Alan H. Bloomgarden, Ed.D.
Mount Holyoke College
I am very excited at the ways in which the language
describing this year’s conference theme, “Connected Knowing,” draws us to think
not only about the (usual, for us!) connections between learning and
experience, but also about the different places knowledge resides, and about
the intersections and crossroads in our communities where it is generated. In particular, I look forward to continuing
to explore of the dynamics of campus-community partnership in the metropolitan
setting. I hope that the 2012 conference
in Baltimore will offer some new research and thinking about this form of
connectedness.
As the Coordinator of a robust Community-Based Learning Program at
Mount Holyoke College, I have the great fortune of working not only in rich and
sustained campus-community partnerships with agency and program staff,
educators and activists in surrounding towns and nearby cities of Holyoke,
Springfield and Northampton. As a member
of the Five College Community
Based Learning Committee (FCCBL), I get to spend a lot of time working
toward sustainable, reciprocal engagement in the context of multi-institutional
collaboration. I and my staff work very
closely with colleagues at Amherst, Smith and Hampshire Colleges, and the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in developing and implementing various
forms of collaboration. We also
frequently engage partners at nearby Holyoke Community College, and in our
community partnership work especially in the city of Holyoke, we sometimes
refer to our efforts as “six college collaboration.”
In the early 2000s, some of us from that group undertook
intensive consideration of relationships among community-based learning and
community engagement agendas via the “Holyoke Planning Network.” HPN was a
campus-community coalition which sought to examine the engagement relationships
driven and defined by campus constituencies, and aimed to enable and empower
partners to articulate community development priorities and define productive,
reciprocal, and ultimately sustainable practices. The effort to explore these practices
centered upon our joint hosting of a “Planners Network” conference thanks to
the suggestion and inspiration of Ken Reardon, who helped bring this process to
us. This is a story discussed at length
in our joint paper, “Building
Sustainable Community/University Partnerships in a Metropolitan Setting,”
in which we concluded:
The challenge for CBL faculty and
staff in working with community partners is
to develop ways to adequately measure and articulate the benefits of
community-based learning for both students and faculty and also to determine
the true costs [and benefits] to a community organization that is accommodating
CBL opportunities. On both sides, a fair accounting of the total resources required
to create true community-based learning opportunities is a necessary
prerequisite for equitable partnerships… As representatives of academic
institutions, we must recognize that our fate is intrinsically tied to that of
our neighboring communities and that we share a responsibility for each other.
Talk of social justice and social change is meaningless unless we work hard to
overcome the barriers to justice and change in our own institutional settings,
while at the same time striving to ensure the well-being and sustainability of
our community partners.[1]
There are a number of rich research questions emerging from
that paper. How do we measure the resources our community partners invest in the
learning aims of our students, and how can
we represent those accurately in our accounting to them, to campus
constituencies, to funders, etc.? How are community partners impacted when
enlisted as partners, placement sites, resources, etc. by multiple higher
institutions often at the same times and for similar purposes? What do the intersections of our often
competing, conflicting, or concurrent needs mean for the communities and the
community partners we work with?
These questions provide a different and perhaps distinctive
prism through which I am looking at the concept of “connected knowing,” one
which has me asking: what is happening in communities where multiple
institutions of higher education explore varied forms of engaged learning and
scholarship, in modes and with policies and practices that are both complimentary
and conflicting? Are the flows of
traffic carrying students, faculty, administrators through and about the
communities that host multiple colleges, universities made rewarding or even
comprehensible? I hope to see and hear
some responses to these and related questions in Baltimore.
[1] Bloomgarden, A., Bombardier,
M, Breitbart, M., Nagel, K., & Smith, P.
(2006). Building Sustainable College/Community Partnerships in a
Metropolitan Setting. In Forrant, R.
& Silka, L. Inside and Out: Universities
and Education for Sustainable Development, Amityville, NY: Baywood 105-117.
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