Cultivating Community Relationships through Project-Based Learning
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Date
2019-04
Authors
Jackson, Nate
Mong, Sherry
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Ohio State University. Office of Outreach and Engagement
Abstract
Drs. Nate Jackson (philosophy) and Sherry Mong (sociology) will describe a transdisciplinary pedagogy that combines project-based learning with best practices in community engagement. Extending Capital University's commitment to partnering with community members in the Near East and Driving Park neighborhoods of Columbus, students in ethics and sociology classes work with community partners to co-define and produce an artifact over the course of a semester. Their experience with community partners serves as a fulcrum for deep reflection and application of concepts they learn in their coursework.
Description
In this presentation aimed at faculty members and teachers, we describe the process of implementing and assessing a project-based pedagogy incorporating significant engagement with community partners. In a general education ethics class and an upper-division sociology course, we make projects a centerpiece of the course. Ethics students are grouped with sociology students to form teams of five to six people. Prior to the beginning of the semester, we work with a variety of community partners to prepare "project statements," outlines of a general project that students will complete with these partners. Students are presented with six to seven such statements and asked to rank them. We then form student groups. Early in the semester, community partners come to our class to give an overview of their organization, goals, and conception of the neighborhood. Students can then know a bit about their partners before embarking on fieldwork. In the first few weeks, they meet in the neighborhood with partners to further clarify and co-define their artifact. Artifacts are co-created to meet community needs as defined by the community partners. Artifacts then become the fulcrum leveraging reflection on moral theory and the study of social problems. In the ethics class, weekly reflection papers, in-class discussions, and a final paper project require students to describe their experience and process of working with community partners in terms of the moral theory under discussion. Using experience as text, they can draw on philosophical work to critique their own initial responses and assumptions, and leverage the experience to criticize theory. In the social problems class, students prepare weekly reflection papers, explore concepts of privilege through readings, reflection, and analyzation of census data, and prepare a final paper in which they frame the project sociologically and reflect on their own civic and ethical engagement. Groups of ethics and social problems students work together to prepare final poster projects. Finally, we assess student projects using discipline specific rubrics, the AAC&U Civic Engagement rubric, and indirect assessments like student evaluations. We also assess partners’ experiences with a questionnaire developed at Capital. In this presentation, we share some of the outcomes of this assessment, and seek to spark a conversation about effective assessment of impact, in addition to further clarifying and refining our project-based pedagogy.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Nate Jackson, assistant professor of philosophy, Capital University, njackson1331@capital.edu (Corresponding Author); Sherry Mong, associate professor of sociology and criminology, Capital University
AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Nate Jackson, assistant professor of philosophy, Capital University, njackson1331@capital.edu (Corresponding Author); Sherry Mong, associate professor of sociology and criminology, Capital University
Keywords
project-based learning, community engagement, sociology, ethics
Citation
Engaged Scholars, v. 7 (2019).