA accessible, students will have an identified point of contact who is able to respond in a timely manner, the organization has appropriate liability practices, and procedures in place for crisis management.

Guide: Building New Relationships

5. Plan Together

To act transparently and build trust, create a process through which community partners can be co-collaborators. Share curricular and SLS learning outcomes and other goals. Ask partners to help set project parameters, define roles and responsibilities, and add their individual goals to the syllabus. Set clear expectations and structures and be open about any limitations with respect to resources and your own and students’ skills and time.

Checklist for co-creating a strong engagement project:

Create a plan that includes orientation and trainings, discussion and dialogue, and informal opportunities for connection that help to facilitate the development of authentic relationships (see: guide to Critical Community Engagement).

Outline the project specifications during initial conversations and set expectations for the course (share syllabi, roles, and schedules, plans for orientation, site visits, classroom visits, etc.).

Allow partners to add their own list of goals but work with them to be sure the goals align with the students’ abilities and are ambitious yet attainable.


If working with multiple partners, use a working group session to prioritize the goals most important to different organizations.

Get feedback on refined, prioritized goals and project parameters from other faculty members, community partners, and SLS staff, including our Service Learning and Partnerships Specialist, Dr. Ruth Yow.

Remind partner/s that you will likely learn from the project and may need to shift the process as you encounter challenges or incorporate feedback.

Remember, creating projects that facilitate student learning and growth and benefit community partners is difficult and doing it well takes a lot of practice, refinement, and learning.

Guide: Cooperative Community Partnerships

Guide: Dos and Don’ts for Community Engagement

6. Put It in Writing

Build partnerships with a clear governance and decision-making structure built on: trust and respect, a shared set of ethical values, diversity of skills and experiences, and a written agreement with specific and documented plans for the course.

Checklist for creating strong agreements:

At an early planning meeting, outline individual and group goals and sketch out preliminary plans.

Share syllabi, decide on specific roles and responsibilities, a timeline, and protocols for student-partner, student-faculty, and partner-faculty check ins.

Remember, if during initial meetings it becomes clear that goals are not aligned, don’t be afraid to decide that the partnership doesn’t make sense; be willing to accept if a partner says that the partnership isn’t beneficial for them.

In the written agreement:

Clearly define each stakeholder’s specific roles and responsibilities.

Determine the resources (including funds) available for the project and how they will be allocated.

Create a set structure for decision making and a policy for conflict resolution.

Identify and plan for potential constraints and challenges.


mailto:[email protected]

Establish a process for providing one another with constructive feedback and continuously working to improve the partnership and engagement.

Describe in writing the plans for sharing benefits of the partnership, accomplishments, and resources.

Include a plan for conflict resolution and a plan for dissolving the partnership/project if conflict cannot be resolved or either party decides that partnership is not a good fit.

Guide: Collaborator Agreement Template


SUPPORT STUDENTS AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS DURING THE COURSE

This set of plays focuses on the nuts and bolts of running successful community-engaged courses and offers suggestions to help you support students and partners throughout the course and achieve high quality final results.

1. SET MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL EXPECTATIONS

2. ESTABLISH PARTNERS AND STUDENTS AS LEADERS

3. MONITOR PROGRESS

4. ADDRESS CHALLENGES

5. EVALUATE

6. WRAP UP

1. Set Mutually Beneficial Expectations

At the outset of a community-engaged course, define clear engagement and learning goals and outline responsibilities for all involved. Provide students with the details and offer orientation, trainings, and readings that fill in the big picture (i.e. organization’s mission, the service focus area, cultural context); connect the content to the engagement work and answer the question “why community engagement?” Plan on dedicating class time for pre-engagement training/s and for an orientation to your partner/s.

Checklist for orienting students to an engaged course:

Include the service learning expectations and definition in the syllabus (see SLS Big Ideas: Mutually Beneficial Partnerships)

Along with a syllabus, provide roles and responsibilities, and an engagement-specific schedule

Suggest a clear set of communication practices and guidelines (information on the


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/mutually-beneficial-partnerships

organization’s contact point person, how often to check in via e-mail/phone, meet in person, etc.)

Share relevant engagement resources and trainings (see the SLCE Nuts and Bolts )

Take students on at least one faculty-led partner site visit or orientation or bring the partner into the classroom

Anticipate common challenges and offer support for them (see the Pre-engagement Training and Conflict Resolution guides)

Match students and partner needs through a clear and transparent process that balances fit with potentially changing circumstances.

Guide: Pre-engagement Training

2. Establish Partners and Students as Leaders

Break down some of the walls between students, faculty, and partners by working to democratize decision making and leadership. Train students to acknowledge and understand how historical and current patterns of power, privilege, and oppression impact community-engaged work. Ensure that students see the community-based partner as a co-teacher of the course. You can achieve this through written expectations and, more importantly, by modeling a flattening of the relationship between professor and student, and professor and community partner.

Checklist for flattening relationships:

Use pre-engagement trainings and orientations to explain to students the structure of the engagement, and the cooperative partnership you have established with the community group.

Ensure that students have some control over the design of their specific projects.

Whenever possible, encourage and invite students to initiate partnerships and projects (perhaps best-suited for graduate students or students you have developed a relationship with through other engaged courses).

Give community members and partners leadership roles.

Ask partners to give a lecture in one of your classes on campus or visit campus for an activity.

a. Emphasize and model your belief in the equal importance of the knowledge and expertise of community members in your teaching.



b. Step back and learn from community partners when you are attending their on-site orientations or other community-based events.

Guide: Critical Community Engagement

3. Monitor Progress

Throughout the course, check in with students and partners, ask pointed questions about how the relationship and projects are going, have students submit benchmark assignments to monitor project progress, provide students and partners with opportunities to reflect not only on their projects but also on their personal experiences and growth—on how their work may or may not be contributing to social change, challenging traditional power dynamics, and building strong relationships—and model this reflection yourself.

Checklist for monitoring progress:

Complete regular progress reports of student and project development.

Include critical reflection assignments and in-class conversations throughout the course (see guide to Reflection, SLS Big Ideas: Reciprocal Teaching and Learning, SLS Tool: Community Engagement Reflection).

Remember that the best reflection may happen during informal conversations or discussions, make time and space for these to occur and adjust as needed; be prepared to document evaluations provided in these moments.

Ask students and partners to complete pre- and mid-course short reflections.

Document the various roles and reflections in your own engaged teaching journal.

Guide: Reflection

4. Address Challenges

Challenges will undoubtedly arise. In fact, they are often a natural and healthy part of the process of building authentic relationships, which are integral to community engagement. At times, unforeseen challenges will come up quickly and unexpectedly. To successfully manage conflict, be in close touch with students and partners, remain flexible, and view the process of conflict resolution as an opportunity for growth and learning.


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/community-engagement-reflection

http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/reciprocal-teaching-and-learning

Checklist for planning for and working through conflict:

First, recognize that conflict is:

Normal, and while uncomfortable, often an important part of collaborative processes.

Often caused by and exacerbated by differences in communication style and approach.

Very common in community engagement as power, privilege, and different cultural and class-based norms of communicating and working come into play.

Not always due to a deeply rooted problem, and may be about resolving miscommunication or mismatched expectations.

To deal with challenges:

Depending on the situation, consider adding in a relevant training (for example, differences in communication or work styles; conflict management or on non-violent communication—see guide to Conflict Resolution. See also our Cross-Cultural Communication tool).

Create a safe space for students and partners to share issues they may experience or communication challenges.

Model talking about issues you’ve had in similar circumstances.

Use reflection assignments to bring up points of tension or difficulties and facilitate dialogue around them.

Make clear the mechanisms students and partners can use to resolve conflict.

Encourage perspective taking; help students see the partners’ priorities and help the partners understand the students’ schedule.

Guide: Conflict Resolution

5. Evaluate

Along with including structured reflections throughout the course, ask students and partners to complete evaluations once the engagement is finished. Courses should be evaluated for specific SLS student learning outcomes as well as for your own goals. Take time yourself, once you have some space from the course and the evaluations, to evaluate the partnership, the structure and content of the course, student learning outcomes, and plan your next course accordingly.


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/documents/sls_learning_outcomes_final_5.5.2017.pdf

http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/cross-cultural-communication

http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/cross-cultural-communication

6. Wrap Up

Bring students, partners, other community contacts, and colleagues together to celebrate concrete project achievements and the personal, academic, and community-led learning and teaching. Take time to talk about accomplishments but save time for informal conversations, since it is during these moments—through jokes, stories, and common and enjoyable experiences—that strong relationships are built.

Checklist for wrapping up a community-engaged course:

Celebrate student and community achievements at a party/reception.

Encourage students to think about how they might want to build from, continue, or pivot from the work (the best community engaged teaching projects help guide students in thinking about their future role in volunteer social justice projects or professional work).

Host final student presentations on campus and invite partners and anyone in their network to the presentations or events (see guide to Georgia Tech Public Relations and Media for tips on event planning on campus).

Attend community-based events or co-host them at your partner’s site.

Use the events to generate publicity; share the projects online, in the community, and at the university.

If you won’t have much time at the end of the semester, ask students to weave celebrations and final presentations with partners into their semester planning and final projects.

Guide: Georgia Tech Public Relations and Media


GROW THE RELATIONSHIP AFTER THE COURSE

This series of plays prepares you for the important steps after the course is finished. Among the plays are tips and tools for seeking out additional feedback, documenting the work you’ve completed, encouraging direct, long-term relationships between partners and students, and staying in touch.

1. SOLICIT HONEST FEEDBACK

2. DOCUMENT THE WORK

3. SPREAD THE WORD

4. MAKE NEW CONNECTIONS

5. SHARE RESOURCES

6. STAY IN TOUCH

1. Solicit Honest Feedback

While you may have had partners and students reflect and evaluate the projects and their experiences to some degree during the course, after the course is the best time to work with community organizations to evaluate whether the relationship worked for them. Getting substantive and honest feedback from partners is essential to doing high quality engaged teaching and research. Find ways to help partners give you real feedback, even if those conversations are sometimes difficult.

Checklist for getting honest feedback:

Take into account that research on service learning and community engagement reveals that faculty and student experiences are often very different from those of community organizations, and that community organizations are often more critical of


these partnerships than they will say publicly.4

Ask those you worked closest with for feedback but also consider having a small get-together with frontline staff, members, or volunteers at the organization (since experience with you, the students, and project may not be felt evenly); often these are the people working the most closely with the students.

Speak with contacts at other community-based organizations that work with your partner to assess the value of the work or the experience for the community-at-large.

Consider asking the organization to do their own evaluation of the partnership/project and share the results with you; this is especially relevant if they’ve taken an active role in developing or co-developing the project and/or if your partnership with them is long-term.

If you can work with a student assistant or someone else, consider having an evaluator (that is not you) do interviews and host feedback sessions.

Use a simple and short blind survey post-course and follow up with your organizational contacts for a more in-depth conversation if the results surprise you.

2. Document the Work

Document the engagement evaluations and reflections, student and partner work, the process, your own thinking and learning, visual material, and any other thoughts you have on the process or outcomes. Community partners will appreciate you taking the time to save and share notes and material. While your time may be limited during the semesters, plan to document the work you’ve done after the course is finished.

Checklist for documenting the work:

Gather all the project and engagement materials (including written reflections, visual material, annotations, and metadata), save it in one place and share it with partners.

Provide partners with a timeline and set of steps (e.g. how to access and save files on a shared drive) for submitting documentation materials (send reminders to help them plan).

Include any critical reflections and feedback that is appropriate to share.

4 See: Randy, Elizabeth A. Tryon, and Amy Hilgendorf, The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009); Mitchell, Tania D, "Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models," Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 14, 2 (2008): 50-65.


Keep in mind, this is an especially important ongoing practice for longer-term relationships and engagements, as individual student projects can often get lost if not saved every few months and shared in a single repository.

Consider building the documentation work into student assignments and/or final projects to save yourself and partners time at the end.

Guide: Documentation

3. Spread the Word

Work with the community partner after the course to decide how and what you will share publicly about process and project outcomes. Plan to share results and lessons learned with the communities you worked in, colleagues, SLS, and the university; but also aim to reach a wider audience through a press release to media outlets in Atlanta or to everyone working on similar engagement projects around the country at national conferences or events.

Checklist for getting out the word:

Use your networks to share results and project frameworks.

Consider different methods to get out the word based on the audience you want to reach (e.g. report, presentation, storytelling event, series of images, mural, etc.).

Consider communication channels nontraditional in your field.

Advertise through social media, through Institute Communications or Government and Community Relations within Georgia Tech, and any community-based avenues.

Contact Kristina Chatfield at Serve-Learn-Sustain to get on the SLS blog or newsletter.

Consider co-writing something with the community partner, such as a case study or critical piece in one of the academic journals that focus on community-engaged teaching and/or research.

Guide: Georgia Tech Public Relations and Media


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4. Make New Connections

You, your students, and the community organization spent a lot of time together; you did a lot of work to build trust and create authentic relationships. As you transition from this project to another, or to working with another community partner, encourage and grow connections and relationships, even if they are changing in scope or nature.

Checklist for making connections:

Connect partners to other people and resources that will help them strengthen their work and mission.

Suggest specific ways that projects or personal ties between students and the partner can grow from what you started.

Make introductions to colleagues, possible funders you meet, student groups, and your own current and future students that might be interested in continuing to work with the partner.

Think about connections you can make outside of Georgia Tech (for example, do any of your neighbors work in a related field and do they know about the community organization?).

Ask yourself:

Can the engagement project you worked on help the organization gain more visibility or set the organization up to make stronger city-wide, regional, or national connections?

Do you work with other groups or individuals that the organization may benefit from being connected to?

Can you directly help the organization achieve any of its top goals or priorities for growth or change (if you haven’t already asked about their longer-term organizational goals, this would be a great time)?

5. Share Resources

Community-based work is often under-funded. Think about how you can contribute to the organization’s long-term funding and sustainability strategies. Leverage your role and connections at Georgia Tech to help them with specific needs.


Checklist for sharing resources:

Seek out information about the various funds available to support community-engagement partnerships at SLS and elsewhere on campus. The SLCE Nuts and Bolts is a good place to get information on funding.

Ask the community organization about their specific resource needs and think about whether you know any departments or resources at Tech, or through other funding or resource connections, that you can connect them to.

Offer to help them find a meeting space on campus whenever that would be convenient/appropriate.

Seek out ways to partner with them on grants and other funded partnership projects.

Share relevant campus events with your partner and invite them to come to events and workshops that might benefit their work.

6. Stay in Touch

In some cases, the end of a course means the end of a particular engagement, either because that is the engagement model you’ve developed or because the content focus will not be relevant to your future teaching or research. In other cases, you will be working with one community partner in courses year after year. No matter what, create a plan to stay in touch, even if this just means grabbing a coffee on a regular basis.

Checklist for staying in touch:

Create calendar reminders to reach out to community partners on a regular basis.

Invite them to your events and attend their events.

Promote their work and events via your communication channels and ask them to do the same.

Talk them up in reports, at conferences, and to other colleagues.

Invite them to present with you about work you’ve done together at events or conferences.

Provide them with support to evaluate the longer-term impacts of your co-led engagements.

When relevant to your work, consider expanding on community-engaged courses to more intensive community-based research projects or community-led Participatory Action Research (see guide to Participatory Action Research and SLS Big Idea:


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/slce-nuts-bolts

Participatory Research).

Guide: Participatory Action Research


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/participatory-research

COMMUNITY-ENGAGED COURSES

PLAYBOOKACTION GUIDES


BUILDING NEW RELATIONSHIPSBUILD A STRONG FOUNDATION: Select Community

Partner

Strong relationships are essential for high-quality community engagements. Building and maintaining relationships can be challenging and time intensive, but these tips should help you:

Consider building new relationships based on relationships that your colleagues, friends, and/or faculty and staff at SLS have already developed. SLS’s Service Learning and Partnership Specialist, Dr. Ruthie Yow, can help you connect with community or institutional contacts.

A few faculty members we interviewed for this playbook talked about building their community-based relationships with people they have personal connections with. If your personal network allows for this, take advantage of it. Building from a current and authentic connection is ideal.

SLS has established relationships with a number of community organizations and their key members or staff. If before starting a community-engaged course you would like to invite someone from a specific organization or working on a content-specific issue to your course or would like to plan a site visit to them, reach out to SLS to connect with Dr. Ruthie Yow.

Even when you aren’t working on a community-engaged course, maintain the relationship by checking in every few months, sending e-mail updates, including partners on updates on your work or life, and attending community-based events.

Seek to create and maintain authentic and mutually beneficial relationships based on dialogue, solidarity (or a commitment to continuing social justice work after the engagement), and true connection that builds off an acknowledgement of who you are “and the biases that shape [your] interactions.”5

Work on relationship building through both content and process (the ways in which you relate to and connect with students and how you encourage them to connect to partners). Use both content and process to explore issues of identity, personal and

5 Mitchell, Tania D, “Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models,” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 14, no. 2 (Spring 2008).


collective histories, and privilege and oppression.

Encourage students to continue to work with partners and/or for social change and social justice once the community-engaged course has ended.

Consider creating a Cooperative Partnership (see Guide to Cooperative Partnerships link) to address some of the power differentials and to help create authenticity in the relationship through a more equal partnership.

Remember that due to various structural issues, trust with community organizations is often fragile and you will have to continuously work to maintain and strengthen it. Do not be surprised to learn that trust is not always a given or a constant, even in long-term relationships.


COLLABORATOR AGREEMENT TEMPLATEBUILD A STRONG FOUNDATION: Put It in Writing

This agreement constitutes a description of a relationship between

__________________________, and _________________ _________. It outlines the intent of ________________ __________, and _________________ _________ to collaborate in mutually beneficial activities in the interest of furthering the goals of both parties.

It is understood that this agreement is a letter of intent only and the participants agree to proceed in good faith to determine the feasibility of the collaboration described here. No participant shall have any legal obligation to the other as a result of this agreement other than as expressly stated herein. This agreement does not constitute a binding agreement nor does it constitute an agreement to enter into an agreement.

1.0 Intent of Participants

It is the intent of ________________ __________, and _________________ _________ to participate in a collaborative effort to ________________________________________________________. The two entities will also work together to _ ________________________________________. This collaboration will result in the following intended outcomes: _________ ___ __________________________________________________.

2.0 Responsibilities and Timeline

Describe how responsibilities are divided and the timeline for completing agreed upon work.

3.0 Agreement Termination

The undertakings of the parties described in this agreement will expire on _______ __________ Either party may terminate its continued participation in the discussions contemplated by this agreement, and the agreement, at any time and for any reason or no reason by giving the other party written notice of the termination. Signed, emailed or faxed documents shall constitute originals and written notice.


4.0 Points of Contact

Each participant agrees to provide a point of contact, who will serve as the responsible person to ensure that activities outlined in this agreement are accomplished. For __________________________, the person is ______________________. For __________________________, the person is _____________________.

5.0 Communications

Communications between _________________________and __________________________will be accomplished through ____________________________________.

6.0 Fees & Expenses

___________ _______________ shall pay for expenses in connection with the proposed project but not to exceed ______ and pending discussion and approval from the __________________________ (e.g. working team) and the __________ _(e.g. community-based coalition).

7.0 Confidentiality

___ _______________________and __________________ ________ agree that no press release or other media publication, academic paper or presentation, or other general public announcement (including in any trade journal or other publication) of the transaction shall be made without the prior written consent of each of the parties hereto.

8.0 Binding Nature of This Letter

This agreement is not intended to be a binding agreement, except as set forth in sections 6.0 and 7.0, each of which shall be binding on the parties and their respective successors and assigns. Except as provided in the preceding sentence, the parties will not be contractually bound unless and until Definitive Agreements have been prepared and executed. This agreement shall be governed by the internal laws of the State of Georgia, without regard to its conflicts-of-law principles.


Signing this agreement indicates agreement with the foregoing.

This collaborator agreement will be effective_________ ___________.

_ _____________________________ ____________________ __

Representative of _________________ _ Date

_ _____________________________ ____________________ __

Representative of _________________ _ Date


CONFLICT RESOLUTIONSUPPORT STUDENTS AND PARTNERS: ADDRESS

CHALLENGES

The literature on conflict resolution best practices is vast. In this guide, we’ve included some tips for handling the types of conflicts that are most likely to arise in community-engaged teaching: interpersonal and cross-cultural conflicts.6 There are also footnotes included throughout and an “additional resources” section to provide you with sources that offer in-depth information on different approaches.

Conflict resolution, building authentic relationships, and sustainability:

Conflict is natural and when it is resolved well it can lead to positive change, increased levels of trust, and, ultimately, stronger relationships. There are numerous approaches to conflict resolution, from pretty poor models like domination and avoidance, to models like mediation and compromise, often applied in long-standing conflicts or during tense negotiations. There is also an area of conflict resolution that focuses on collaboration and good communication best suited for close-knit relationships, and partnerships; this is the overarching approach we suggest faculty teaching community-engaged courses use.7

Good conflict management is about sustainability since, as we work to create an environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable future, we must learn better ways to work together to manage resources and resolve conflicts. The most important global challenges, like climate change and economic inequality, require working together to create new models for a different future. Creating sustainable practices for conflict resolution, and modeling them for your students, can have a widespread positive effect on your community-engaged teaching, learning, and research.

6 While your students may be working in communities and on issues with long-standing and complex conflicts, dealing with these forms of conflict may require conflict resolution training and literature related to the specific problems and/or your content area. If this is the case, we suggest that you seek out additional resources to train students in the appropriate methods of thinking about and approaching conflict (e.g. conflict resolution in youth work).

7 See, for instance: Duckworth, C. L., & Kelley, C. D, Conflict Resolution and the Scholarship of Engagement: Partnerships Transforming Conflict (London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).


Moreover, dealing with conflict in the service learning setting is often a great learning opportunity for faculty, students, and partners. Through partnership-based conflict resolution we can begin to unlearn negative, but dominant, social lessons about conflict—that power is an acceptable basis through which to resolve issues—and instead develop the use of understanding as a way to address issues.

To practice collaborative conflict resolution in the community-engaged course (tips for faculty, partners, and students):

Treat conflict as natural.

Teach and learn about complex ways that power, privilege, and difference can create or fuel conflict or enter into conflict resolution.

Work to address problems instead of attacking or seeking to change people.

Work together to establish and agree upon a specific protocol for conflict.

If confrontation is necessary, intentionally prepare for it (e.g. by sharing a set of guidelines for the interaction or bringing in a third party to mediate).

Consider the situation from the other person’s perspective.

Create a learning community where you deal with small conflicts as a natural component of discussion, dialogue, and learning.

Adopt popular education methods, such as those of Freire that use conflict as the basis for liberation and learning, in your teaching and community-based work8.

Replace competition with collaboration in your community-engaged course, as competition fuels conflict. For example, ask whether you can change any assignments or projects set up as competitions and replace them with challenges teams work together to address?

Work together to create a set of shared values that you will refer to when working to address conflict (e.g. that you support the peaceful expression and identification of conflict, value diversity, difference and individual and group acceptance of responsibility for conflict).

Conflict resolution and cultural fluency9

8

Freire, Paulo, Education for Critical Consciousness (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

9 The following two sections have been adapted from Michelle LeBaron, “Culture and Conflict,” in Beyond Intractability, July 2003, http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/culture_conflict


“Cultural fluency involves recognizing and acting respectfully from the knowledge that communication, ways of naming, framing, and taming conflict, approaches to meaning-making, and identities and roles vary across cultures.” – Michelle LeBaron

Complications of working across culture:

Culture is complex and elastic: knowing about a few cultural norms cannot predict individual behavior or response. People are unique and cultural generalizations never apply across the board.

Culture is always changing: Even with a sense of the nuanced ways in which cultural norms might be relevant to a given circumstance, culture is always in flux as contexts and people change.

Culture is often subconscious: Culture influences thoughts, actions, and the ways in which we define ourselves and understand the world in ways that we are unaware of and unable to fully comprehend.

Marginalized communities experience cultural oppression: Historically oppressed and traditionally marginalized communities have specific experiences with culture-based oppression. Cultural oppression comes in different forms: sometimes it is marginalized groups being told by those from privileged groups that certain aspects of their culture are “wrong.” At other times, it takes the form of romanticization, often through commodification or consumption of aspects of marginalized cultures by those from outside of it without context, respect, or even understanding (e.g. naming professional sports teams after Native American tribes).

Culture and conflict: how to prepare and respond

“Culture is always a factor in conflict, whether it plays a central role or influences it subtly and gently. For any conflict that touches us where it matters, where we make meaning and hold our identities, there is always a cultural component.”—Michelle LeBaron

Given the aspects of culture outlined above, careful and close attention to resolving conflict across difference is essential in community-engaged teaching. Here are some concrete tips for resolving conflict in an intercultural context:

1. Learn about and provide resources to students on cross-cultural communication.10

Teach students about the ways that stereotypes, assumptions, and biases emerge from a society built on systematic oppression. For students from privileged groups working with those with less privilege, this requires deep reflection, reading, and dialogue on how to break free from harmful patterns of thought and behavior. But these differences also exist between students, so take this into account as well.

10 See for instance: LeBaron, Michelle, "Culture and Conflict," Beyond Intractability, Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess (Boulder, CO: Conflict Information Consortium July 2003).


Recognize that defining and addressing conflict is also cultural. For example, you and the partner or student might disagree about whether conflict arose at all or, in other cases, whether those involved should meet on their own or include an outside mediator in the discussion.

Focus on building strong and authentic relationships (through pre-trainings, informal events, and by structuring the engagement so that students and partners develop independent relationships) since the best way to resolve conflict is through strong ties. Encourage experiences that help students and partners see each other as broadly as possible and connect across difference.

Consider using narrative to resolve conflict, encouraging those involved to tell the story from one another’s perspective. When possible, document these stories and how you deal with conflict so as to incorporate it in future community-engaged teaching.11

Additional Resources

Mayer, Bernard.The Dynamics of Conflict: a Guide to Engagement and Intervention. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013. http://www.myilibrary.com?id=344615.

Wilmot, William, and Joyce Hocker. Interpersonal Conflict. 8th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 2010.

For readings, courses, and other resources on conflict resolution, see “Beyond Intractability,” an online resource center developed by the founders and co-directors of the University of Colorado Conflict Information Consortium. http://www.beyondintractability.org/ .

For examples of how communities structure productive and collaborative approaches to conflict resolution, see “Community Boards: Building Community Through Conflict Resolution.” http://communityboards.org/ .

For more information on transformative justice, see Nocella, Anthony, “An Overview of the History and Theory of Transformative Justice,” August 20, 2013, http://www.heathwoodpress.com/overview-history-theory-transformative-justice/.

Transformative justice is relevant in thinking through conflict resolution in the community engagement setting as the criminalization of marginalized communities continues to be a systemic issue, and as many of the traditional approaches to conflict resolution in the U.S. are rooted in our legal and criminal justice system.

11 For more on narrative conflict resolution, see: “Introductory Bibliography.” Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution. George Mason University. http://cncr.gmu.edu/introductory-bibliography.html.


COOPERATIVE COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPSBUILD A STRONG FOUNDATION: Plan Together

Too often, community members or organizations are asked to work with professors and students as “test users,” “labs,” or research participants. This kind of relationship places the expertise and effort of the community in service of research or pedagogical goals.

In these structures, “engagements” are often multi-day feedback sessions, workshops, or “charrettes,” or even just surveys, where researchers and their students solicit community input for research, teaching, and analysis. This approach tends to objectify community members, giving them little autonomy over the questions being asked, the methods utilized, or the ways in which the research will be used after the single engagement

Cooperative projects aim to change this structure by treating community members and outside organizations as partners.

To establish a “cooperative partnership”:

1. Plan to make decisions through an intentional democratic process with clear definitions and rules. Depending on the size of your group, you may choose to make decisions based on consensus or, if you are larger, based on agreement (meaning everyone agrees even if the choice wasn’t their preference) or a specific voting procedure

2. Seek out community-based partners that value inclusion, have principles of open membership, and represent the stakeholders in the community

3. Structure the relationship so that all members are given equal opportunity to shape processes and to present and amend proposals

4. Create a teaching and learning environment in which the knowledge and expertise of the community is valued equally with scholarly forms of knowledge and expertise

EXAMPLES OF COOPERATIVE PARTNERSHIPS USED IN COURSE PROJECTS

Renters State of Emergency

In the summer of 2016 Georgia Tech Planning professor Anna Kim taught a course that co-created a project with the Housing Justice League of Atlanta. The resulting research conducted by students in partnership with HJL members was turned into a 15-page report called “The Renter’s State of Emergency,” designed and written by students and HJL members


for HJL’s advocacy work. This project was created through a cooperative partnership intended not simply to serve the students but also to support the organizational goals of the community partner. For more information, see: http://www.housingjusticeleague.org/atlanta_declared_a_renter_s_state_of_emergency

HWCAC Community Historians:

Beginning in 2012, Georgia Tech professor Christopher Le Dantec began a multi-year partnership with the Historic Westside Cultural Arts Council. The goals of the partnership were to understand the role of digital technologies in supporting community engagement and capacity building within the context of Historic Westside Neighborhoods. Each semester, Le Dantec and his students worked with members of HWCAC to scope and implement different projects that used community narrative, public performance, and digital media to capture, share, and curate resident-created content. Each project advanced HWCAC’s goals of building capacity within their community, while also allowing Le Dantec and his students to develop participatory design research methods and novel digital media interventions that focused on community identity as a platform for engagement. For more information, see: http://ourcommunity.is

Westside Atlanta Community Landtrust (WALT):

Georgia Tech professors Carl DiSalvo and Ellen Zegura and researcher Amanda Meng have been working with the Westside Atlanta Land Trust (or WALT), a nonprofit program of the HELP Organization for the past several years in a series of ongoing civic data and design projects. The common basis of these projects is the collection and use of data to advocate for permanently affordable housing for Westside residents. Concentrating our focus on the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods that are threatened with gentrification. Throughout these projects, WALT has taken the lead in setting the agenda — our work has been to accompany WALT in pursuit of their goals. This has resulted in the design of digital media and partnership in processes of data modeling, and analysis. The projects have contributed directly to WALT's advocacy efforts, while also providing the basis for scholarship in design, media and computing.

Engaging the Latino Communities in Atlanta:

Since 2016, Georgia Tech professor Juan Carlos Rodríguez has created various community engagement opportunities for GT students in his courses Span 4150: Spanish Service Learning and Span 4813: Latin American Documentary, with the purpose of learning about the Latino communities in Atlanta. In the Spring of 2016, students in the Spanish Service-Learning course collaborated with three community organizations that provide tutoring and mentoring services to K-12 Latino students (La Amistad, Agape, LAA's Youth Program). As a final project, students developed games in collaboration with Latino students. In the Fall of 2016, students in the Latin American Documentary class, along with students from professor Yanni Loukissas's Data Design studio, participated in various community engagement events with


organizations that serve the Latino community in Buford Highway, such as Plaza Fiesta, The Latin American Association, Cross Keys High School, Center for Pan Asian Community Services, Emory University, and Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights. From these events, students created video materials for their final projects: three data documentaries focusing on housing, education and family objects in Buford Highway's Latino community. Community leaders from participating organizations attended the final screening of these data documentaries and provided valuable feedback on the projects. The Buford Highway Data Documentary Project received a third-place award at the showcase organized by the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center. In the Spring of 2017, students in the Spanish-Service-Learning course collaborated with three organizations (Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Cross Keys High School, and The LAA's Family Service Program) and created two participatory interview projects about different aspects of the Latino experience in Atlanta. In addition to these teaching activities, Professor Rodríguez provides support to various Latino organizations in Atlanta. He organized a community immersion tour of Buford Highway in partnership with GT Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain and Los Vecinos de Buford Highway. And, in collaboration with the Latin American Association, he produced and edited two videos advocating for the protection of DACA students.

FAQS ABOUT COOPERATIVE PARTNERSHIPS

Why is it important to build collaborative partnerships?

Teaching and conducting research is part of an academic professional’s job description. However, for community organizations and other agencies there are no set benefits to working with a scholar or with students in a course. Therefore, it can often be viewed as a burden. This is why it is important to develop a cooperative partnership where the benefits for both parties are clear and decisions are made cooperatively.

What are possible benefits of cooperative partnership for community groups?

Along with sharing research or project findings with organizations in a format they can use, you can also share funds from grants with the community partner. You and/or your students can also provide your expertise and time outside of the project as a volunteer on another of the organization’s projects.

What are some of the challenges to partnering with community groups?

Cooperative partnership is time consuming. This is largely due to the relationship building required, but seeking consensus also takes extra time. With already busy schedules, you might see co-partnership as too time intensive. However, keep in mind that much of the time can be invested up-front and then, once trust is built and processes agreed upon, less time is required. Another common barrier teachers and researches often face is community burnout due to previous negative experiences with university partnerships. This is often due to poorly structured engagements (that are not collaboratively worked out based on the parties’ mutual interests), or scholars or students who have viewed the community as non-active participants


in their projects. Explaining your plans to use a cooperative partnership structure can go a long way in addressing this challenge.

What are the possible benefits for teaching and research?

Cooperative partnerships give you the opportunity to teach students while producing knowledge that is relevant to the needs of the community. For those doing linked research, it can give you the opportunity to take findings to those who need them the most and it may also help increase the relevance and trustworthiness of the research questions, data, and programs that you have devised and implemented as a result of the work.

How can you ask a community partner to work with students without burdening them?

Community organizations are often overwhelmed with work, often beyond their staff or volunteer capacity. Therefore, asking them to work with students can seem like too much. Another way to address this issue is by finding other creative ways to support partners, by, for example: providing the organization with funding, trainings for their staff or volunteers, new software and extra research staff such as student interns. This is also where it helps to have in place a tight process for the project, for communicating with students, and creating accountability measures to ensure student work is high quality.

How do I begin the process of establishing a cooperative partnership?

When approaching the community about a research or course project, it is best that you begin by simply learning about the community and their needs. This can be done through your participation in community events and simply by being present. Often local organizations, churches, and schools are a great place to start. The only way to identify connections between your work and community needs is through communication and relationship building.


CRITICAL COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENTSUPPORT STUDENTS AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS:

Establish Partners and Students as Leaders

As service learning has matured over the years, critical questions have come up around whose needs are being met in projects and engagements; As a result, a canon of work on different types of service learning—and the benefits and drawbacks to the different models—has emerged. This resource is for those interested in developing “critical” community engagements and has been adapted from Tania Mitchell’s article “Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models,” in which she conducts an expansive review of the literature, and from the Data Center’s Toolkit on Research Justice, which provides a number of tips on working in just ways with communities.12

Simply put, Mitchell defines the traditional approach to service learning as one that “emphasizes service without attention to systems of inequality.” She argues that a critical approach is essential, given the ethical demands of the historical moment and the promise of service learning, adding that critical service learning is “unapologetic in its aim to dismantle structures of injustice.”13 Extrapolating on the definition, she notes:

Developing experiences with greater attention to equality and shared power between all participants in the service experience and challenging students to analyze the interplay of power, privilege, and oppression at the service placement and in their experience in that placement will ensure that a critical service-learning pedagogy questions and problematizes the status quo.14

12 Mitchell, Tania D. “Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models.” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 14, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 50-65; Reem Assil, Miho Kim, Saba Waheed. An Organizer’s Guide to Research Justice. DataCenter, 2015. http://www.datacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Intro_Research_Justice_Toolkit_FINAL1.pdf . 13 Mitchell, 50.

14 Mitchell, 62.


http://www.datacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Intro_Research_Justice_Toolkit_FINAL1.pdf

Image Credit: Tania Mitchell, “Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models,” 53

According to Mitchell’s review of the literature and accompanying case studies, critical service learning includes three essential components:

5. A social change orientation

6. Working to redistribute power

7. Building authentic relationships

A social change orientation “requires rethinking the types of service activities in which students are engaged, as well as organizing projects and assignments that challenge students to investigate and understand the root causes of social problems and the courses of action necessary to challenge and change the structures that perpetuate those problems.”15 For instance, critical community-engaged projects at Georgia Tech might explore questions such as: Why does Atlanta (as of 2016) have the highest income inequality in the U.S.? In examining this question, students should be asked to think not only about the structural conditions and policies that may have led to this circumstance but they should also work to understand the social policies at play—and how they participate in them.

Working to redistribute power, explains Mitchell, means adding in discussions and readings about “biases, unearned privilege, and power” … A critical community engagement practice

15 Mitchell, 53.


facilitates “analysis and dialogue that allows students to identify and challenge unequal distributions of power that create the need for service.”16 Once awareness is established among students, “working to redistribute power” looks much like the practice encouraged throughout this playbook: honoring and centering the experiences and knowledge of the community, creating equal and truly cooperative partnerships, allowing community-based groups to not only make decisions but to lead, and providing ongoing resources and support to community partners.

Perhaps most important to Mitchell and other critical service learning proponents, and central to the tenets of this playbook, is the attention paid to “how relationships are developed and maintained.” As Mitchell explains, “the challenge is to create relationships that neither ignore the realities of social inequality in our society nor attempt to artificially homogenize all people in the service-learning experience.”17 It is important for students to see connections with those they are working with or serving, but it is equally important for them to critically understand difference and how it has been created and perpetuated. The ultimate focus, explains Mitchell, should be on understanding difference but searching for the small areas of shared experience where relationships can develop and grow, and which, over time, might develop into “authentic relationships.” According to Mitchell, there are a number of ways to help facilitate the development of authentic relationships: through conversation, by being and working together, through informal events and gatherings, and through structured conversations about identity and difference. You can work intentionally to help facilitate authentic relationship building by creating as much space for community partners and students to work closely and independently from you as possible.

While it may be more difficult to plan your community-engaged work so that critical engagements can emerge, if sustainability, social justice, and long-term impact are among the reasons you are doing this work, it is worth the effort. It is also important to note that you may need to take these recommendations into account as you build new relationships with partners, decide on communication strategies, and work to collaborate with partners to structure the course.

16 Mitchell, 57.

17 Mitchell, 59.


DOCUMENTATIONGROW THE RELATIONSHIP: Document

While documentation overlaps with evaluation and reflection, it should also be viewed as distinct: it is an organizational task for you to keep and organize your own notes but it is also an opportunity to simply share the process and products with the students, your larger communities, and partners. Most of the simple tasks of documentation you are likely already familiar with (note taking, file saving, shared online storage, etc.). However, this guide was developed to provide you with some out-of-the box ideas for how you and your students can publicly document and share community-engagement work throughout or after the course.

In various media:

Creative nonfiction Poetry Collective story creation Photography Videography Painting and other visual arts Based on your community partner’s media of choice By visualizing data and creating an infographic or data visualization A public-facing report

On the web:

Website Blog Twitter Instagram Pinterest Tableua

In physical space

In the community and/or on campus In public space At the organization (e.g. displayed on a prominent wall)


DOS AND DON’TS FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

BUILD A STRONG FOUNDATION: Plan Together

Do:

Plan carefully before developing new relationships; Research which leaders and organizations have widespread buy-in and support from community members, have open and voluntary membership, and are serving those most marginalized.

Develop pre-engagement trainings for both partners and students: this can be a 30-minute lesson or a week-long curriculum but ensure that you have set expectations about the engagement content of the course with students and expectations set with partners for communicating with you and students, the process and structure, and any projects you’ve planned.

Connect engagement projects to academic and service learning curriculum.

Ensure that projects and/or relationships are mutually beneficial, as defined by both you and the partner.

As you start out and throughout your community engagements, plan to encounter challenges and conflict, make mistakes, and be faced with steep learning curves; be comfortable being uncomfortable, take a learner’s stance in your work with communities and be open to failure—it is all a part of the process.

Provide students and partners with structured reflection time.

Enable partners to lead: co-design engagements and plans for projects, meet in person often, establish ongoing communication channels, invite them to campus (e.g. to give a lecture or co-evaluate final projects).

Evaluate the partnership and student learning and growth and re-design your approach accordingly.

Seek out resources from Georgia Tech offices like Serve-Learn-Sustain and Office of The Vice President for Government & Community Relations, established to support you as you do this work.

Stay connected to communities and issues that you work on and support community partners long-term; continue to build from and expand upon engagements through


additional courses or research projects; or, simply stay in close touch, connecting partners to people, resources, and networks that can help them achieve their goals.

Be very intentional in talking with students about building authentic relationships, examining their power relationships in the context of community partners, and seeing their work as helping to address systemic issues; guide them in a way that discourages essentializing, romanticizing, or pathologizing experiences of marginalized groups.

Pay community groups for their involvement and time whenever you can, or, alternatively, ensure that the work or process is valued at a level equal to the time requirements you are asking of partners.

Read this playbook and follow the guidelines established here!

Share your additions, lessons learned, and comments with SLS so we can improve this playbook and other toolkit materials for future service learning projects!

Don’t:

Engage in traditional service learning, where the end goal is simply service and no attention is given to systems of inequality or the larger structures and contexts that help to explain the need for service in the first place.

Structure your engagements as a series of interactions that treat community members or groups as “test users” as this has the tendency to objectify community members and offers few of the benefits of critical community engagement.

Ask or expect staff at partner institutions to advise students; be especially intentional about the role frontline staff at small organizations take in coordinating work with students—these positions are often filled by women paid relatively low salaries who are already expected to do a great deal of emotional and “disempowering” labor.

Involve partners only at course-level decisions if the work will be taken to different levels and institutions later on. For instance, do not work closely with partners to collect data on socio-economic patterns only to work the next semester with a more powerful partner (like the City of Atlanta) and leave the community group out of these next steps to make use of findings and influence decisions that might impact their lives.

Treat partners as research subjects or even as clients—true engagement is about building authentic, meaningful relationships and requires work from both partners.

Expect that your community partners from People-of-Color, low-income, or other marginalized communities will teach your students about their experiences, perspectives, or neighborhoods.

Take advantage of generosity of time if it is offered to you; be wary of the power differential.


Set up relationships without establishing a clear set of expectations, mutual benefits, processes, and plans.

GEORGIA TECH PUBLIC RELATIONS AND MEDIA

SUPPORT STUDENTS AND PARTNERS: Wrap Up; GROW THE RELATIONSHIP: Spread the Word

Georgia Tech provides faculty with a number of relevant services and resources that will be helpful as you plan events to highlight your community-engaged teaching or the end results of projects. They have also put together a useful guide to a number of avenues through which you can share your work at Georgia Tech in a Campus Communications Guide.

Georgia Tech PR & Marketing Services for Community-engaged courses:

Photography and video production offers services for campus events but can also help support documenting and sharing the products of your work through video editing, animation, graphics, and location filming, to name a few.

Design Services can support your work by helping with planning, design, production, paper and digital design, and printing for any materials you, your students, and your community partners co-produce and want to share publicly.

Their websites and social media support may be useful for courses with digital components.

Many community-engaged courses end their year with presentations of final projects and celebrations. It is great to host one of these on campus and the Event Planning Guide can take you step by step through this process. To make this sizeable amount of material on event planning more digestible, below we break down the most relevant Georgia Tech Communications and Event Planning steps and services for faculty teaching community-engaged courses.

Georgia Tech Event Planning Shortened Checklist:

Confirm attendance early from all those you want to be sure are in the room.

Make a rain plan.

Set roles and responsibilities for students and partners (if applicable) leading up to and at the event.


Select a venue that meets all of your technical and space needs.

Create a budget.

Check out the list of Georgia Tech approved vendors and caterers, Consider local/sustainable options, select one, and book with them early.

Develop a communications plan for reminders and a day-of plan to ensure that all of the details are set before the event.

Contact Parking and Transportation and make sure that guests know where to park.

Request photographers and videographers from GT if applicable.

Secure A/V needs for event.

Ensure you have all supplies you need (e.g. nametags, day of roles and responsibilities, list of contact numbers).

If you are hosting an outdoor event or a major event with more than 30 people invited, review the additional steps/tips provided or download and print the GTech event checklist .


GETTING TO KNOW COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS

BUILD A STRONG FOUNDATION: Learn More

Choosing the right community partner is a critical step in making your community engagement a meaningful experience. Selecting a partner that other community members identify as doing good work and representing their interests is important as well. To understand if this is the case, talk to people about the organization, learn about their goals, staff, expectations, history, funding, board structure, and previous experience with university partnerships. Also, consider the roles and responsibilities the work you’ll be doing will require of community partners. Think about whether there are people at the organization that can take on these roles. Roles that may be especially useful for staff from partner organizations to take on during a community-engaged course, include:

specific content expert

collaborator

teacher (content, community context)

community resource expert

community historian

facilitator

supervisor

information source

planner

Along with looking for an organization that is relevant to the content and focus of your course, consider whether an organization and its staff will be interested in working through some of the difficult but essential questions of high-quality community engagements with you. Some of the questions that you should feel comfortable addressing in collaboration with partners, either in tandem with the work (especially if the work is tied to major social or economic justice issues), or in addition to the work, include:

What are the historical patterns at play in the problems we encounter in this work?

How do students and community members relate to these problems differently?


What are the patterns of historical and current power, oppression, and injustice that most deeply impact the community?

How do the systems of power, including academic institutions, relate to, try to disrupt, and/or perpetuate these patterns?

How, through our work together, can we break down patterns of injustice to create systems change and ensure that communities have democratic control over decisions that impact their lives?


PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCHGROW THE RELATIONSHIP: Stay in Touch

This guide is for faculty members interested in establishing Participatory Action Research (PAR) community engagements. These engagements could be structured into an engaged-course or they could be established as an independent research project. The field of PAR is increasingly large and complex, with key divergences in approach. For instance, recently criticism has noted that participatory engagements are increasingly “used by development organizations and leaders to “extract local knowledge and legitimate abuses of power.”18 Maintaining a commitment to high-level engagement work, we describe tips for conducting critical PAR projects using Maria Torre’s definition. Torre defines PAR as:

An approach to research committed to democratic principles of justice and equality. It is an inclusive practice of research defined both by participation and a determination to produce knowledge in the interest of social change. While often regarded as simply a method, PAR is actually an epistemological stance that values knowledge produced from lived experience as equal to that produced in the academy.19

Background on Critical PAR

Citing Arjun Appadurai, Torre describes that critical PAR also helps legitimize more inclusive notions of “expertise” and “researcher.”20 This can happen by: privileging multiple ways of knowing—knowledge, experience, and analytical frames produced in communities—and flipping those often seen as “the researched” (historically oppressed and marginalized communities) to the position of researcher. Co-researchers from communities are then collaborators in designing “research questions, methods, analyses, interpretations, and products.”21

Example: PAR evaluation projects led by youth22

Participatory evaluation projects have been shown to be especially dynamic and effective in

18 Cooke, B., & Kothari, U, Participation: The new Tyranny? (London: Zed Books, 2001). Qtd. In Torre, Maria Elena, “Participatory Action Research,” in Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, ed. T. Teo (New York: Springer, 2014), 1.

19 Torre, 1.20 Arjun Appadurai. “The Right to Research,” Globalisation, Societies, and Education, 4(2) 2006, 167–177.

21 Torre, 3.

22 See: Zeller-Berkman, Muñoz Proto, and Torre, “A Youth Development Approach to Evaluation,” Accessed August 3, 2017, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1083955.pdf.


evaluating program effectiveness. Three scholars at the Public Science Project researched the effectiveness of five PAR projects conducted at Community-based organizations (CBO) that serve youth. In interviews, staff at these organizations described their process:

We all worked together for 25 hours a week for five weeks. We started off with a research camp kind of curriculum, combined with some curriculum on anti-oppression, work on sexism, racism, things like that.… We did school mapping …with some guided questions, and one was “Where do you feel least safe or where do you feel most safe?” [We] prepped [research camp participants] a lot on interviews. They also interviewed each other a lot to hone in what our first round of interview questions would be.23

Another CBO staff member said:

We were very much focused on always being mindful of our relationship with the participants, and the first day beginning with a very broad question about what is research and who is a researcher…. We were very explicit about opportunities for participation, always looking for ways the young people could [participate] … or anything that we could do to get away from [the adults doing the] talking….24

This level of intentionality and attention to who has decision-making power and control over the research is at the heart of PAR. The researchers evaluating these PAR projects found that not only did PAR methods lead to better research outcomes, but they also: increased youth engagement and leadership, deepened adult-youth partnerships, and increased participatory practices across the organization.

Questions to Ask before Establishing a PAR Project

Torre offers practitioners of PAR a series of questions they should work through with co-researchers in order to ensure critical PAR engagements. These questions include:

1. What is the purpose of the research (critical PAR projects should always engage issues of justice)?

2. Where will the data live during the project and after it’s over?

3. What impact might the results have—positive and negative?

a. How might the research “betray individuals or communities either as a result of misuse, cooptation, or in the reproduction of oppressive conditions”?25

PAR Projects, Step by Step26

23 Zeller-Berkman et. al., 27.

24 Zeller-Berkman et. al., 26-27.

25 Torre, 3-4


1. Organize a research team or research collective and consider the following:

a. How should research collectives be organized? Who should be included? The formation of PAR collectives is an opportunity to intentionally design to address unjust issues of power and privilege in research.

b. What types of expertise, knowledge, experience, and points of view should you bring together?

c. Where are the non-traditional places you might find knowledge and expertise?

d. When should you plan to have separate spaces for marginalized groups to research together?

e. When are projects that bring together those with significantly more and significantly less power productive and when should they be avoided?

2. Organize orientations to establish shared practices. Discuss the following:

a. How will the diverse sets of knowledge and expertise be shared?

b. How will participation be structured?

c. What needs to be in place for co-researchers to participate as equally as desired?

d. What constraints are there?

e. Consider these orientation tips:

i. Find a comfortable space to hold the training

ii. Provide food and drink

iii. Take frequent, short breaks

iv. Structure the space for interaction and movement (e.g. chairs in a circle, activities spread around the room)

v. Differentiate presentations and discussions for different learning styles

vi. Use the training to build relationships, get to know one another, and come up with shared values

3. Determine what research questions your collective will answer

a. What theoretical and policy/organizing history is the research connected to?

b. What questions should be asked?

26 Adapted from Torre, “Participatory Action Research.”


c. “Are there dominant analyses that serve oppressive power arrangements that should be reframed?”27

d. How might the research support local organizing campaigns?

4. Plan and structure the research

a. How can you structure data collection and analyses methods to be shared with the community to build capacity?

b. How do you ensure that “action” becomes an ongoing part of the research process?

c. How might the research lead to individual and collective transformation?

d. Who is responsible for what?

e. How and by whom will information be analyzed?

f. When, how, and with whom will the findings be shared?

5. Carry out the work

a. Building relationships and trust is an ongoing process and will need continual thought and attention

b. An action research group, like any other, experiences internal and external conflict. There will need to be a shared set of agreements about how these will be dealt with (See guide to Conflict Resolution).

6. Prepare and present findings

7. Work with community partner to bring about action based on findings

8. Follow up

ADDITIONAL RESOURCESThe Public Science Project and The Critical PAR Institutes.

Data Center, Research for Justice, Community Driven Research.

Appadurai, Arjun. “The Right to Research.” Globalization, Societies and Education 42 (2006): 167-177.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

27 Torre, 4.


Cherry, Frances and Borshuk, Catherine. “Social Action Research and the Commission on Community Interrelations.” Journal of Social Issues 54, 1 (1994): 119 – 142.

Crenshaw, K. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” Stanford Law Review, 43, 6 (1991): 1241-1299.

Dill, L. J. “Poetic Justice: Engaging in Participatory Narrative Analysis to Find Solace in the ‘Killer Corridor.’” American Journal of Community Psychology, 55 (2005): 128-135.

Fox, M. & Fine, M. “Circulating Critical Research: Reflections on Performance and Moving Inquiry into Action.” In Cannella, G. & Steinberg, S., Eds. Critical Qualitative Research Reader. NY: Peter Lan, 2012.

Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. The Action Research Planner: Doing Critical Participatory Action Research. Springer Press, 2016.

Stoudt, B. “Critical Statistics.” In T. Teo, Ed. Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer Press, 2014.

Stoudt, B. “‘This is Exactly What this Study is all About and it is Happening Right in Front of Me!’ Using Participatory Action Research to Awaken a Sense of Injustice within a Privileged Institution.” Journal of Masculinities and Social Change 1, 2 (2012): 134-164.

Torre, Maria Elena. “Participatory Action Research and Critical Race Theory: Fueling Spaces for Nosotras to Research.” Urban Review 41 (2009): 106-120.

Tuck, E. “Re-visioning Action: Participatory Action Research and Indigenous Theories of Change.” The Urban Review 41,1 (2009): 47-65.


PRE-ENGAGEMENT TRAININGSUPPORT STUDENTS AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS: Set

mutually beneficial expectations

Providing students (and partners) with some structured trainings before starting the engagement work is important; this guide is a collection of materials intended to help you plan class sessions specifically on service learning and community engagement and important related topics.

Even students who have taken community-engaged courses will need an orientation to the partner site and information about how your course’s specific engagement goals map on to academic content. This guide is meant to be a scaffolded resource: if you need a one-hour, simple pre-engagement training, it offers a number of tips and resources; or, if you want to incorporate community engagement lessons throughout your course it provides a number of options. For each of the 4 “lessons”, we’ve included: an overview, topics to consider covering, reading assignments to assign, an example of a linked reflection activity, and additional resources for you. However, these readings and topics can be mixed and matched to meet your specific curriculum plans as well.

If you only have time to dedicate one class session to engagement content, we suggest you: run a pre-engagement training in class or conduct a site-visit to your community engagement partner where you also go over the engagement goals and expectations.


Lesson 1: Pre-engagement TrainingIncluding a pre-engagement training session for students and with partners will help set expectations, establish a shared set of guidelines for working together, and anticipate and collectively work through possible challenges.

Topics (consider covering some or all of these, in a lecture or through readings):

What is service learning?

What are non-traditional ways of knowing and how do we treat them equally to traditional (e.g. academic) ways of knowing?

What is community engagement?

Expectations for students in relation to the community-engagement work (e.g. communication with partner, final deliverable, weekly reflections)

Information on effective cross-cultural/class communication and conflict resolution (see Guide to Conflict Resolution)

Any base knowledge required

Understanding and identifying community partner expectations

SLS Learning Outcomes

Reflection and evaluation

If not covering these in a separate lesson, consider incorporating some of the material from the lessons on socioeconomic background and history and power and privilege (see lessons below) into your pre-training

For those new to service learning, consider a guest lecture from Dr. Ruthie Yow, our Service Learning and Partnerships Specialist. You can reach Dr. Yow for more information at her email.

Possible Reading Assignments:

Arnstein, Sherry R.(1969) 'A Ladder Of Citizen Participation', Journal of the American Planning Association, 35: 4, 216 — 224, http://www.participatorymethods.org/sites/participatorymethods.org/files/Arnstein%20ladder%201969.pdf

Davis, A. (2006). What we don’t talk about when we don’t talk about service. In A. Davis & E. Lynn (Eds.), The Civically Engaged Reader. Chicago: Great Books Foundation.

Eby, John, "Why Service-Learning Is Bad" (1998). Service Learning, General. 27. http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/slceslgen/27

Serve-Learn-Sustain, Georgia Tech, "Big Ideas."


Selection from: Stoecker, Randy. Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2016.

Reflection Activity:

Ask students to write a 1-2-page reflection on their expectations (e.g. What do you expect to observe and learn during your community-engaged work? What assumptions do you have going in?)

See: Serve-Learn-Sustain’s “Community Engagement Reflection” tool for additional pre-service reflection activity ideas.

Additional Resources:

Cress, Christine M., and David M. Donahue. Democratic Dilemmas of Teaching Service-learning: Curricular Strategies for Success. Sterling, VA: Stylus Pub, 2011.

Dolgon, Corey, Tania D. Mitchell, and Timothy K. Eatman. 2017. The Cambridge Handbook of Service Learning and Community Engagement. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Haas Center for Public Service, Stanford, Principles of Ethical and Effective Service .

Review a syllabus from an introduction to Civic Engagement Course


Lesson 2: Community Partner OrientationOrientations with partners are important, in helping to make students and partners feel more comfortable, and in establishing the partner as co-leader of the course. Talk with the partner beforehand to plan out this lesson but defer to them if they already have volunteer trainings they can tweak for your students.

Sometimes partners will say that an orientation won’t be necessary (possibly because of restrictions on their time); in these cases, we suggest that you insist on at least a short orientation—if necessary you can lead the session with just quick introductions/comments from the important contacts at the site. When partners are excited about leading an orientation, speak with them about the possible topics to cover and share any relevant readings you’ll be assigning or resources you’ve consulted.

Topics:

An introduction to the organization and community/communities

A structured conversation about the history of engagement with the community/organization and Georgia Tech/students

Any relevant organizational policies, procedures, safety and workplace rules

Discussion with the community organization about the goals and expectations for final projects

Partner-led review of the logistical details—timeline, expected hours, plan, communication preferences, etc.

Partner-led discussion about their expectations for professionalism (e.g. appropriate dress, cell phone usage, etc.).

Structured conversation about power, privilege, and histories of oppression when community partner is comfortable leading or co-leading this conversation (some organizations are experienced in leading popular education or critical pedagogy on these topics)

Possible Reading Assignments:

Blouin, D.D., and E.M. Perry. "Whom Does Service Learning Really Serve? Community-Based Organizations' Perspectives on Service Learning." Teaching Sociology. 37 (2009): 120-135 http://nfjcl.depaul.edu/Resources/Blouin-PerryWhom%20Does%20Service%20Learning%20Really%20Serve.pdf.

Selection from: Calderon, Jose Z. Race, Poverty, and Social Justice: Multidisciplinary Perspectives through Service Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2007.


Petri, Alexis. “Service-Learning from the Perspective of Community Organizations.” Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education, Volume 5, (2015). https://jpshe.missouristate.edu/assets/missouricompact/Article-PetriFINAL_1.pdf.

Worrall, L. "Asking the Community: A Case Study of Community Partner Perspectives". Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. 14, 1 (2007): 5-17. http://nfjcl.depaul.edu/Resources/Worrall%20asking-the-community-a-case-study-of-community-partner.pdf


Ask students to write a 1-2-page reflection on how they will make room for diverse ways of knowing and meaning making in their engagement. Alternatively, ask students to take photographs that represent diverse ways of knowing and write 1-2 sentences on each.


See the plays in Serve-Learn-Sustain, “Community-engaged Teaching Playbook.” (link).

Tryon, Elizabeth A., Amy Hilgendorf, and Randy Stoecker. 2009. The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning. Temple University.


Lesson 3: Socio-economic and Historical ContextTopics:

Relevant local Atlanta histories/contexts

History and socio-economic context of the specific community you’ll be working with

Role of the university in larger structural conditions (e.g. university as gentrifier)

Histories and anecdotes from your community partner about overall experiences with Georgia Tech (as a developer/educational institution/powerful institution) and from working with GT students—positive and negative experiences

Possible Reading Assignments/Additional Resources:

Serve-Learn-Sustain Resource, Course Materials Available: ENGL 1101: "If Not Us Then Who?": Student Activism 1960-Present , Fall 2015, Dr. Ruthie Yow

Emory has an excellent research guide on Atlanta with a diverse set of resources: http://guides.main.library.emory.edu/c.php?g=50184&p=324551

Neighborhood Nexus offers maps and demographic data in a user-friendly format, http://neighborhoodnexus.org/

On the history of Atlanta:

See Serve-Learn Sustain’s Case Studies for teaching toolkits on select topics: http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/tool-category/case-study

Bayor, Ronald H. Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Immergluck, Daniel and Balan, Tharunya, “Sustainable for Whom? Green Urban Development, Environmental Gentrification, and the Atlanta Beltline,” Urban Geography (2017), 5.

Kruse, Kevin M. 2013. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1218572.

Lands, LeeAnn. 2009. The culture of property: race, class, and housing landscapes in Atlanta, 1880-1950. Athens: University of Georgia Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10493754.

Monroe, Doug. “Where it all Went Wrong: If only we Could Undo the MARTA Compromise of 1971.” Atlanta Magazine, August 1, 2012. http://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/marta-tsplost-transportation/


On the role of the university:

Democracy Collaborative, Anchor Institutions, http://democracycollaborative.org/democracycollaborative/anchorinstitutions/Anchor%20Institutions

Hodges, R. A. & Dubb, S. The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012.

Jackson, Laur M. “The Hypocrisy of Revitalization: Universities in Black Communities.” The Atlantic, December 15, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/no-its-not-gentrification-its-something-else/383645/.

J.D. Capelouto, “Georgia Tech Fraternity Under Investigation for Alleged Racial Harassment.” USA Today College, August 27, 2015, http://college.usatoday.com/2015/08/27/georgia-tech-fraternity-under-investigation-for-alleged-racial-harrassment/

Lowrey, Annie. “Take away Harvard’s Nonprofit Status,” New York Magazine, September 9, 2014, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/take-away-harvards-nonprofit-status.html

Perry, David C., and Wim Wiewel. 2005. The University as Urban Developer: Case Studies and Analysis. Cambridge, Mass: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Vidal, John and Provost, Claire. “US Universities in Africa ‘land grab.’” The Guardian, June 11, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/08/us-universities-africa-land-grab .


Ask students to write a 1-2-page reflection on one of the following questions (or a related one): What is your understanding of how the socio-economic and historical context might shape your engagement work? How do you see the position of Georgia Tech (and other colleges/universities) in shaping communities and cities? Should their role change? If so, how?


Lesson 4: Power and PrivilegeThis lesson does not have to be created out of the box. There is a lot to cover in just one class and you can’t do it all. Consult your colleagues in social science fields who are experts in this area, teaching entire courses on related topics, and craft a lesson and set of readings that is appropriate for your discipline and students.

Topics:

Intersectionality

Relevant histories and socio-economic contexts (see lesson 3 above)

Power differentials and dynamics

Work across-class and culture

Conflict resolution (see Guide to Conflict Resolution)

Possible Reading/Viewing Assignments:

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Rowman and Littlefield, 2014.

Border Crossers, various resources and readings: http://www.bordercrossers.org/what-we-do/

Class Action, various resources on Class: https://www.classaction.org/

hooks, bell. Outlaw culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Johnson, Allan G. Privilege, Power, and Difference. New York: McGraw Hill Education, 2001.http://csgenderstudies.weebly.com/uploads/2/0/2/1/20211125/johnson-powerprivdifference.pdf

USF Urban Education & Social Justice, The Color of Fear Documentary Clips, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzLTyp0ZBx4

The White Privilege Conference, “White Benefits Checklist.” http://www.whiteprivilegeconference.com/resources/10-White-Benefits-Checklist.pdf


Ask students to write a 1-2-page personal response to one of the readings/vides/activities assigned. If you can take additional class time, consider doing an in-class activity and then ask students to write up a response to the experience. For activity ideas, see: Campus Compact, “Intercultural Border Crossing, Power and Privilege."


See tried and tested workshops on these topics. For example: The Rainbow Health Network’s “Practical Tools for Intersectional Workshops.”


http://www.oaith.ca/assets/files/Publications/Intersectionality/Practical-tools-intersectional-workshops.pdf.

Consult your colleagues who teach entire courses on this topic to find the right set of readings, lecture and/or discussions for your content, for instance: https://hts.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/syllabi/hts3008b.pdf

Allen, Ricky Lee and Rossatto, Cesar Augusto. “Does Critical Pedagogy Work with Privileged Students?” http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ851035.pdf

Berger, Michele Tracy, and Kathleen Guidroz. The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class, and Gender. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.


PROJECT PLANNING AND MANAGEMENTBUILD A STRONG FOUNDATION: Create a Tentative

Plan

There is a plethora of approaches to project planning and management. Many of them are from the business community and may be less relevant for the academic context. However, this guide provides you with a few key tips relevant for any project planning and management context and offers an overview of the differences between traditional and agile project management.

Project Planning Steps

1. Define the project

a. Put the goals in writing

b. Establish a budget and determine what other resources are needed

c. Set meeting times with partners to do the detail-oriented project planning work together. Consider using an online meeting time selection tool, such as Doodle, to find common meeting times that work for larger groups.

d. Decide on a communication structure and avenues

e. Define roles and responsibilities

f. Put together a timeline

2. Create a scope or written plan

a. Put the details established in phase 1 in writing in a shared online document that you can adjust as things change

i. Include the overall goal of the project and the individual deliverables or outcomes that will contribute to achieving that goal.

ii. Prioritize based on a very conservative estimate of what can get done. Community-engaged projects require a lot of time spent building relationships. In terms of project outcomes, keep this in mind and think small and useful.

b. If you have a complex structure (with different student groups working with different partners, for instance), consider using T-square, or a tool specifically created for project management, such as Basecamp, Trello, or Org-mode


i. If you do use a project management tool, remember to create simple protocols for how and when information, deliverables, and discussions should happen on the site

c. Create a shared online calendar, pre-populate it with key dates and meetings, and send out invitations

d. Questions to consider: which parts of project planning and management should you give to the community partner and which aspects should you take on (remember to consider their workload and the degree to which the project is benefiting them)? Are there any components of project planning and management you should include in expectations of students? For example, can they review and provide feedback on one another’s work? Can you crowdsource certain questions to the students as a group as opposed to having them all automatically directed to you?

3. Execute the project

a. You’ve done the work to make introductions and set expectations and the project is underway

b. Distribute resources and tasks

c. Check in with students and partners regularly

d. If you are using a project management site, set times to review materials, discussions

e. Follow your timeline

f. Adjust the plan as needed, anticipating challenges, changes to the timeline, and even the structure

4. Monitor project performance

a. Set benchmark dates to monitor progress and compare it to the plan

b. Invite groups to adjust their plans and schedules based on the reality of doing the work and change the plan and structure accordingly

5. Project close

a. Include evaluation questions to students and partners about overall project structure, planning, and management

b. Adapt your approach to project planning based on the feedback

c. Write up the final results of the project goals and outcomes and include it in the shared scope you developed with the partners


d. Decide on how project outcomes will be shared, by who, and on what timeline. Get your community partner’s feedback on how you might share the work (presentations at Tech or to the outside community, use in research or publications, etc.)

You may prefer “agile” project management methods—adapted from software development—to traditional methods, since the nature of teaching and research work requires a more decentralized structure (you are not being paid to be a project manager). Agile structures are even more important for design studios or open-ended, exploratory engagement projects, and can help to support some of the important goals of high-quality community-engagements such as: building authentic relationships and challenging inherited privilege and power. If a more decentralized and iterative structure is better suited to your work, consider adapting Agile Project Management techniques in your work (see the chart below comparing agile and traditional techniques).

Agile Project Management Traditional Project Management

Individuals or teams work independently and can decide on their own how to achieve overall goals, as long as they follow agreed upon rules.

Teams are more tightly structured, working on specific deliverables, under a clear and shared process and based on a tight timeline.

Plans for deliverables are developed within the process as needs emerge. This may be a better structure for exploratory or studio-based courses and/or for graduate students.

Goals and plans for deliverables are set before the project starts. The final outcomes should match the goals set at the start. This might be a better structure for undergraduate students.

Feedback from partners is built into the work so that it is easier to make changes as you go. While this structure is time intensive, in a community-engagement setting, where students and partners are often coming from very different backgrounds, it may be a good process, both for relationship-building and for ensuring that the final project is useful for the community organization.

Feedback is provided at the end of the project, when everything is complete. This may risk partners not being happy and it cuts out some of the work-based relationship building that can be important. On the other hand, if community partners do not have much time, it can be a good approach, especially for projects dealing with more straightforward outcomes (a presentation on census data trends, for instance).

Adapted from: “Agile Methodology,” http://agilemethodology.org/


REFLECTIONSUPPORT STUDENTS & PARTNERS: Monitor Progress

Reflection, as defined for community-engaged courses, is the consideration of experiences in light of specific learning objectives (both content and community engagement focused). Providing structured and unstructured opportunities for yourself, students, and partners to reflect on what you are learning and the quality of the engagement is an important part of teaching a successful community-engaged course. Reflection can take many forms; it can be individual or one-on-one, written or oral, conducted through large group dialogues, with just students and/or students and community partners. Critical reflection should include reflecting on how the engagement is going in terms of the tenets of critical community engagement (approaching the work from a social change orientation, working to redistribute power, and building authentic relationships—see guide to Critical Community Engagement).

Be sure to schedule in at least a few in-person, one-on-one reflection-oriented meetings with students and the community partner throughout the semester.

To incorporate reflection into your course:

Plan to ask students to reflect at least three structured times over the course of the semester (beginning, middle and end).

Incorporate continuous reflection into project planning and assignments. For instance, you could ask that students complete a journal to take notes on meetings and engagements with partners that include their academic and personal take-aways from the interaction.

Find at least one or two opportunities to encourage students to engage in dialogue together over more challenging reflections. These could include using course readings from sociology or history to examine power differentials or assumptions and interpretations grounded in the status quo and to reflect on how they can work effectively to dismantle unjust systems.

Always ask the students to link the engagement experiences to the academic content of the class.

Incorporate reflection activities that will engage different learning styles.

In reflection discussions or assignments, model these practices.

Question your assumptions and values.


Pay attention to and unpack the implications of your work in communities.

Share personal reflections about challenges you encountered during specific engagement and allow students and partners to respond and offer feedback on how it might have gone differently.

Personal Growth Reflection Activities:

Directed writings

Open-ended journaling

Describing specific engagements or activities and personal responses to them

Double-entry journal: ask students to write about the engagement and their experiences on one side of a page, take notes on readings on the other, and then highlight and mark the pages up, making connections between the two

Structured class discussions

Facilitated debates and dialogues around a specific key issue or challenge

Participatory arts projects (e.g. a mural or another constructivist arts project; often a good way to structure reflections with partners as well)

Student portfolios

Class presentations

Reflection Questions for a Project-based Engagement

What? So What? Now What?

How do our actions match our goals and objectives?

Do our actions match our expectations? If not, should we revise expectations? Or the project?

How has this challenged prior learning?

Are leaders emerging? Who?

What is the most difficult part?

The most rewarding?

What is your main contribution?

Did we miss something in our planning? What?

What kind of skills and/or knowledge do we need to make this project a success?

What have you learned?


How have we helped solve the problem that is the basis of the engagement component of this project?

Are there any other needs arising that might be a good second project?


For additional assessment activities, see: Duke University, “Responsible Engagement “Reflection Activities for all Classrooms” ;

For Georgia Tech community engagement assessment information and activities, see: SLS, “Community Engagement Reflection” tool.


http://serve-learn-sustain.gatech.edu/community-engagement-reflection

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King, John T. “Service-Learning as a Site for Critical Pedagogy: A Case of Collaboration, Caring, and Defamiliarization across Borders.” Journal of Experiential Education 26, no. 3 (1 March 2004): 121–37.

MacGregor, Jean, ed. Integrating Learning Communities with Service Leaning. Olympia, WA: The Evergreen State College, 2003. http://wacenter.evergreen.edu/about/monographs/servicelearning.html

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Ostrander, Susan A. “Democratic Civic Participation, and the University: A Comparative Study of Civic Engagement on Five Campuses.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. 2004: 74–93.

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Saltmarsh, John A, and Matthew Hartley. ‘To Serve a Larger Purpose’: Engagement for Democracy and the Transformation of Higher Education. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012.

Stoecker, Randy, and Elizabeth A. Tryon, eds. The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009.

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