"Connecting Community and Academic Activism Workshop Series"

Over the past ten years, I have been exploring, researching, practicing, theorizing, and problematizing (not always in that order) the relationship between academic work and community activism. My opinion of this type of work has swung from emphatically optimistic to ruthlessly critical. I have finally come to a point that I am able to employ a rigorous reflective critique which questions the assumptions and implications of my own practices in the community and would like to provide some of that reflection here. The pedagogy we practice, the relationships we engage, have implications-many of them extremely positive and promising, and many of them not so positive, indeed, at times damaging. My hope is that in actively examining those implications and our own assumptions we can continuously interrogate the function of collaboration and ultimately the relationship of that collaboration to envisioning and enacting routes to social justice.

My experiences in partnerships between community and academics come from several directions. I have, as an instructor in university and community college settings utilized "service learning" which involved students working in the community in conjunction with courses I have taught. I have also, as a student, worked in community settings in conjunction with my own coursework. I have participated as a community member in sites of activism and volunteerism. And I have utilized the work of other students in my own organizing efforts at the University. From each of these sites, I have learned (I hope) a great deal and have had to tackle important issues. Each of those experiences have involved an unforeseen consequence that has shaken my own assumptions-assumptions I believe I share with others. The most prevalent issues that these experiences have brought up for me are the following:
 

• Academics and Community Members often enter relationships/partnerships without a clear sense of goals for their participation beyond a vague idea of the "usefulness" and the "rightness" of doing so.
• Students (as well as faculty and researchers) tend to have preconceived notions of "privilege" as they enter communities.
• Students do not necessarily understand activism to be a good thing. Requiring students to take a position on an issue that they don't necessarily understand or believe in has, in my estimation, serious implications for students' understanding of the function of "rhetoric" beyond the project or the course.
• Students think they have enough expertise to do certain "products" for community groups; instructors think they have enough commonsense in general to evaluate those products. Often those products aren't what the community needs, or are presented to the community in well-intentioned, yet a condescending fashion.
• Students do not automatically connect the activist work they might involve themselves regarding specific issues as part of systemic issues or connected to larger structures, or relevant to their other communities (what they might consider "home").
• Students do not automatically connect community based activities and "service" to course content, and when they fail to see the connection, they hold it against the instructor and the community organization.
• Communities have assumptions and reservations about people from the University coming into community settings that may prove to be obstacles to certain types of participation.
• The work that gets done in, for, about, or concerning the community often never gets back to the community in any form.

Academics and Community Members often enter relationships/partnerships without a clear sense of goals for their participation beyond a vague idea of the "usefulness" and the "rightness" of doing so.

When I have worked with instructors who would like to utilize service learning or administrators who are seeking ways to integrate service into curricula, I most often get the sense that their reasons for wishing to do so are tied to their best intentions but not to a specific sense of what such relationships should entail, nor to any specifically articulated goals. Although administrations often seek to incorporate service because of funding trends and the role that such activities as service learning play in substantiating an institution's outreach mission, instructors are generally more responsive to a hope for making their course content "real," or making that content relevant to students' lives. In addition, both instructors and administrators express goals of instilling an "ethic of service" in students, or exposing students to "real life" issues. As starting points for investigating partnering with the community, these desires are all valid. However, they are not sufficient to actually operationalize any effective relationships.

On the other hand, community organizations often agree to support and participate in service learning opportunities (if they are even asked), or to accept students as volunteers for a semester simply because they need the help, appreciate the effort of some students to find out more about the issues they deal with, or provide need-based service that doesn't require a great deal of complex understanding of the issue on the part of the volunteer. But, often, these placements require organizations to do the work of finding something for under-qualified students to do in settings where the organization deals with complex social service delivery. Organizations that deal with complex issues (and I cannot think of examples of community organizations that do not fall under this category!) but do have direct service programs, find placing students in these service positions problematic. For instance, The Primavera Foundation is a complicated and comprehensive organization that deals with homelessness and its associated causes. In addition to providing shelter and meals for individuals who are without such necessities, Primavera advocates for the homeless, works with finding them sustained employment, and carries out a strategic and effective activist agenda in terms of addressing an unjust socio-economic system that makes homelessness a structural (not individual) issue. It is frustrating at best for this organization to accept students in direct placement for a limited number of weeks, only to watch those students view a small segment of their operations, and, because of that, see those students understand homelessness in an isolated manner-in such a manner, in fact, that perpetuates common misunderstandings of homelessness as a failure of the individual in that situation. It is, undoubtedly, also frustrating to the instructor to receive reflections from these students about their experiences that reproduces such positions.

I would suggest that such unexpected disadvantages in partnerships are often caused by the lack of specific goals for utilizing service in the curriculum, and-further-lack of shared goals between the instructor and the community organization. If, for example, an instructor determines that s/he would like her/his students to have a sense of "real" issues and their structural causes and determines that an effective way of achieving that "realness" is to have students move into the community, perhaps a volunteer placement in an organization that feeds or shelters the homeless will certainly present the students with up-close-and-personal images of homelessness, but will not sufficiently contextualize the problem for them. It may in fact, as I mentioned above, simply re-confirm some of their cultural assumptions about the issue. And, while I do not mean to undermine the need of community organizations for volunteers, both the instructors' goals and the organizations' goals of recruiting volunteers might be served better by a different approach to integrating the community issue into the students' experience. If the shared goal of both the instructor and community organization is to problematize and understand the issue in way that creates the possibility for meaningful activism around its causes, perhaps a better way to conduct a partnership is to allow the organization to educate the students, or to have students do research on the issue with or for (depending on the students' level of research expertise) the organization rather than simply to volunteer. Whatever the actual "service" turns out to be (a question I will return to below), that service cannot be defined without a clear articulation of goals. And, to be most effectively realized, that articulation of goals should be shared and clarified with community organizations.

I have used service learning here as an example, but this necessity of clear goals and expectations is applicable to all community partnerships. If a researcher partners with a community organization for a research project or question, and the goals and expectations of that partnership are not articulated, the research and the relationship often suffer. What does each party in this relationship expect to gain from this experience? Is the researcher an "expert" on the subject, or is there shared expertise, or is the researcher learning from the community leader or representative? Is the research being done for or about the community issue/organization? If the goal is genuinely a partnership, the research design will need to take that into consideration and may have to be altered to be as much for the community as it is about the issue in question. To approach those design questions requires a constant, rigorous conversation that puts goals and expectations on the table.
 

Students (as well as faculty and researchers and community members) tend to have preconceived notions of "privilege" as they enter communities.

Our complex socio-economic system valorizes institutional educational experience as a sort of "cultural capital." Higher education is often viewed-from both within and without-as the pursuit of knowledge in a special way. While not stopping here to critique the actual function of higher education, I simply want to point out that there is a mystique of privilege surrounding higher education-that those who participate in and achieve "higher education" are constructed as a sort of intellectual elite. Additionally, the ranks of higher education (students through faculty and administration) is overwhelmingly made up of an already socio-economically privileged group. Community partnerships, under these constructs, become a sort of noblesse oblige, or the well-intentioned attempt to mobilize that privilege for the benefit of communities that do not share in it-that is, as providing access to more individuals in order to allow them to participate in those systems of privilege.

I have argued elsewhere (Service Learning as the Reinvention of the Instructor; Learning to Serve?: The Necessity of Marxist Critique for Service Learning Curricula), and continue to argue, that this assumption about higher education and cultural capital is in fact something that community partnerships have the potential to and ideally should disrupt. Higher education is a system that is complicit in the socio-economic system that creates the structural necessity for many of the issues of inequality that exist in communities. If, as I have claimed above, the goal of integrating community partnerships into higher education is to more effectively interrogate those systems, the "privilege" and system of higher education must be interrogated as well. To not put these cultural assumptions under active interrogation has implications for community partnerships and relationships.
 

Students do not necessarily understand activism to be a good thing. Requiring students to take a position on an issue that they don't necessarily understand or believe in has, in my estimation, serious implications for students' understanding of the function of "rhetoric" beyond the project or the course.

It is not uncommon, especially in an institution that draws from a predominantly conservative pool and is itself fairly conservative, for students to be antagonistic to political agendas and activism in general. "Politicized" instructors understand that their students are not necessarily similarly politicized. However, if course content includes activist elements and service placements involve community activism, instructors may not recognize, until it is perhaps too late, the degree to which or ways in which students' antagonism manifests itself. Students may choose to do a project that is to the instructor antithetical to the spirit of the course goals. For example, I have heard of many cases where students were asked to create a "real-life" document in response to a community issue-in one instance around a corporate entity exposing its workers and the environment to lethal toxins. One student wrote a proposal to the corporation in question to create a public relations strategy in defense of their practices. More often, students write from a position that they think their instructor or the organization wants from them. That is, even if the student doesn't agree with the position, s/he will pose as if s/he does in order to fulfill the course requirements.

Either of these responses create problematic situations for instructors. Instructors are then put in a position of determining how to evaluate the ethics of their students' decisions. While I do not care to take up an argument on that particular can of worms, I would suggest that what underlies this pedagogy is a notion of the function of rhetoric as argumentation and persuasion. That is, assignments framed in this fashion indicate to students that what is important to develop is the skill to present a persuasive position to a particular audience in order to achieve specific ends. This construction of writing and argument is certainly the dominant functional model in education and society in general. There is a tendency to evaluate and measure arguments in terms of "effectiveness"-the definition of which is the degree to which an argument (however loosely defined) persuades an audience to desired action, regardless of the "ethics" or implications of such action.

I would like to suggest that we might consider these assumptions as we design assignments, especially when we are incorporating "real-life" community issues of inequality and exploitation into our courses. We cannot realistically expect all of our students to accept or fully understand social critique in a semester's time. However, we can realistically expect our students to engage issues and engage analysis and begin the difficult task of interrogating the assumptions and values from which they make sense of the world. By shifting the frame of particular assignments (which I discuss further below), and by understanding what the goals in this type of instruction are, a different understanding of rhetoric is enacted that may remove the possibility of placing students and instructors in the position of evaluating each others' ethical positions. That is, the emphasis is placed on analysis of ideas rather than the rightness or wrongness of an argumentative position.
 

Students think they have enough expertise to do certain "products" for community groups; instructors think they have enough commonsense in general to evaluate those products. Often those products aren't what the community needs, or are presented to the community in a well-intentioned, yet a condescending fashion.

The repeated issue of assignment design in the context of including community partnerships in course curricula forces us to consider what type of "service" we are asking students to do in this context. Often, community organizations and instructors establish a partnership where students are creating "products" for the organization, or in response to community issues. On the level of effectively integrating course content-for example, in a composition course-with community service, this appears to be the single most effective approach. Students are learning to write; students write for the community and are evaluated in terms of how effectively they do so. As simple as this approach appears, it is perhaps problematic and has implications that need to be taken into consideration.

One aspect of this approach to assignments as "products," is that students studying an issue over the weeks available in the course (often not the whole course, but only a portion of it), may not establish the kind of "expertise" required to adequately create "effective products" for the community. If the creation of the product is not carried out in close consultation with the community organization, the students may in fact think they have the expertise required, but may not. The community organization may not be able to use the product, and may be placed in the uncomfortable position of having to reject the student's work. Worse, from my perspective, is that this type of assignment frame tends to send a subtle message to students that it is their position as a student in an institution of higher education that gives them the privilege of being able to assume the role of expert in a community setting and to deliver to a community organization what they themselves could not create.

A second consideration in this type of assignment framing is that instructors often evaluate the product created with very different criteria from what the community organization itself needs. An instructor may give revision advice which is counter to the organizations' advice or requirements, or the instructor may endorse a product that does not suit its "real-life" purpose at all. In this scenario, the student is confused or simply negotiates (manipulates?) the rhetorical situation in the spirit of achieving individual needs (of which the grade in the course will most likely take precedent). Additionally, the instructor's assumptions are never brought under examination-the instructor may never actually understand the community organization's needs or the ways in which the assignment did or did not succeed.

In the previous section, I suggested that assignment design might be approached not to be product-oriented. However, if an instructor does work out a partnership with a community organization that includes students developing products, I think it is important that that partnership be approached carefully. To avoid the possible implications outlined above, I believe it is necessary to first problematize for students their roles as "experts." That is, students need to have a clear understanding that the community organizations doing this work are, in fact, the experts with years of experience and knowledge regarding the issues they are dealing with. One way to indirectly construct this awareness for students is for instructors to visibly include community leaders in the teaching of the course and in the design of the assignments. Additionally, I think it is important for students to work, as much as is feasible, directly with the community organizers in creating the products for them. Also important in this type of assignment design, I believe instructors need to themselves work with community organizers on developing criteria by which such products will be evaluated.

I am ambivalent about the product approach to assignment design in most settings. While I see the incredible value of such an approach in terms of integrating course goals with community activism and of genuinely breaking down the dichotomy of classroom authority and community participation, for such assignments to actually achieve this potential requires a lot of time and work for both the instructor and the community leader. I believe responsible partnerships will have to honestly evaluate if that type of investment will be honored in a feasible fashion.
 

Students do not automatically connect the activist work the course might involve regarding specific issues as part of systemic issues or connected to larger structures, or relevant to their other communities (what they might consider "home").
 

If a partnership between community and academic activism is constructed around the assumption that specific community issues are imbricated within larger structural issues, are connected to other issues, and are not entirely unique to any given local community, those partnerships have the potential to have more impact and be more relevant to students and researchers in the long run than partnerships that are focused on fostering the spirit of volunteerism or overly concentrated on any single decontextualized issue. But, it is not sufficient for the partnership to be undertaken with that larger goal; that larger goal is not readily visible to students as they work or research in depth one site or issue. I believe that the instructor must facilitate the visibility of the structural questions and the connections to causes and other issues through as many methods as possible. Instructors might provide students with a theoretical framework that takes structural issues into account. If a course has groups of students working on various issues, the instructor might ask the class as a whole to examine the connections between those issues. Instructors might ask students to reflect on the local issues in relation to issues in their "home" communities. Whatever methods for doing this type of critical reflection an instructor might employ, the connection needs to be actively pursued and integral to the experience if the course is to be "activist" in nature. I would argue that what makes community-education partnerships activist collaboration is the degree to which the goals of the integration of community issues are in fact grounded on structural critique. If they are not, the collaboration may still be effective in a variety of ways, but it will not be, in what I understand the word to mean, activism.

Students do not automatically connect community based activities and "service" to course content, and when they fail to see the connection, they hold it against the instructor and the community organization.

As an instructor, what often seems completely and logically relevant to me in terms of my course goals is not always clear to my students. It is not uncommon for students to evaluate community service components of a course as seemingly irrelevant, or simply an additional burden on their time, or as serving no clear purpose in the course except as an articulation of the instructor's personal agenda. While I don't mean to pander to student evaluations or to suggest that students are always "right" in these assessments, those perceptions suggest the need for attention to articulating goals (see the first section) and an argument for working closely with community partners to make activities connected clearly to course goals and those connections visible for everyone. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that students not understanding or seeing the connections may make them less likely to engage with the structural issues we are asking them to, and may make them less likely to treat community organizations fairly or to do the work they are asked to do in a community setting with any real sense of commitment or responsibility. Any of these implications seriously undermines the effectiveness and/or the sustainability of meaningful partnerships.
 

Communities have assumptions and reservations about people from the University coming into community settings that may prove to be obstacles to certain types of participation.

When I first relocated for graduate school, I took a course that required a community literacy project. At the time, I felt disconnected from community activism or even a real sense of community membership and welcomed the opportunity to get established in a community group, viewing anything I might do for the course as secondary. I was invited into a neighborhood arts program that was designed around the principle of integrating humanities readings and conversations into discussions of "place" and neighborhood inclusion to build a stronger sense of cohesion amidst diversity. Most of the people were professionals or community activists in the neighborhood, but there was one other graduate student participating. When we introduced ourselves and were introduced, the frame for my participation in the project was determined. I was introduced as a grad student (rather than a "neighbor"), and it was suggested that I would be "researching" this process-something that was certainly true in one sense, but certainly not my major reason for being there. Nonetheless, from that point forward I was really not allowed to participate in the project. I, and the other graduate student, were relegated to the roles of "researcher," read "outsider." The other members of the group would make comments about having to "watch what was said" when I was present; there was clear resentment when I participated in one session as a reader and bringer of food; I spent the entire program (weekly meetings for about 6 weeks) not being able to talk about my sense of belonging in a neighborhood, but taking notes on what was said. It felt rather ironic to me.

What this example is meant to point out to community members and academics alike is that there are assumptions and fears in the communities where we work. Whether we choose to recognize it or not, the University feels like a foreign, manipulative space and institutional presence in a community feels like an invasion to many community members. In the situation I found myself in, these issues should have been discussed during the formation of the group and the direction of the interactions could have been changed. To my mind, those who work from institutions such as a university are always/already members of the community first. But that doesn't erase the constructions and assumptions that exist and doesn't change the history of problematic relationships between academics working in communities. Those relationships must be actively interrogated and discussed, by the academic and by the community organizations and activists.

I can only recommend that a frank conversation between those who work from the university and those who work from the community occur early in partnerships. Clarify roles and concerns. I believe it is absolutely essential to actively work to break down the notion that in these types of partnerships the person in the university is the expert or even wishes to be the expert. But I also believe in order for that to happen, community leaders and activists must be willing to anticipate and address their own assumptions in these relationships as well.
 

The work that gets done in, for, about, or concerning the community often never gets back to the community in any form.

Perhaps one of the most significant obstacles to community-academic partnerships working effectively and especially for being sustained at any level, is that often students work in communities, academics incorporate communities into their research, yet after the "work" is done, the community never hears the results or are not offered the opportunity to participate in revision or application of that research. There are many reasons for why this happens. Students write for a particular course (and the grade associated with that course), and believe the instructor is the final word on that work. Often, the work done in the community is framed in the context of the course as simply another "text" to be incorporated into their research-and who feels responsible to answering to a "text"? Often, when the research is done, it does not seem all that relevant to the community; that is, that work tends to be perceived as an "academic exercise" rather than useful information for those involved in the issue. Another problem is that during the collaboration, no official mechanism for sharing results is articulated-there are simply no plans or space made in order to talk about what came from the collaboration.

While these situations are all understandable and, in most cases, fairly easy to overcome, they have serious implications for collaboration efforts. When activities-especially research-occur in a community and the community is left out of the end of the process, that situation can be read as the utilization of communities without any sense of obligation to them. This, of course, reproduces traditional problematic power relationships and informs many of the assumptions about the motives of academic researchers working in communities. Communities are defined as much by personal investment as by anything else. If the "academic" does not invest in the community throughout the process, there appears to be no investment.

Further, communities benefit from the analyses and reflections created from collaboration. What may appear to be an "academic exercise" for students or researchers may provide valuable insight, strategies, historical documentation, and tools for community activists. If nothing else, the work done creates a sense of shared experience. Additionally, if we approach our partnerships in terms of engaging in a dialectical structural critique, to be useful, that dialectic needs to be sustained. Academics (even those who do not consider themselves "academics," such as undergraduate students) should not construct the "last word" on any given issue. The larger community involved can and does provide valuable problematizing and re-framing of conclusions, and that leads to further collaboration.

In order to address these issues, then, collaborations and partnerships should include mechanisms, built in at every level-from assignment and research design, to dissemination-to include the community activists and organizations in the process. A useful approach to this aspect of concern is to frame the work to be relevant to the community (even if it is not a "product" for them); instructors might include as assignment guidelines that the community organization(s) students work with must receive a copy of the final documents, and perhaps students could be requested to incorporate community feedback into the final version; partners might consider ways to talk about assessing the partnership according to the possibly very different goals each had for collaborating to begin with. The point here is that the more that the partnership is followed through on throughout the process, the more effective, interesting, and sustainable it will be.
 

The Value of Trying

There are, clearly, so many things to think about when doing work that falls outside of traditional (and although often unquestioned, just as problematic) work in our communities-whether that community is a neighborhood or a complicated institution. But, this work is valuable. When, as academics or as community leaders, we work with each other to break down traditional barriers, to think about our own work in different ways, to struggle over responses and solutions to huge structural problems that have horrific material consequences; when we assert all our efforts to achieve real ways to enact and pursue social justice, we are doing meaningful work.

What the previous observations and considerations are meant to suggest is that that work can be done more effectively if we actively engage in self-critique and reflection and consider the implications of the things we do. Working together means paying attention to issues of framing the relationship from the beginning. It means considering the constructed power relationships that we are not conscious we are complicit in. It means being accountable to each other. It means actively questioning the reasons we do what we do and what we hope to achieve. It means being vulnerable, and it means being supported.