What makes or breaks higher education community engagement in the South African rural school context: A multiple-partner perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to inform global citizenship practice as a higher education (HE) agenda by comparing the retrospective experiences of a range of community engagement (CE) partners, and including often silent voices of non-researcher partners. HE-CE aims to contribute to social justice as it constructs and transfers new knowledge from the perspectives of a wide range of CE-partners. This qualitative secondary analysis study was framed theoretically by the transformative-emancipatory paradigm. Existing case data, generated on retrospective experiences of CE-partners in a long-term CE-partnership, were conveniently sampled to analyse and compare a range of CE-experiences (parents of student-clients (n = 12: females 10, males 2), teachers from the partner rural school (n = 18: females 12, males 6), student-educational psychology clients (n = 31: females 14, males 17), Academic ServiceLearning (ASL) students (n = 20: females 17, males 3) and researchers (n = 12: females 11, males 1).Following thematic in-case and cross-case analysis, it emerged that all HE-CE partners experienced that socio-economic challenges (defined as rural-school adversities, include financial, geographic and social challenges) are addressed when an HE-CE partnership exists, but that particular operational challenges (communication barriers, time constraints, workload and unclear scope, inconsistent feedback as well as conflicting expectations) hamper HE-CE partnership. A significant insight from this study is that a range of CE-partners experience similar challenges when a university and rural school partner. All CE-partners experienced that HE-CE is challenged by the structural disparity between the rural context and operational miscommunication.

Community engagement in engineering education: A systematic literature review

“…Scholars assert that to achieve true learning outcomes and fully understand a specific experience, researchers must understand students' motivation to participate in community engagement and must gather in-depth reflections and feedback for analysis (Bringle & Hatcher, 1999;Eyler & Giles, 1999). It appears researchers are more and more aware of the advantage of qualitative methods to incorporate data derived from participants' reflections and responses to open-ended questions (Duff et al, 2014;Machimana et al, 2018). In our sample, the qualitative studies captured the rich experiences of students and community partners involved in community engagement projects through participants' in-depth reflections.…”

“…One main purpose of service-learning is to serve the community and create change (Bringle & Hatcher, 1995); as such, projects impact individual students, institutions, communities, and even the whole social system (Bielefeldt & Lima, 2019). This change cannot be effected without a collaborative effort by community partners (Machimana et al, 2018). In community engagement projects, the community should be the driving force with a vision of partnering with student engineers (Bielefeldt & Lima, 2019).…”

“…Seay & Lumkes, 2014), but the community perspective was largely ignored. Researchers tended to shy away from topics such as community partners' challenges, resources that community can provide to facilitate community engagement, community's attitude toward the programs and participating students, efforts community can contribute to the programs, among others (Machimana et al, 2018). Even though community perspectives were taken into account in some studies, the main focus was on the role of participating institutions and students and the use of students' responses to the scenario to derive results Thompson & Jesiek, 2017).…”

“…Future researchers could delve deep into what elements and types of community partnerships are important for effective community engagement and further explore what the community can contribute to student service-learners (Petri, 2015). Also, future research could investigate topics such as the community's challenges, resources, and attitudes about community engagement projects (Machimana et al, 2018).…”

Negotiating Leadership in Interdisciplinary Co-Productive Research: A Case Study of An International Community-Based Project Between Collaborators From South Africa and the United Kingdom

“…One prominent theme in the literature regarding teams that cross academic and community settings is just how difficult they are to manage and support. An example is from a study by Machimana et al (2018), of the experiences of multiple higher community engagement partners on a decade-long partnership. They found that a common hindrance related to relationships and communication (i.e., unclear scope, inconsistent feedback and conflicting expectations).…”