1.1: Brief History of Community Engagement as a Teaching and Learning Practice

Community engagement, also referred to as service-learning or civic engagement, has many roots. In academic settings at universities, many scholars attribute our current practices to scholars like John Dewey. In the early 20th century, John Dewey wrote a book called Experience in Education wherein he emphasized the importance of experiential and experimental learning opportunities. In the near century since this landmark text, efforts toward community engagement have expanded across K-12, university, and workplace learning environments. Before we get to our discussion of community engagement, let’s talk about some experiential education opportunities with which you may be familiar. Think for a moment about many of the professional fields you interact with regularly—doctors, dental assistants, and teachers, just to name a few. All of these professionals engaged in experiential learning to achieve their professional goals.

These fields require internships or learning experiences before an individual can be considered qualified to work as a professional in the field. Consider social workers, who have to observe and be observed to earn licensure. Or doctors, who complete medical school and then a residency before beginning their own practice with patients. And teachers, too, who observe experienced teachers and participate in these teaching settings while being observed before ever teaching their own class of students on their own. All of these professions require experiential learning: translating textbook reading and traditional learning experiences in the classroom into practice-based experiences with communities outside of their college or university. Within this context of experiential learning, community engaged pedagogies are one common type learning opportunity. The sort of experiential learning opportunity you are about to engage in can be considered on a continuum of issues like time commitment, intensity of effort, required book knowledge for success, the types of project(s) you’ll work on, and the goals of the experience. In this class, we have a short time together, and before you begin your projects with partners, you’ll already have completed practice and learning through other projects, readings, and class activities. This means that your experiential education will be intensive, but not sustained (unless you opt to continue with the organization after the class ends, which we discuss more in section 4.6).

Today, community engaged pedagogies are a fairly mainstream practice. Most colleges and universities have units like Washington State University’s Center for Civic Engagement. These units provide support not only for students, but also faculty, staff, nonprofits, local communities, and other campus offices. Centers like these often serve as matchmakers between faculty and nonprofits for curricular (classroom) community engagement, and some have research arms that are located in the communities they are designed to serve (see, for instance, Weber State’s Center for Community Engaged Learning). Aside from supporting curricular engagement initiatives, Centers like these also provide structure for student clubs, alternative breaks, and similar co-curricular (occurring alongside classroom) community engagement. Sometimes these offices also focus on the civic component, which relates to educating students to be active citizens.

Community engagement in your technical writing course provides you a version of experiential learning on a scale appropriate to the level and focus of your course. You will be equipped with the theory and content knowledge to conduct the work and will be provided a specific experiential learning context in which to practice these new skills. Whether you are an engineering student taking this course as part of your degree program, an interested anthropology student fulfilling a degree requirement, or a future business professional seeking to sharpen your technical and professional writing skills, experiential, consequential learning in your technical writing class will help you process and practice the content you are learning.