Engaged learning
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2978
Engaged learning commits itself to community development and an active pedagogy as the state continues to withdraw funding from communities. Community engagement is a teaching, research and change mechanism for students who use ethnographic methods and experiential learning to practice citizenship and rehearse their roles in professional settings. Engaged learning provides the opportunity to explore “alternative moral frames for academic work”, for pedagogical innovation and for resistance against neoliberalism.
application/pdf
2239-625X
2978
1
en
Sam Beck
Anuac
Engaged learning
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
6
Forum: Anthropologists Witnessing and Reshaping the Neoliberal Academy
2017-07-18
2017-06-27
2017-07-17
2017-07-18
35-40
1
Sam Beck
2017/07/18
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2978
35
Cornell University, United States
2239-625X
1
en
40
Engaged learning
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/2978/2597
6
                                                  2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 35-40




                                                                                              FORUM




Student demonstration against fees and cuts, Aberdeen. Credits: http://anticuts.com/wp-content/uploads /
2015/07/ Aberdeen-student-left-banner.jpg


Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Virginia R. DOMINGUEZ, Sam BECK, Carl A. MAIDA, Martin A. MILLS, Berardino
PALUMBO, Alan SMART, Ger DUIJZINGS, Alexis M. JORDAN & Shaheen M. CHRISTIE,
Boone W. SHEAR, Alex KOENSLER & Cristina PAPA, THE RECLAIMING OUR UNIVERSITY
MOVEMENT.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © SAM BECK
Engaged learning
2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 35-40.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2978
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            35




Engaged learning
Sam BECK
Cornell University




ABSTRACT: Engaged learning commits itself to community development and an active peda-
gogy as the state continues to withdraw funding from communities. Community engage-
ment is a teaching, research and change mechanism for students who use ethnographic
methods and experiential learning to practice citizenship and rehearse their roles in profes-
sional settings. Engaged learning provides the opportunity to explore “alternative moral
frames for academic work”, for pedagogical innovation and for resistance against neoliberal-
ism.




    Cornell University is one of the land-grant universities created in the
1860s that marked the beginnings of university-community engagement. It
was a response to the modernization of industry and agriculture with each
state in the U. S. developing its own campus. Cornell University is one of a
small number of campuses (MIT is another) that incorporates both public
professional and private liberal arts colleges. While Cornell’s public colleges
encouraged off-campus engagement, Cornell’s private liberal arts college un-
til recently resisted this sort of engagement.
    The Campus Compact, a national coalition of colleges committed to the
civic mission of higher education, was formed in 1985 to respond to the criti-
cism higher education received from business and government sectors for
being unresponsive to society needs (Beck and Maida 2013: 1-2). The non-
academic Cornell Ithaca Volunteers in Training and Service was established
in 1988, made up of a small number of activist professors and administrators.
Following the establishment of G.H.W. Bush’s National Community Service
Act of 1990, Cornell established its Public Service Center in 1991 «to cham-
pion the conviction that the Cornell University experience confirms service
as essential to active citizenship» (http://vivo.cornell- .edu/display/individ-
ual26488) using a service-learning methodology. In 2001 Cornell helped
found the New York Campus Compact.


                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 35-40
36                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


   University engagement is a double-edged sword, a teaching tool for civic
engagement and labor market oriented professional development and the
further articulation of higher education with neoliberalism. University en-
gagement incorporates professionals in community non-profit and the pri-
vate sectors as unofficial non-university instructors and simultaneously pro-
vides free labor (Perlin 2012) in exchange. For corporations, internships are
an inexpensive recruitment strategy. For the non-profit sector, engagement
adds university labor, problem solving and research capacity that replaces
government support.
   The concept of community engagement is also implemented to reduce in-
equalities and disparities in our society. According to the Committee on Edu-
cating Health Professionals to Address the Social Determinants of Health,
      Community-Engaged learning is an educational process by which people are
      enabled to become actively and genuinely involved in defining the issues of
      concern to them; in making decisions about factors that affect their lives; in
      formulating and implementing policies; in planning, developing and delivering
      services; and in taking action to active change” (A Framework for Educating
      Health Professionals 2016: xiii).

   Community engagement emphasizes change and agency (Freire 1970),
people improving their own lives, while concurrently improving teaching,
learning, scholarship, professional practice and the self.
   I have directed the Cornell University experiential learning Urban Semes-
ter Program in New York City for the last 25 years and shaped it into its en -
gaged form as students involve themselves in internships, community action
projects, text analysis and active learning seminars. Engagement here re-
shapes the students’ experiences in knowledge production from siloed out-
of-context and abstract learning to lived practice and the multidisciplinary
problems of the real world. Coursework that encompasses an interdiscipli-
nary approach is shaped into an integrated curriculum with permeable inter-
disciplinary boundaries. By providing this kind of knowledge and holistic ex-
periences students in internships rehearse the adjustments they must make
to adapt to professional work environments and the civic contributions for
which they are being prepared.
   Social welfare programs and funding grew between 1965–1981, spanning
the presidencies of LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter, this growth ended with re-
ductions introduced in the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years. Funding for so-
cial welfare was withdrawn, impacting working class urban America as dein-
dustrialization, deregulation, the decline of trade unions, racial discrimina-
tion by banks, real estate agents and landlords was occurring. Urban white


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 35-40
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            37


flight occurred simultaneously with the repopulation of cities by immigrants
and low income people of color.
    Government and business sectors reproached institutions of higher learn-
ing for not adequately preparing undergraduates for the national and more
generally the global labor force as citizens of this nation and the world, po-
tential future leaders, and for being campuses disengaged from real world
dilemmas. Universities were criticized for maintaining their Ivy Tower exis-
tence, isolating themselves from the real world at a time when the real world
was facing problems for which they should take responsibility of resolving.
    Community engagement should not be confused with volunteerism or
other forms of charity work. The United States has a well-developed history
and mythology built around volunteerism and the notion of “charity,” a prac-
tice of benevolence. It is an ethical and moral stance. Engagement is inher-
ently based on the notions of empowerment, autonomy and self-determina-
tion, the principle of autonomy and protecting those who lack autonomy,
beneficence by doing no harm, and maximizing benefits while limiting harm
and the just distribution of burdens and benefits.
     Universities, of course, were not constructed to engage communities or
the world in this manner, but rather to intellectually prepare the young to do
so once they left institutions of higher learning. The community engagement
movement followed the silencing and punishing McCarthy Era resulting in
academic isolationism. Engagement was a response invigorated by the in-
volvement of campus-based anti-Viet Nam war and Civil Rights social move-
ments.
    The changes in immigration laws of the 1960s and the 1970s brought
about a visible demographic shift as more immigrants of color settled into
life in the United States. The social and cultural transformations that took
place as a result of the Civil Rights and Human Rights movements reverber-
ated in the education system from pre-school to universities. By the 1970s,
institutions of higher learning were challenged by the increasing number of
students of color in their classrooms and the race and ethnicity based soci-
etal tensions that this demographic shift created. Multiculturalism, the cul-
ture wars, and affirmative action all resulted from these population shifts.
    Richard Nixon (1969-1974) started the withdrawal of social service fund-
ing, the shrinking of entitlements, and dismantling Lyndon Johnson’s War on
Poverty. This helped create the context in which students were harnessed to
carry out community service in community based organizations reinforced
by JFK’s and LBJ’s ideology of service (Peace Corp and VISTA).


                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 35-40
38                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


   Community service programs targeted relatively affluent and racially
identified “white” students who not only wished to learn about the under-
privileged but were also looking to “help” them. Educators sought to bring
about critical consciousness (Freire 1970) in their students opening them up
to experience the barriers of change, the lives of the working poor and people
of color and how these barriers limit life chances.
   The other issues in which universities were engaged were related to the
withdrawal of government support for underserved and vulnerable commu-
nities. Faculty created community service-learning projects and courses to
support or help these communities resolve local problems through research
in which students generated the data, analyzed these, proposed remedies
and provided the labor to implement projects. This is where experiential
learning and service-learning courses emerged as an important academic
transition, previously perceived as not academically viable or a scholarly en-
deavor (Stanton, et al. 1999, Butin 2010).
   Funding incentives, political pressure, and academic associations advo-
cated for greater scholarship relevance that brought universities and disci-
plines to embrace “community engagement” (Burawoy 2004, Beck and Maida
2015). Efforts to involving students in off-campus activities coincide with a
focus on more effective teaching methods rooted in John Dewey’s hands-on,
experiential and problem-based learning educational philosophy
(1938/1997); Lev Vygotsky’s view that reasoning grows out of practical activ-
ities in social environments (1978); Kurt Lewin’s founding action research
(1946); and Paolo Freire’s concerns with liberatory education that uses daily
life as a means for transforming themselves and their world (1970). David
Kolb’s widely used theory represented by a four stage learning cycle of con-
crete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and ac-
tive experimentation remains influential (2009). Donald Schoen (1983) and
Chris Argyris (1974) explored the notion of reflective practice central to or-
ganizational learning, the nature of in-context, in-process learning and the-
orizing-in-practice.
   In the past, college student outreach and service programs and activities
were administered by untenured and part-time staff and were classified ei-
ther as forms of volunteerism or co-curricular endeavors. They were not wor-
thy of academic credit. In the 21st century these activities have taken on a
greater importance in pre-professional education, increasingly recognized as
academic where contingent staff still predominate, but where tenured and
tenure line faculty participate due to the increasing administrative encour-
agement for “active learning.” Yet, it is also a time when universities are op-


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 35-40
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            39


erated as businesses and part-time and an untenured contingent labor domi-
nates higher education teaching, of which supervisors in private sector in-
ternships and non-profit organizations serve as mentors.
   The Urban Semester Program’s experiential learning and ethnographic
approach pushes against the predominant use of pedagogies that emphasize
aggregate statistical hegemony, didactic and pacifying (“banking”) forms of
teaching, out of context learning, MOOCs and what Shore annd Wright
(2016: 47) identify as the emerging
      institutional framework that promotes competition, entrepreneurship, com-
      mercialization, profit making and “private good” research and the prevalence of
      a metanarrative about the importance of markets for promoting the virtues of
      freedom, choice and prosperity.

   While university engagement is not an accepted standard in higher educa-
tion, it is receiving increasing legitimacy. Oddly, as universities are increas-
ingly being integrated into the market economy, restructured to serve the la-
bor market, becoming yet another business form, the movement for engage-
ment is both part of this integration and a movement of resistance against
the neoliberal political economy.

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                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 35-40
40                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


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