A Collaborative Approach to Service,Learning, and Scholarship

ABSTRACT

This article describes a research course that was a collaborative endeavor between a school of social work and a community organization. This project was guided by learning, service and scholarship goals. Specifically, the participants in this course provided a pro-bono evaluation for a community benefits district. The benefits district solicited assistance from the authors, with the caveat that district members not be involved in the data collection and analysis. The authors situate this project on a continuum of traditional versus participatory research, and propose a “mixed” model for collaborative university-community efforts. The authors suggest ways of engaging students in “real world” research that benefits the community and facilitates their own training as macro social work practitioners. Factors that facilitate and hinder such a project are also discussed.     

A river revitalization: Seen through the lens of local community members

This article provides insight into a revitalization project of a river near Basle in Switzerland. The authors conducted an evaluation study to investigate the river revitalization from a social point of view. How do people, who spend their spare time there or who live near by, perceive and evaluate the changes? What does the revitalization mean to them? Do they support the nature‐preserving intentions? Might the ecological ambitions oppose behavioral habits and social life at the riverside? The research project included a visual part: visitors were first asked to take Polaroid photographs of what they liked and what they disliked about the locality. In a second step, they explained their pictures and their reasons for taking them. The article presents and analyses the visual and the verbal data. A nature‐oriented and ecological perspective emerges as but one of many ways visitors experience the area. Social and aesthetic arguments are prominent in the photographs and in the verbal evaluation of the revitalization project.     

Training Students as Facilitators in the Youth Empowerment Strategies (YES!) Project

SUMMARY

This article describes the training of students as facilitators for the Youth Empowerment Strategies (YES!) project designed to promote problem-solving, social action and civic participation among underserved elementary school youth in West Contra Costa County, California. This project involved 160 fifth grade students in after-school activities which identified their capacities and strengths in ways which aimed to decrease rates of alcohol, tobacco and other drug use and other risky behaviors. The article describes the recruitment and training of high school students and their graduate student counterparts as facilitators in this university-community partnership, and discusses the implications for other youth-focused community-based projects.     

Understanding Contemporary University-Community Connections

Abstract

This article contextualizes the contemporary phenomenon of university-community partnership initiatives. Because changes in the university must always be understood in context, recent efforts to build and strengthen relationships between institutions of higher education and communities must be situated in the broader social sites that produce them. To that end the article surveys the university-community intersect through an historical lens which emphasizes the relationship between the larger political-economy and civic engagement efforts. Subsequently, types of contemporary initiatives are broadly and selectively discussed. Lastly, challenges to both universities and communi-ties embodied in the current initiatives are posed.     

Seven Ways of Teaching and Learning

Abstract

The vast majority of Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) grantees are institutions with both undergraduate and graduate programs. Consequently, baccalaureate institutions are underrepresented in university-community partnerships. Although the current emphasis on partnership and engagement arose out of an examination of the scholarly direction of higher education, this history should not preclude institutions with primary teaching-learning activities. Results from one baccalaureate institution show a range of activities appropriate for the involvement of undergraduate institutions in university-community partnerships. This article reviews recent thought and vision to demonstrate the potential advantages of partnership. Seven methods of engagement that can be used by baccalaureate institutions are described. Two important ways include service-learning courses and academically-based service-learning. This article provides examples of these approaches for helping baccalaureate educational institutions become engaged with their communities through their teaching missions.     

Connecting a University to a Distant Neighborhood

Abstract

The willingness on the part of university participants to listen attentively to community representatives is of great importance to successful collaborations. This article presents three phases of a university-community partnership between the Macedonia neighborhood in High Point, North Carolina, and the Center for the Study of Social Issues (CSSI) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Although no professional network and neighborhood contacts were in place prior to this collaboration, the partnership addressed community needs by obtaining federal grant funding and by listening to the residents' concerns. Staff, students, and faculty overcame the challenges of inexperience and the difficulty of working with a neighborhood that was not located near the university. In various phases, the partnership moved away from a technical assistance approach to a self-help model. By actively engaging neighborhood residents through the Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC), a learning and adaptation process occurred that resulted in successful university-community collaboration.     

University Civic Engagement with Community-Based Organizations

Abstract

This article compares and contrasts two case studies of large research universities involved in civic engagement projects with urban nonprofit community-based organizations and neighborhood associations. The article uses a community building framework in which organizational, interorganizational, and community-level features are examined. The study found that each university used a different approach through which to achieve a university-community partnership. A dispersed model favored an entrepreneurial approach for individual faculty and student involvement, while the coordinated model requested faculty and students from different departments to work together toward a community-driven goal. The extent to which these different models of civic engagement delivered what community organizations wanted was based on five factors: (1) the university's geographic proximity to a tar get low-income neighborhood, (2) leadership for institutional social commitment, (3) use of community-based research, (4) funding as a social strategy, and (5) a flexible curriculum. Challenges faced by faculty, students, and practitioners are addressed, and directions for future research are suggested.     

Looking Forward Not Looking Back: The Evaluation of Community Living

This article outlines the development of evaluative methods within the field of mental handicap services. It suggests that evaluators have too often taken for granted the tacit assumptions underlying service models, using these to determine the criteria for evaluating success. It argues that evaluators should be more explicit about the values they adopt, and what patterns of life services should be enabling people to achieve. By more closely linking evaluation criteria to what people with a mental handicap should achieve, evaluation can become more effective in promoting positive change in service models. The article describes an approach developed by the authors for the evaluation of the 'All-Wales Strategy for the Development of Services for Mentally Handicapped People'.     

The Taping Project

This article describes and evaluates the effectiveness of a “Taping Project,” a teaching method for student self-evaluation in racism courses. The project offers students the opportunity (a) to hear in private the assumptions about themselves and others that they have brought into the course, (b) to reexamine these assumptions in the context of what they learn in the course, and (c) to consider if and how these assumptions have changed. Formal evaluation of the project’s effectiveness in helping students observe and reflect critically on their own development is reported in two ways: content analysis of 53 student essays using grounded theory analysis, and student and faculty evaluations of the assignment.     

‘I Need Help on Mondays,It’s Not My Day. The Other Days,I’m OK’.—Perspectives of Disabled Children on Inclusive Education

This article examines the experience of inclusive education from the perspective of disabled children. We worked with the observations of, and interviews with, 15 children, aged 5–17 who go to a mainstream school. The study is set in the context of a 3‐year research project exploring the practice of inclusive education in Flanders. Here, we report on the key findings from the children’s accounts, focusing on what they had to say about themselves, what they think about school, friends, support and their future prospects.     

Beyond the body in a box: Visualizing contexts of children's action

Social scientists refer routinely to a range of social and cultural contexts in trying to understand children's lives, but this range may not include what children think or say about what they do. In this article, I examine how two girls thought about their efforts to mummify a Barbie Doll as part of a school project. Attending to what the girls said about their project led me to regard strings of related activities—as defined by kids—as an important but neglected context of children's action. After reviewing how the girls’ work cut across the contexts familiar to social scientists, I examine the implications of “activity series” for visualizing kids and their contexts, in theory and in photographs.     

Illinois's child welfare research agenda: an approach to building consensus for practice-based research

This article presents a consensus-building initiative to develop a statewide research agenda that responds to the needs of Illinois's child welfare community. Researchers conducted this process through a university-community partnership to engage those interested in child welfare services. The process and findings resulted in a living document that will guide child welfare research throughout the state. Findings of the inquiry suggest that the development of best practice models may be one of the most important contributions research can make to practice.     

Mending the gaps in social work education and research: two examples from a Swedish context

ABSTRACT

The gap-mending concept is an analytical tool that helps teachers and researchers in social work to reflect upon what, in their practice, increases, maintains or mends gaps between professionals and service user groups. The article suggests a theoretical background on how gaps in social work practice can be challenged. This includes theories about power and recognition. It then moves on to describe the development of gap-mending strategies in research and education at the School of Social Work at Lund University. Lund University was one of three partners that took the initiative to the international network PowerUs that has focused on gap-mending strategies in social work education. The authors have been working over 10 years in collaboration with service user participation in the education of social workers and in different research projects. In the article, they give examples of gap-mending practices and of challenges that they have faced. The first example is an experimental course that has been given since 2005 where social work students study together with students from service user organizations in a university course. The second example is an attempt to combat homelessness in several Swedish municipalities. Supported by researchers, the development project has been a collaboration between homeless groups, politicians and social workers.     

Asylanten auf der Saualm

The following article deals with the question of how socio-political questions such as integration and asylum policy can be processed within a self-organised project and which concomitances, irritations and difficulties may be encountered; it is exemplified through a regionally based case study. The basic assumption is that topics which are relevant to current social political topics require processes which can function across systems. These processes must be sensitively steered, have a concrete application and involve structures of self-organisation. The authors outline how self-initiated projects can be supported professionally and how accompanying phenomena need to be taken up and considered as well in order to ensure that they can at least be partially steered. At the same time the authors look at social and emotional influences, including both emotions which determine the actors’ capacity to act within the project and emotions which must be considered as “environment” outside the project. The article draws analytical distinctions in order to make the complexity of the topic comprehensible. However, in actual practice all these topics interweave continuously and must be balanced accordingly.     

Multi-Media Computer Technology in the Classroom

SUMMARY

This article recounts the experiences of the authors as participants in the quest of their university to bring multi-media computer based technology into the classroom. The authors discuss the method of the university's approach to this task, review the process leading to the development of their own project, and then review some of the lessons they learned in the process. They conclude by discussing the outcomes and presenting a number of recommendations for other campuses that might be considering similar endeavors.     

International Collaboration in Translating Career Theory to Practice

This article describes an effort to apply a theoretical perspective developed in one country (the United States) to cope with increasing demand for career services and limited funding in another country (the United Kingdom) faced with similar increasing demands for cost‐effective service delivery. The authors hope that the experience gained in the transnational application of theory to practice they present can be replicated in other countries using other theoretical perspectives. This article describes the process used in one transnational career theory adaptation project and discusses implications for transnational adaptations of career theory across countries.     

Using conceptual models as a planning and evaluation tool in conservation

Conservation projects are dynamic interventions that occur in complex contexts involving intricate interactions of social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental factors. These factors are constantly changing over time and space as managers learn more about the context within which they work. This complex context poses challenges for planning and evaluating conservation project. In order for conservation managers and evaluation professionals to design good interventions and measure project success, they simultaneously need to embrace and deconstruct contextual complexity.In this article, we describe conceptual models—a tool that helps articulate and make explicit assumptions about a project's context and what a project team hopes to achieve. We provide real-world examples of conceptual models, discuss the relationship between conceptual models and other evaluation tools, and describe various ways that conceptual models serve as a key planning and evaluation tool. These include, for example, that they document assumptions about a project site and they provide a basis for analyzing theories of change.It is impractical to believe that we can completely eliminate detail or dynamic complexity in projects. Nevertheless, conceptual models can help reduce the effects of this complexity by helping us understand it.     

Obligations of kinship in contemporary Britain: is there normative agreement?

This article explores the extent to which there is normative agreement in contemporary Britain about the 'proper thing to do' for relatives. Using quantitative survey data generated using the 'vignette technique', the authors assess how far certain policy and sociological assumptions about appropriate kinship obligations hold up to empirical scrutiny. They argue that there is not a straightforward consensus about a set of normative principles but that it is possible to identify patterns of normative agreement. These vary more in line with the circumstances specified in the vignettes than with the social characteristics of the respondents. There is more evidence of a consensus over procedures - that is what factors people should take into account in working out the proper thing to do for relatives - than over the substance of what should be done. The authors conclude that people do not carry around with them stable sets of values and meanings about obligations to kin, but construct them when they have to out of various materials available.     

Using live supervision to teach counselling skills to social work students

This article reports on a research project which explored how anxiety can be managed when social work students receive live supervision as they are learning counselling skills. Eight social work students volunteered to participate in an eight session project in which they role played counselling sessions and received live supervision of their work. Their subjective experience of live supervision was elicited via survey reported surveys over the course of the project. They also submitted pre-and post-project recordings of their counselling role plays which were evaluated for changes in skill level. The participants’ survey results showed that, over the course of the project, each participant became less anxious about live supervision and came to find it a valuable learning experience. Their recorded role plays all showed improvements in skill level across a range of domains. The authors contend the establishment and maintenance of positive and trusting relationships between participants and between participants and the supervisor was crucial to the success of this project, as was attention to power dynamics and differences in learning styles. These results suggest that, under the right conditions, live supervision can be a valuable addition to counselling skills teaching strategies with social work students.     

A University-Community Partnership to Change Public Policy

Abstract

This paper describes a project aimed at promoting major change in government policy toward the growing problem of food insecurity in Israel. The project was initiated by Ben-Gurion University in collaboration with community service and social advocacy organizations. This joint action led to a dramatic change in government activity. The problem of food insecurity moved from a state of obfuscation to the establishment of a special ministerial committee mandated to develop policy guidelines for a national school lunch program. For higher education to contribute to the community, necessary preconditions must exist: Is the faculty committed to promotion of social change? Do the organizational and community environments legitimize university-sponsored activity for such purposes? Is the faculty competent to act effectively in the community and adopt strategies for political influence? Are there organizational mechanisms, action frameworks, and community contacts that enable collaboration for the purposes of social change? This case discussion uses the analytical framework developed by Taylor (1985) to evaluate the preconditions for action and the processes involved in facilitating university-community collaboration for promoting policy change.