Asking, Listening, Learning, and Reflecting: Tactical Approaches to Community-University Partnerships

Asking, Listening, Learning, and Reflecting:

Tactical Approaches to Community-University Partnerships

Establishing partnerships with community organizations is not a new concept in formal educational settings. High schools and colleges have embraced the idea that community involvement and hands-on learning experiences lead to positive educational outcomes for students and benefit members of the local community. It is difficult to identify a definitive origin of this pedagogical movement, but two distinct events arguably influenced the rise in popularity of community-university partnerships. One, according to Lillian Bridwell-Bowles (1997: 23), "came when the Clinton administration connected community service to the school reform movement." Earlier than Clinton's endorsement of community service was the 1985 formation of Campus Compact. According to the mission statement on its Web site, Campus Compact "advances the public purposes of colleges and universities by deepening their ability to improve community life and to educate students for civic and social responsibility."

Campus Compact was one of the early supporters of integrating service into course curricula. With the academic climate friendly to merging service with learning, most community-university partnerships and service learning programs arose from three perceived needs: the students felt disconnected from what they would be learning (hence the familiar refrain, "When will we use this?"); the administration desired closer interaction with the local community; and writers and scholars researching community literacies sought to use their research experience to inform their pedagogy, in hopes that their work would enhance the classroom experience for them and their students.¹

As a result, we have a rich body of scholarly work concerning community-university partnerships and service learning projects, from book-length projects to articles in peer-reviewed journals.² While this corpus does provide thoughtful, reflective, and helpful information to writing instructors, students, and researchers about administering and organizing service learning projects and community partnerships, the perspective is somewhat one-sided. Examples, success stories, failure stories, lessons learned, and recommendations for the future are given almost solely from the perspective of scholars in the academy. What has been missing, until now, is the perspective of the other: community organizations and the community itself. In Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition, Paula Mathieu foregrounds these missing voices and addresses this gap in the scholarship on community-university partnerships.

Mathieu is not merely hypothesizing about best practices. Her work with two street newspapers, Spare Change News and StreetWise, as well as the International Network of Street Papers, provides her with an insider's view of what it is like to partner with and be served by the university community. These experiences directly inform her main argument: that writing instructors, students, and researchers must fundamentally alter their approach to working with and within the community. Drawing on theories from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1988) and Ernst Bloch's Principles of Hope (1986), she advances her argument that the current strategic logics of community involvement must be changed to a tactical orientation grounded in hope.

A strategic logic is the logic of today's university. Mathieu explains that the goal of a strategy "is to create a stable, spatial nexus that allows for the definition of practices and knowledge that minimize temporal uncertainty. Strategic thinking accounts for and relies on measurability and rationality" (16). The complexity of running—and funding—the modern university nearly guarantees a bureaucratic mindset focused on program outcomes, metrics, and reports, and this mindset does not stop with the budget and control office. Departments often find themselves justifying their budgets, and programs (such as service programs) that are renewed are those that can demonstrate, numerically, that they get results. Mathieu argues that this is a problematic mindset: "When extending university work into the community, existing academic measures are often applied—such as grading criteria, methods for evaluation, desires for institutionalization—even...