Closing the Loop: Community Engaged Pedagogy in Business Courses

Abstract

Executive SummaryMotived by a desire to learn more about the impact on our community partners of adopting a community service learning approach to pedagogy, this report conveys the results of a follow-up exercise for 45 student projects, covering four semesters. With a relatively small sample size, based on a 49% response rate, our findings need to be considered cautiously. Yet, we believe they provide sufficient insight to merit an interim report.Through an online survey we asked our community partners to comment on: The quality of their experience with our students  Their thoughts on the quality and content of the final report students prepared  Whether they considered the experience to be 'worthwhile', e.g., good value for their time spent  Whether any of the recommendations made by our students had been implemented by the company or organization.Of the 22 partners who responded, only 11 chose to self-identify; that sub-sample was made up of eight for-profit firms (72% of those respondents who chose to self-identify) and the remaining three were notfor-profit organizations.Community partners' responses ranged from being disappointed and feeling 'nothing of value' was received from their interaction with the students, through expressions of gratitude for the work done by students, to complements on the quality of our undergraduate program. Some firms and organizations had already implemented changes based on the recommendations made by students, while others were planning to implement changes in the near future. One firm had already experienced an increase in sales leads as a result of implementing student recommendations.In the pages which follow we review the academic literature on the use of community service learning within business schools. We describe our own approach and present the results of our follow-up exercise in more detail. We discuss a number of issues related to using community service learning and make some recommendations, including directing our readers to a template for constructing memoranda of understanding and criteria for screening potential community partners. We emphasize the need for educators to be aware of the additional time requirements of this pedagogical approach and its potential impact on tenure and promotion decisions. Finally, we share some practical tips based on our own experiences.ii IntroductionThis study was motivated primarily by a desire to 'close the loop' in terms of our learning about and understanding of the impact of using community service learning (CSL) (or community based pedagogy in our home institution's lexicon) in our undergraduate teaching. Over a number of years and across a variety of courses, we had implemented projects ranging in duration and topic in order to facilitate a 'practice' perspective for the students in our Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of International Business programs. We had received lots of feedback from students, in the form of anecdotal accounts and more structured feedback exercises, and we had some feedback from communi...