Faculty User’s Guide for Ethical Community Engagement Modules

Reflecting on How to Create a Just World: Ethical Engagement with Community

Over the last few years, our ideas at St. Olaf about the global-local continuum have shifted: what is global is local, and what is local is global. As we engage with study abroad, study away, and academic civic engagement (ACE) courses in the Smith Center and advance the mission of inclusive global engagement, it is important to consider the ethics of these forms of engagement. The resources on this webpage reflect our commitment to creating reflection opportunities that will support more ethical community-engaged learning experiences, locally and globally.

We invite faculty to explore the modules to the left and read below for tips, strategies, and FAQs to see how you could use and integrate these modules into your courses to deepen this work.

Want to talk with someone? Reach out to Alyssa Melby or Theresa Heath in the Smith Center.

Modules

Identity Module Read
Reciprocity Module Read
Communication Module Read
Solidarity Module Read

The reflection questions gave us an agenda and ethical commitment that I really appreciated–and which I found harder to establish in prior semesters without the modules.
~Ryan Eichberger (english)

Here are some of the most commonly asked questions about the modules. Additional questions can be submitted to Alyssa Melby.

The modules were designed with two key audiences in mind: faculty and students.

The modules are meant to be “plug and play”, adaptable content that faculty can take and immediately incorporate into their course that has a community engagement component, locally or globally. The modules are designed to be used in multiple contexts.

The modules were written with a student audience in mind and attempt to be as “student friendly” as possible in its rhetoric and format.

Because of these two things, you may notice that most of the module sections don’t go deeply into any one aspect of the module, but instead are point to further lines of inquiry that faculty and/or students can investigate around that topic.

In addition, the modules are dynamic! They have evolved as feedback has been received from users. Expect changes and know that your own ideas are welcome! Please share them with Alyssa Melby.

The modules focus on distinct ethical dimensions of community engagement: identity, communication, reciprocity, and solidarity. Each module has the following three components.

Introduction

(Designed to give key concepts and distinctions)
↓

Reflection Questions

(Gives an opportunity to reflect on and connect the key concepts before, during, and after the experience)

↓

Case Studies

(Applying your knowledge to local and global scenarios based on real-life examples from St. Olaf)

Many ideas are included in the Facilitation Guide, but here’s how we got to the guide:

The modules were piloted by over 10 faculty during the 2022-23 school year. These faculty–and others since–are invited to:

find the module(s) that best connect to their ethical engagement experience
discern which pieces of that module might best work and fit into their course
add onto the module with disciplinary-specific information
use it with your students and see what insights and questions are raised!

Some faculty only use the learning content (or a portion thereof). Some faculty only look at the reflection questions (and only use some of the suggestions to create more targeted and student friendly reflection opportunities as some modules offer 20+ reflection question ideas!). Other faculty have their students dive deep into one or two case studies. Others have the classes read the modules online from top to bottom. Others take the content and incorporate into their own slide decks or Moodle sites.

In other words: use what is most helpful, but do not feel like you have to use it all!

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 earlier, these modules are meant to give a general overview of these concepts and to point to further lines of inquiry along the way. That said, you may have students within certain academic disciplines or with lived experience for whom the information in the modules might be far too basic.

For instance, as more and more students are being asked to reflect on their positionality and identity in multiple classes, the modules may feel redundant or too elementary for some students. How might you acknowledge this and, for those students who feel that way, encourage them to return to that reflective work on positionality and identity (which is a lifelong endeavor!) within the particular context of this community-engaged experience, inside and outside of the classroom? How might a return to these concepts continue to help them grow in their understandings of themselves and others?

Great question! First, if you’re ever asked yourself something like the following questions, you’re already participating in ethical engagement endeavors in your study abroad or away course.

What do I know about the community(ies) we will be studying in and the people who live there? How am I encouraging students to learn about these places before they go?
What relationships do I have or do other St. Olaf community members have with people in that place? What is the web of relationships that I/we are entering into?
What is my/our positionality during our time in that location? How am I preparing students to show up and attend to power and privilege during their study abroad/away experience?
How am I framing the relationship between our group and the host community: guest-host? neighbors? global changemakers? Something else? And how does this framing shift how we move throughout that place and build relationships with the people there?
How am I encouraging responsible action on issues that students care deeply about or encounter during their study abroad/away course, even if that sometimes might mean not doing anything at all at that time?
What are the systems of power in play within that location, and what systemic connections are there between that place and my own location?
How will I help students synthesize what they learn and feel prepared to bring that learning back home?
Is reciprocity and/or solidarity called for in this engagement? How would that look in this context?

Second, by leading a study abroad/away course, you’ve made a conscious choice to take learning outside the walls of academia. What responsibility do you/we have to that place and its people? Every choice that you make in designing your program can consider:

ways to honor and center local expertise, knowledge, and culture-bearers when you choose your vendors, tour operators, restaurants, etc.
opportunities to intentionally participate in meaningful intercultural dialogue and communication
responsibly using resources at that location when you consider the number of travel days, modes of transportation, etc.

No, the material is not available on Moodle or Google Classroom.

Why? After considering that we actively encourage faculty to use and adapt the modules as they need (most are not using the entirety of any one module) and learning how difficult it is to copy sections of a Moodle into another Moodle site, we decided it might not be the most effective way of sharing information with faculty and students (although please share if you disagree!).

Instead, there are a couple of ways to share the information with students.

Link to the module(s) website and direct students to the particular piece(s) you wish them to read and review
Take what you want from the modules by copying and pasting into your own preferred format. To assist with this, there are Google Docs and Slide Decks for each module listed under the “Additional Resources” section below. We will endeavor to keep these as up to date as the website, but know there may be minor discrepancies.

Here are additional resources for faculty to use as they integrate the modules into their courses, including the modules in Google Doc and Slides formats.

Students held each other accountable and used the questions to make decisions. When planning their contact with a community partner, they debated their strategy using insight drawn from the modules. The modules essentially empowered students to make effective independent choices.
~ryan eichberger (english)

Faculty User’s Guide for Ethical Community Engagement Modules

Reflecting on How to Create a Just World: Ethical Engagement with Community

Modules

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Additional Resources for Faculty