Accrediting Community Engagement in Higher Education: Reflections from a Participatory Curriculum Develop Project with Mature Students from the University of Bristol’s part-time English Literature and Community Engagement BA (ELCE) 

Background: In 2018 I was based in The University of Bristol’s English Department leading community-engagement within the part-time English Literature and Community Engagement BA (ELCE). Following several discussions with students about challenges they experienced relating to their study of community-engagement within the programme, I secured funding from BILT for an Education Development Project which worked with students studying on ELCE to collaboratively re-develop the BA’s community-engagement curriculum.

What is ELCE?

ELCE is a direct-access part-time degree programme led by the University of Bristol’s English Department and aimed at mature local students. The course is taught through one 3-hour evening seminar a week over six years combined with occasional Saturday schools. In the early years of study students are primarily taught within ‘year groups. In later years of study, year groups are combined, broadening their cohort and enabling new and interesting cross-pollination of ideas and opinions between the student community.  The programme was designed to create a route for mature, local students to participate in higher education alongside their regular commitments, and to ‘reconnect the teaching within an English Department to the practice of reading in wider communities, particularly local ones’ (Billington & Sperlinger, 2011, p. 505). The ELCE programme has a sister short-course programme of approximately 25 courses which run across the academic year in community settings offering free taster courses co-developed with community partners, accredited ELCE and MA pathway courses, and low-cost literature and creative writing courses for those who might not otherwise access Higher Education (HE).

What do we mean by Community Engagement in ELCE?

Community-engagement is a core component of the ELCE programme. In the first four years of study ELCE students design and lead their own community-engaged projects supported by 121 project-mentoring, regular seminars, and guided group reflexive exercises; in the final year they can choose to under-take a research focused dissertation building on a chosen element of their community engaged project. Community engagement in the ELCE programme asks students to learn-through-doing. Assessment involves reflecting on their own practice, situating their project activities within relevant literatures and bodies of knowledge, and considering how the skills and knowledge from their academic study of English Literature can apply to real-world contexts. Examples of ELCE student projects can be found here.

Community-engagement in ELCE has a close relationship to ‘service learning’, which is defined as a ‘course-based, credit-bearing educational experience in which students (a) participate in mutually identified and organized service activities that benefit the community, and (b) reflect on the service activity in such a way as to gain further understanding of course content, a broader appreciation of the discipline, and an enhanced sense of personal values and civic responsibility.’ (Bringle & Clayton, 2012, p. 105). But differs in its rejection of the language of ‘service’ which infers a transactional, hierarchical relationship wherein the student’s specialist knowledge is bestowed upon a given ‘community’, and risks ‘unhelpfully producing a situation in which the children of the affluent middle classes spend some time ‘helping’ the children of poverty beyond the university walls’ (Facer and Enright, 2016, p.54). Instead, community-engagement in ELCE can be situated within the paradigm of co-production and collaboration, seeking to work with communities and emphasising ‘engagement’ as an opportunity for recognising the value of different knowledges and experiences, and for projects which bring mutual benefits.

As an educator, working with ELCE’s community-engaged curriculum was an exciting opportunity to think about how theory can inform educational practice. For me this meant drawing on bell hooks’ work on engaged pedagogy to consider how Higher Education (HE) courses might serve to inspire and enable students, their networks and communities, to connect across a range of social divides and engage with people with different experiences to themselves (2013); and on Freire’s conceptualization of education as a practice of both freedom and hope (2021). Community-engagement as an accredited part of a HE programme, felt – and still feels – inspired. A unique space where lived and professional experiences can be genuinely valued and recognised as important factors which contribute to the wider learning experience.

The Research Project

The project aimed to take a participatory approach which meaningfully involved students in the evaluation and development of their community engagement curricula. The approach was inspired by questions of what and who universities are for (i.e. Sperlinger et al., 2018), and how higher education might resist commodification (Roggero and Brophy,2011). It was driven by the academic values of openness and sharing knowledge. The project’s participatory approach also informed by Mike Neary’s notion of ‘students as producers’ who, he argues, should play a key role in advising teaching and learning in higher education, particularly in improving experience, but with an understanding that meaningful educational change ‘is our responsibility as academics’ (Neary, 2015; Neary & Winn, 2009). Through collaboratively exploring and reflecting on different experiences of teaching and learning community engagement in the ELCE programme, the project aimed to produce new insight which would enhance the community engagement curriculum and improve student experience.

Approach

Between October 2018 and February 2019, students from across the ELCE programme were invited to two whole cohort focus-groups and several year-group orientated focus-groups in which they participated in guided discussions, reflecting on their experiences of interrelating the ELCE programme’s taught content with their practice of running community-engaged projects.  Focus groups were short (<1 hour) and run directly before and after seminars recognising that mature students have limited time to commit to activities not essential to their studies. Conversational interviews were held with six community-engagement lecturers. I also conducted a rapid review of taught content on community engagement units between 2008 – 2016 including: unit outlines, teaching materials, assessment titles, and anonymised unit feedback forms. Themes from the rapid review were shared in focus groups, latter focus groups also incorporated summaries of themes from prior focus groups.

Key Findings and Related Actions

Belonging in Higher Education. Students described a compound negative impact on their sense of belonging in the University of 1) being non-traditional learners (mature), 2) studying a discipline (community-engagement) that they felt was not a ‘typical’ part of UK undergraduate degrees, 3) accessing teaching outside of core university hours when the campus is largely closed.

What is Community-Engagement? Some students lackedconfidence in community engagement as a valid intellectual pursuit, questioning whether it was a ‘real’ discipline and describing it as a ‘lesser’ option. There were fears that community engagement was part of the University’s only degree for mature students due to low academic expectations for this student group. Some students admitted studying community engagement because it was the only way to access the study of English Literature part-time. Conversely, some students highly valued community-engagement and wanted to see a curriculum with a more clearly defined theoretical and disciplinary grounding which drew on ‘sociology’, ‘education’, or ‘community work and development’; others felt it should be less theoretical with more focus on practice ‘I didn’t sign up to study sociology’. However, there were consistent issues with engagement in practical taught content such as seminars on ‘managing conflict’ or ‘risk assessments’. Some students chose not to attend seminars focused on practical skills that they felt they already possessed through their professional lives.

Teaching and Assessment. Community-engagement seminars had irregular attendance. It was suggested by some lecturers and students that seminar teaching should be reduced and replaced with 121 and small group mentoring of students with related projects. However, this provoked anxiety for some students for whom it was important to meet every week of term time to ‘stay focused’ on their degree study amid busy personal and professional lives.

A minority of students had fallen into a reflective rut whereby their written assessments on community engagement were autobiographical rather than reflexively utilising their experience to make wider comments on their community engaged practice. A small group of students with excellent projects wrote extremely poor essays which did not enable them to achieve a mark commensurate with their practical work, while some students wrote excellent critical essays with no evidence of any practice.

There was a significant push from the student body to use observation-based assessment with lecturers visiting and observing students running their community-engaged projects and assessing the impact a project has on a community. However, lecturers noted that observation-based assessment is complicated in practise. At the time, when delivery was still primarily face to face and technology was not regularly used to support teaching and learning, observation based assessments  had staff implications; the requirement for moderation meant the need for two members of staff. It is also the case that students can engage in excellent practice and still not manage to pull off an impactful project which has measurable impact on a community.

Actions and Outcomes

• Introduced a panel-assessed community-engagement project poster competition including an exhibition of posters in high-footfall campus locations. This actively improved how students viewed their standing in the university and, in turn, positively impacted on student retention.
• Established an ELCE community partner network of organisations across the South-West that co-designed or hosted projects with students. This positively affected the translation of student ideas into successful projects.
• Revised and updated all 5 community engagement units and produced a ‘community engagement handbook’ to guide students (and lecturers) through a variety of theoretical discussions, concepts, theorists, and practitioners situated in and around the field of community engagement.
• Introduced reflection and reflexivity earlier in the student journey including developing a guide to aid reflective/reflexive essay-writing drawing on the standards and ‘rigorous reflection framework’ from Ash and Clayton’s (2004) model and including examples from prior community engagement essays.
• Diversified the methods of summative assessment available to students creating the opportunity to submit a portfolio and critical commentary (recommended by Eyler & Giles, 1999) as an alternative to a reflexive essay responding to prompt questions.
• Introduced a range of formative assessments including project plans, ethics presentations, and critical reviews of relevant literature. This aimed to build confidence; encourage the study and writing skills with which mature part-time and other ‘returner’ learners can struggle; develop presentation skills necessary for some community engaged projects; and create intervention points to identify and target-support to struggling students.  As a result of formative assessments, approximately 20% of students were identified for enhanced 1-2-1 project-tutoring, which was latterly cited as an intervention that improved retention and student outcomes. We also saw an overall improvement in student’s summative assignment quality which was noted and commended by our external examiner in 2021.
• Produced pro-forma design for community-engagement seminars for use by temporarily employed lecturers which included bite-sized theoretical lectures, small groups discussions of related practice, followed by consideration in relation to students own community-engaged practice. This was popular and attendance at evening seminars improved as a result, student’s engagement with appropriate theory and research in relation to their practice in assessment improved with a notable impact on outcomes.

Concluding comments

While there are multiple structural barriers which can prevent mature and other non-traditional student groups from developing their potential in higher education, flexible programmes which also enable student to engage their experiential and professional knowledges can be an effective mechanism for inclusion and success (Hubble & Bolton, 2022). The English Literature and Community Engagement BA is one such programme. Through collaboratively reflecting on how community engagement was taught and experienced by students on the programme we were able to make significant improvements to student experience and outcomes and have provided some of the theoretical and practical delivery insights which can support the wider rollout of community-engaged learning units across the University of Bristol.

It is important to acknowledge that the participatory aims of this project were not fully realised. Students were keen to be involved in the project and engaged in the language of participatory research but had very little time to commit. The temporary nature of some of the lecturing team’s employment meant that they were juggling multiple roles and commitments. This meant it was extremely difficult to find time to reflect on experiences of teaching. As a result, while the project was shaped by participatory principles, it was not participatory in its methods and analysis. Future curriculum development work with mature students should take account of this.

Reflecting on the time past

I write this short account of the project 6-years after the fact and a lot has changed in that time. Shortly  after the project concluded we lurched into the rapid real-time adaptations required by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic which involved significant changes to teaching and learning. For community-engagement, a practice-based discipline, this meant supporting students to pivot their projects online, or to conduct desk-based research and reviews rather than the face-to-face work they had hoped for. I would suggest that there is an opportunity to build on the insights from this project to consider what we can understand about learning and teaching community-engagement in the post-pandemic teaching environment which includes (as standard) asynchronous materials, online learning and meeting spaces, and vastly increased opportunities for engagement with multi-national virtual communities.

While I stepped away from my role in the ELCE programme in 2021 (leaving it in the capable hands of Dr Marie-Annick Gournet and colleagues) I remain deeply committed to creating opportunities for community-engaged learning in higher education. I hope that this report provides insights which others will find useful when developing their own community-engaged learning opportunities across disciplines. 

References

Billington, J. and Sperlinger, T. (2011) ‘Where does literary study happen? two case studies’, Teaching in Higher Education, 16(5), pp. 505–516. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.570439.

Bringle, R. G., & Clayton, P. H. (2012). Civic education through service- learning: What, how, and why? In L. McIlrath, A. Lyons, & R. Munck (Eds.), Higher education and civic engagement: Comparative perspectives (pp. 101- 124). New York: Palgrave.

Ash, S.L. and Clayton, P.H. (2004) The Articulated Learning: An Approach to Guided Reflection and Assessment, Innovative Higher Education.

Facer, K. and Enright, B., (2016) A Question of Purpose: Engaged Learning and the Research Mission of the University in Sachs, J. and Clark, L. Learning Through Community Engagement: Vision and Practice in Higher Education (pp.53-64). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0999-0.

Freire, P. (2021) Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2020.1766207.

hooks, B., 2013. Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. Routledge.

Hubble, S., & Bolton P., 2022. Part-time undergraduate students in England, Research Briefing, House of Commons Library. CBP-7966.pdf (parliament.uk)

Neary, M. (2015) How To Do Student as Producer. Available at: https://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/author/mneary/ (Accessed: 19 February 2024).

Neary, M. and Winn, J. (2009) ‘The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education’, in The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. London: Continuum, pp. 192–210. Available at: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1675/.

Roggero, G. and Brophy, E. (2011) The production of living knowledge: The crisis of the university and the transformation of labour in Europe and North America, The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Temple University Press.

Sperlinger, T., McLellan, J. and Pettigrew, R. (2018) Who are Universities For? Re-making Higher Education. Bristol: Bristol University Press.