Abstract:

With communities challenged by natural and manmade disasters such as climate change, COVID-19, economic and racial disparities, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks, there is an important role to be played by university initiatives around community engagement. A model for this was created in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 at Tulane University in New Orleans. Tulane’s leadership team came up with a bold plan that would link the university’s recovery with the city’s by requiring all students to take two community engagement courses before graduating. Within five years, Tulane’s reputation as the U.S.’s most civically engaged university was well established and they had the most applications than any other school. This increase in applicants, according to Tulane, was due to the community engagement requirement. Five years later in 2010 and several thousand miles away, Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake that damaged a number of buildings and caused liquefaction (quicksand like substance). Fortunately, no one died. In the immediate aftermath, a student at the University of Canterbury created a Facebook event for students who wanted to help with the liquefaction clean up. Three days after the quake, he had 100 join him and this doubled every day for a week as they eventually had over 2,000 helping out. After one month, all of the clean up was done and they decided to form a club called the Student Volunteer Army (SVA), which would launch the following academic year in 2011. No sooner than the semester began on February 21, a day later the city was hit with a more devastating earthquake that happened in the middle of the day. Sadly, 185 people perished, over 80% of the downtown was destroyed, and 11,000 homes were uninhabitable. The SVA deliberated for a day before jumping back into action. If the damage was exponentially larger, so too was their response. Over the following weeks, their ranks swelled to over 11,000 students and they provided immediate relief to residents all over Christchurch. On their first day of operation, a news anchor narrated images of the students working and said: “Isn’t it great that the students put their learning aside to help out the community.” I profoundly disagreed with this comment, and it spurred me into action of devising a way for students to situate their volunteer experiences within an academic context. Knowing what Tulane had done after Katrina, I quickly contacted the leader of that initiative who was most generous with assisting us. During the next few months after the earthquake and with Tulane’s assistance, I created a course, CHCH101: Rebuilding Christchurch, that had three components: 1) academic content about volunteering and citizenship, 2) volunteer experience – which could have already taken place, and 3) critical reflection. This course has been taken by over 1,000 students who have contributed more than 30,000 hours of service. Additionally, it has led to a new Bachelor of Youth Community Leadership degree and the development of a new Graduate Profile that has community engagement as one of four attributes all students will have. The current iteration of the course in 2020 will focus on social justice and social isolation as a result of COVID-19. This presentation will share the above story of how curriculum can be designed to address contemporary issues and will engage attendees to consider how community engagement can be relevant in their own contexts.

Keywords:

Community engagement, service-learning, experiential learning.