Pioneer Radio Interviews Linda Hawkins about University and Community Engagement

From Pioneer Radio’s Episode 27 on Community
Aired Oct. 3, 2011

University towns often experience a gap between the research carried out on campus and the work being done by local community organizations. In an effort to make academic research more relevant to communities that shelter them, more and more researchers are partnering with community organisations in order to share their knowledge and expertise and to further social change. Marjorie Taylor met with Linda Hawkins, Director of the Institute for Community Engaged Scholarship and the Research Shop, in her office on campus. The below interview transcript was edited.

To begin with, what do we mean by the term "community engaged scholarship"? It sounds wonderful. What does it mean?

Well it is quite wonderful, but I think it’s important to take apart those terms and then put them back together. When you think about community, a lot of people like to problematize what community is. Community can refer to lots of different kinds of organisations or individuals. Could be folks living with economic hardship, could be a forestry district in Northern British Columbia -it could be communities of interest like those who work around poverty, or it could be geographic communities like the city of Guelph and Wellington County.

Then when we think about engagement - what does that really mean? Engagement, in general, would mean the processes and the relationships that you have and how you interact with others. For the University, what we mean by community engagement is “us” and those folks outside the institution - but we have to know that our partners in the community also talk about community engagement, and they’re not usually talking about the University. They’re talking about their clients if it’s an organisation - if it’s the city of Guelph, they might be talking about public engagement, and engaging citizens. Engagement is for a purpose: are you informing people, or are you giving people a voice in decision making? There’s a real range of what engagement means.

And then the scholarship piece is quite traditionally defined: maybe the products look different, but in terms of quality scholarship, in terms of research or the scholarship of teaching, those products come out of engagement. In engagement, you have reciprocity and the scholarship is part of that.

It sounds as if there’s an activist component to it?

I think without a doubt there is—not for all scholars who would consider themselves engaged, but for a certain portion, maybe even a majority, there would be a social justice framework to this. The idea is to make social change around community engagement and community scholarship. It’s not driven by maintaining the status quo, it is driven by complex and wicked problems.

I want to ask you for an example, if I might, of that, of how it works?

At the University of Guelph there have been a couple of nice big projects that lend themselves to this term and would fit in this category: two Community University Research Alliances, one was the Father Involvement Research alliance and one was the Rural Women Making Change alliance. In each there would have been community partners who identified as communities of interest - organisations, individuals, sometimes advocates - sometimes government partners or policy makers, and the research agenda for those large projects would have been constructed in collaboration. Therefore, it wasn’t always the communities’ research agenda that would move forward: where women’s organisations have specific agendas in various ways, their needs come to the table—their interests, their extensive expertise, and their own knowledge—as well as university researchers coming to that table. We each bring a different piece to that puzzle.

Thinking about where we want to make change, there were policy recommendations, a strong project in municipalities as well as research on and with women’s organisations around women employment rurally.

More recently, in terms of the Research Shop, which has been around just for a couple of years, we’ve done a lot of smaller projects that link to faculty research. We’ve done a lot of work with the Poverty Elimination Taskforce, on affordable bus passes, on food pantries and kitchens. There are very specific uses of this research for the over 30 organisations sitting around that table.

You’ve touched on one thing that I wanted to ask you next which is, can we look at the benefits to the community of this kind of research?

The benefits are that we’re really leveraging the expertise, the knowledge, what’s happened before, and what’s sitting in the literature that nobody outside of the university walls gets to read or have access to. First, there’s a huge knowledge translation piece. One of the first questions that community organisations have when they’re doing planning is to know what’s already happened, what are good practices in this area, what are promising practices in this area. Nobody wants to waste their time; nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. That’s not just up here on the hill, but certainly with our community partners as well.

There’s also the kind of longer term thinking around the relationship that’s built between community and university. These relationships allow community to count on faculty, or graduate students, or others, to be there when they need an expert presenter for whatever panel or for whatever feedback they need on their work. The relationship, I think, is of value to both.

I talked with a colleague in the city and asked about what our value was, and for her, she spoke about access. We can arrange for things, we can bring people in that frankly, she already knows about and sometimes she’s read more of their articles certainly than I have, but we have the ability to support that kind of engagement and exchange. That’s another piece that’s good for community.

What then, if any, are the challenges in carrying out community engaged scholarship from your perspective? I’m wondering first of all if you are always in the position of approaching the various communities or if they come to you, and what challenges might there be involved in that?

Huge challenges. It’s very difficult - our systems are not the same. We’re on a calendar here: linking people with classes and courses is very difficult - but really it comes down to finding the right university players to engage. The difficulty isn’t in finding enough to do, because there’s certainly more than enough to do, and the difficulty is not in having people approach us (we are approached on a regular basis, every day now).

We have developed strategies that are not rigid. They are quite flexible in terms of responding to questions -what we’ve done is we’ve built a way of responding that links us quite strongly – it is not an intake of, here’s one research question, here’s one graduate student, here’s one faculty member. Rather, in effect, the graduate students or faculty are already sitting and linked in community, so we’re breaking down the relationships that way.

The issues are, then, who’s ready to do that work, who wants to do that kind of work, who gets rewarded for doing that kind of work. This is where we get the scholarly politics, and how university scholars might look a little different than community in terms of timing. It’s a huge issue in terms of resources and whose time is paid for and whose time isn’t. There are other risks for community engaging with the university in terms of, for example, how many meetings will this take, what will we get out of it, will we really get what we need, or is this really about the faculty member’s research project? So, lots of issues around how our different systems work and how we can find the little places that we can move forward from--in a way that has high impact and scholarly products as well.

What excites you particularly about this type of scholarship and why? I mean, because you’re obviously passionate about it. Why?

I love the students, and I think they are driving the Research Shop, really. The students are so keen to have an effect on their world - they learn skills, they learn research methods, and theory, and then this gives them the opportunity to think through and practice that in a place that is very messy, but in a place where what they produce will be used as we’ll take on projects where we may effect change, or at least contribute to the conversation around potential change.

I actually believe that research can make social change, so that’s where my passion comes from. I also think that faculty are not always well supported. They’re often isolated and we help in terms of managing the system that we work within—getting their grants in and having students trained up and ready and available to work with them on a research project. I think it’s a very difficult job being a researcher, being a community researcher or an academic researcher.

Linda, thank you so much.

[This interview has been edited and condensed.]