Rethinking the expert: Co‐creating curriculum to support international work‐integrated learning with community development organisations

Abstract

Increasing numbers of Australian students are travelling overseas to undertake short‐term work‐integrated learning placements with community development organisations. In light of recent criticisms emerging in academic and public commentary on short‐term international volunteering, this paper highlights the need for a support curriculum that caters for students from diverse discipline backgrounds, often with little or no previous understanding of community development principles or intercultural engagement. In doing so, we question who is best placed to develop an appropriate curriculum and what might it look like. We draw on Macquarie University's Professional and Community Engagement community development programme to critically reflect on the importance of engaging with diverse knowledge frameworks, approaches to learning and subject expertise of our international community partners. In particular, this paper showcases a community‐based development module co‐created with community partners that aims to encourage students to rethink western‐dominated understandings of development, poverty and inequality. To conclude, we explore how co‐creating curriculum with community partners unsettles assumptions of the university as the only site of expert knowledge and knowledge‐making practices, and reflect on the challenges encountered as we try to contribute to the development of socially and environmentally conscious students.

Towards a Decolonizing Framework for Pre-Departure Education

“…Similar to Hammersley et al (2018), I view the PDO as an educational and social exercise that can provide a rare opportunity for critical reflection, engagement in diverse understandings, and creation of sensitive community relations. As noted elsewhere (Mizzi & O'Brien-Klewchuk, 2016), cultural and human diversity may be adjunct topics in PDO curricula, there is a heavier focus on technical and organizational information, and the goal is to prepare sojourners for quick adjustment and productive experiences as determined by the employer.…”

“…Western ways of working and learning often dominate the PDO curriculum and pedagogy (Hammersley et al, 2018;Jorgenson, 2016). In addition to an explicit curriculum that validates certain knowledge systems, Eisner (2002) wrote that excluded content functions as an implicit curriculum that is also being taught to learners.…”

“…This point calls for an interrogation into how and why colonizing structures continue to be highly valued in formal educational systems. Fourth, Patel (cited in Hammersley et al, 2018) recognized that decolonization and diversity is about attending to power relations, and these elements are often missing in field trips overseas. This point reinforces the notion that transnational mobility experiences are power-ridden and that decolonization may help reduce continuing harm against Indigenous communities.…”

What’s in a Name? Unpacking Students’ Roles in Higher Education through Neoliberal and Social Justice Lenses

“…Sanders and Simons (2009) define co-creation broadly as "any act of collective creativity that is experienced jointly by two or more people." This could extend co-creation activities to other collaborative activities, such as co-governance (Varnham, 2017) and student participation in workintegrated learning subjects or opportunities (Dollinger & Brown, 2019;Hammersley, Lloyd, & Bilous, 2018). These activities, similar to the co-creation of teaching approaches and curricula, encourage ongoing dialogue between students and staff, from the design of the activity or process to the outputs and eventual dissemination.…”

Teaching development studies in times of change

“…To deliver WIL programmes that contribute to the decolonisation of development knowledge and pedagogy, Lloyd et al call for the cocreation of programme design and implementation with community partners. Building on Freire's (1993) dialogic form of education, which understands teaching as collaboration with others rather than for others, they suggest that co-created programmes enable the creation of space for both opening teaching and learning to Indigenous and other alternative epistemologies, and also for unsettling assumptions of the university as the site of expert knowledge and knowledge-making practices (Lloyd et al, 2018). By offering a detailed exploration of a specific community-based development module that was co-created with community partners, Lloyd et al demonstrate how WIL has the potential to contest dominant Western understandings of development and move beyond modernist, colonial and pedagogies.…”