Opening Doors:

1

• Opening Doors

• The Contribution of Community University
  Partnerships to Community Development and
  Personal Learning.
• Juliet Millican, University of Brighton.

2
Education for Social Justice has a long history,
but it is a history of Adult Education..

• Higher Education is constrained by
• Power structure of the academic system
• A focus on theoretical learning
• A need to pre set and validate learning outcomes
• Limited life experience of many of its
  participants

3
The Big Ideas of HE

• Transmission of Knowledge and Understanding (60s
  and 70s)
• Personal Transferable skills (later to become key
  skills) (80s)
• Critical Reflection (90s)
• Tom Bourner Bridges and Towers, 1998.
• Engagement and Widening Participation (21C??)
  Millican, 2005

4
Community University Partnership Programmes

• Initiate new ways of working
• Engage with local communities
• Promote partnerships for mutual benefit
• Encourage wider access
• Make human and material resources of the
  university available to the community
• Make experiential and practical resources of the
  community available to the university

5
Student Learning in the Community

• Can involve either individual or group projects
• Provide a structure where students can gain
  credit for their work
• Facilitate practical experience and a space to
  reflect on that experience
• Link academic learning to real work issues

6
SLIC projects

• Involve experiential and reflective, as well as
  academic learning
• Benefit the community as well as the student
• Give students valuable first step experience
• Incorporate all the big ideas of HE!

7
Who learns what?

• All play roles as educators and learners, and
  become critical scholar-practitioners.

Practitioner
Student
Academic
Taylor 2004
8
What needs to change?

• Traditional HE hierarchies and assessment
  procedures, to acknowledge and encourage the
  contribution of students
• A valuing of experiential and reflective
  knowledge alongside academic knowledge and
  teaching and learning methods that encourage
  these
• The language of academia that is often alienating
  to community practitioners

9
The significance of engagement.

• As a student we live in an incubated world, this
  has enabled me to become part of a wider
  community and to feel much more whole, not just
  part of student life. It has challenged my
  learning relative to other courses I take, made
  me get off a treadmill and think about what I am
  actually learning and what it means for my life
  (Student feedback form 2004).