Ethical Community Engagement Modules

Community engagement, at its core, is exactly what it sounds: intentional interactions between a person or people and a community (place-based or identity-based). The community can be one in which that person belongs to, but is often talked about as engagement across difference.

Community engagement can run across a spectrum in an academic context. It can look like a guest-host relationship in a study abroad/away program, or it can involve deeper relationships and collaboration between colleges and communities. Community engagement on this latter end of the spectrum, or what St. Olaf calls “Academic Civic Engagement (ACE)”, means how students apply their learning within a community context for the common good.  Often an ACE experience (and increasingly study abroad/away courses) involves collaboration with a community partner, but can also focus on the physical place, location, or the general public as the community the students are engaging with. Sometimes, ACE can even happen through a study abroad/away program where students are deeply learning with and alongside their local community–wherever that might be in the world!

As mentioned above, study abroad/away programs often engage with the location of the program through a guest-host relationship, which can vary according to cultural traditions and norms. Sometimes, programs will go deeper into engaging with that location’s local community. Depending on the needs identified by the community or partner and the capacities of the students and faculty member, academic civic engagement (ACE) experiences, locally or globally, typically involve one of the following approaches to community engagement:

Direct: Students engage in in-person interactions with a community partner or members of a community through activities such as tutoring children after school or providing staff support for a community food shelf.
Example Course: SW 254 Inclusive Practice: Individuals and Families: Story Circle collaboration between Northfield Retirement Community (NRC) and St. Olaf students.   

Indirect: Students work “behind the scenes” (without in-person community interactions) to address an issue in the community, such as gathering information that the community can use to write grants or inform plans for future action.
Example Course: ENVST 381 Theo-Ethics of Climate Change: Student teams partner with local Christian communities to create Dialogue and Discussion guides and resources for the congregations to use when learning about and acting upon climate-related topics (i.e. food choices, renewable energies, climate refugees, environmental racism, etc.).

Research: Students use appropriate, discipline-informed methods, often through participatory action research, to collaborate and contribute to solutions and social transformation.
Example Course: ID 242 Democracy and the Arts in Washington, D.C. Students generated an arts-centered policy proposal that they delivered to those with the power to make change and in the arts.

Advocacy: Students investigate community-identified social needs and contribute to transformative change through activities such as increasing awareness of a policy issue, obtaining support for a social change initiative, or assisting community members who are engaged in advocacy.
Example Course: MUSIC 245: Music and Social Justice A musical advocacy project in conjunction with the MN Correctional Facility in Shakopee and Northfield-area nonprofits that included the Northfield Arts Guild, Clean River Partners, and Greenvale Elementary School.

Adapted from:

•  AAC&U VALUE Rubric, which cites Civic Responsibility and Higher Education, edited by Thomas Ehrlich, published by Oryx Press, 2000, Preface, page vi.)
• Service learning in psychology: Enhancing undergraduate education for the public good,  Bringle et al. (2016, pp. 57-58

This student user guide is designed to help you navigate the modules. The modules focus on distinct ethical dimensions of community engagement: namely, identity, reciprocity, communication, and solidarity. Each module has the following three components.

While it is our hope that you might complete all three modules, your instructor might decide to have you focus on just one entire module or some portion of one or more of them. There are other possible choice points as well. The reflective components can be done in small groups or individually. Depending on the nature of your class, moreover, you might be asked to complete only the local case studies or only the global ones. As for content, the main categories of the modules concern identity, reciprocity, communication, and solidarity. But you will also come across supplementary components, including 1) a reminder about the inherent value of relationships, even when your project does not achieve what you hoped, 2) some instructions about mindset changes and remaining flexible, and 3) some optional resources for further study. These components are distinct but each of them is meant to further advance the primary goal of these modules: namely to address some aspect of what it means to enter into communities and how to be part of inclusive communities, whether locally or globally. Since these relational dimensions are inevitably ethical in nature, the goal is to build on your previous knowledge and give you even more tools to bring to your community engagement experiences.