“When There’s Good, There’s Good. When There’s Harm, There’s Harm”: Diverse Voices on Community Engagement

Abstract

Service learning and community engagement, pedagogical strategies combining work in the community with academic learning, have become near ubiquitous across U.S. higher education. While scholarship has demonstrated positive student learning outcomes of community engaged pedagogies and practices, there has been unequal consideration towards understanding the experiences of communities involved. Calls for elevating community voices and perspectives in service learning and community engagement are not new but have all too often demonstrated lofty rhetoric without subsequent practical application. What is even more concerning is that critical scholars have argued that service learning has been shaped by white supremacy and neoliberalism. Yet, these racial and economic realities have rarely been discussed in detail and scholars also have neglected to consider these issues from the perspectives of communities. Because community perspectives have been largely missing from the community engagement scholarship, this qualitative inquiry, drawing on a case study research approach, as well as the analytic lenses of Critical Whiteness Studies and neoliberalism, aimed to engage a multivocal account of how one community described and understood their experiences with community engagement by one college. Specifically, this inquiry took me back to the college that I graduated from, Providence College (a regionally selective, predominantly White, Catholic, liberal arts college in Providence, Rhode Island that had an academically situated undergraduate community engagement program) and the Smith Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island (a predominantly lower-income, multiracial community that abutted the southeast corner of the campus) where I was first introduced to and participated in service learning and community engagement as a college student. Findings from this study revealed how a range of community members experienced Providence College’s community engagement work within Smith Hill as well as how community members described a perceptual harm imposed on the community by the college’s community engagement work. By listening to community voices and perspectives, this inquiry offers a key implication for practice and future research that more fully considers community members in the context of service learning and community engagement in higher education.