Collaboration for In-Depth and Authentic Public Service and Education: Developing Long-Lasting Community Partnerships Via Collaboration among a Learning Community, a Public-Service Center and Community-Based Organizations

Abstract:

University classes built around student-centered engagement with real-world sustainability problems offer promise for broadening participation in the geosciences and for enriching the education of participating students. These classes benefit from strong community partnerships, as partners help students gain a more nuanced understanding of issues of culture, history, federal/tribal/local government, equity and justice involved in sustainability problems. But while the benefits to students and universities in these partnerships are clear, community organizations may spend substantial effort educating students without clear benefits or long-term engagement from the university. We report on a unique collaboration between a university learning community and the university’s public-service center designed to foster more mutually beneficial, two-way interactions. In this collaboration, the learning community serves as an “on-ramp” to the public service center’s longer-term programs, developed with community-based organizations and designed to benefit the community and its members. The service programs have the potential to exist beyond any one student’s time at the university, and so to provide substantial benefit to the community while engaging students beyond the original learning-community participants. This collaboration has been developed and tested in two contexts--the Navajo Nation (where sustainability issues include lack of access to clean running water, environmental catastrophes, and the impacts of climate change on traditional farming) and Puerto Rico (where sustainability issues include resilience to major storms and other disasters)—and we describe it from multiple points of view: that of the learning community, that of the public-service center, and those of community partners in both the Navajo Nation and Puerto Rico.