community engagement | Matthew James Vechinski

Course Theme Dissemination [#CuriousCoLab]

Jul 07 2015

I’m sharing with my Collaborative Curiosity colleagues the revised description of my UNIV 200 course theme, destined for the syllabus. In my last #CuriousCoLab post, I described wanting to make participatory research and design essential concepts in my service-learning section. I hope that in the statement below—with major revisions and additions appearing in bold text—I included just the right amount of detail to stress these priorities at the outset. (To be sure, the syllabus is a peculiar mode of dissemination because it has a dual purpose: an institutional document that is also meant as a reference to students. I’m also working on a web page about the theme and my community partners that should be more inviting to students and the larger community.) Participatory research and design will be explored further in the first unit, as students develop their research questions. I’m in the process of revising the unit to include collaborative blogging on the VCU RamPages platform, which I will use to have students discuss the participatory intent behind their research projects. I’m not entirely sure how I will encourage students to take up questions of design in their blogs—that will depend on the readings I choose. But I have been keeping a list of different design approaches (e.g., universal design, participatory design, systems design, design thinking, etc., many of which overlap) with the idea of having students research them online and interpret how these practices have shaped the technologies they chose to study. Your feedback is welcome!

The course will explore three nuanced ways to discuss the past, present, and future of designed technologies. Technology will be broadly defined as a process or object whereby knowledge is applied to achieve a goal or solve problems, and designed taken to mean having an intended purpose, implying designers who plan the process or object and users who take advantage of the resulting technology.

“Technology” is a socially and historically relative term: new technologies are most likely viewed as innovative or disruptive; established technologies are often so integrated in our daily lives that we take little notice of them; and outmoded technologies we tend to discount because they seem effectively replaced by newer technologies.
Access to technologies differs by social group, due to lack of knowledge or lack of resources, which can reflect existing inequalities and create further disadvantages. But there might be some consolation in this: access shapes different life experiences, seeing how exposure to technology revises the meaning of work, leisure, and community.
The design of technology favors particular outcomes and certain users. This is to say that behind any technology resides a particular intention that is subject to real situational limitations. Nonetheless, designs may be inclusive and invite user participation, to the extent that the intention and available resources allow.

In your research and writing, you will approach the subject of your choice as a designed technology and use these considerations to enrich and deepen your exploration.

Your service may take the form of helping your community partner or those it serves use certain designed technologies to meet their needs. For example, you could help elderly residents use software such as Skype to place video calls to family members. Or, with your community partner you might design a technology to achieve a particular goal that benefits the community. You could, for instance, assist your community partner with organizing its social media campaigns which in turn increase the organization’s reach. Alternatively, you will have the opportunity examine the designed technologies a group actually uses and explore how or why they use them. If you are, say, tutoring elementary school students, you could investigate why your community partner might privilege face-to-face tutoring sessions or practice math with objects or pen and paper rather than a computer.

As a service-learner, you will have opportunities to shape your contributions to the community—what you do, how you do it, and for what purpose. In that sense, you and your community partner are designers and your users are the larger community you serve. These positions will become complicated in many ways, however: service-learners are also participants in the community and thus both users and designers. You will design along with members of the community, who aren’t simply the passive recipients of your contributions.

On PAR (Participatory Action Research) and Social Design for Community Engagement [#CuriousCoLab]

Jun 26 2015

Last week I moved apartments within Richmond, which really got me out of sync with the real-time schedule of the Collaborative Curiosity course. With this post I’ll reflect on my takeaways from this week’s and last week’s readings, gathering my thoughts before moving onto the last two weeks of the course.

Recall that I’m not actually designing a community-engaged research project myself; instead, I’m interested in seeing how what I learn about CEnR could be applied to teaching undergraduate service-learning courses. So I didn’t need to choose between a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) or Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology. Yet I found myself drawn to the latter, especially because articles I came across by way of the Participatory Action Research and Organizational Change site problematized what participation means in useful ways. In “Participatory Action Research as a Process and as a Goal,” Greenwood, Whyte, and Harkavy stress “the impossibility of imposing participation on the research process”; it is instead emergent in nature, and falls on a continuum with “expert research” on one end and full PAR on the other.

PAR

I could see exploring the concept of participation with my students, who would be selecting a community partner and designing a research project with the goal of having their service experience complement what they find in conventional sources. Sometimes it is a good match, sometimes not. However, the success of the pairing depends in part on how students take ownership of their service. I seek placements for students where they have the ability to design how they will contribute to their partners’ missions—independent initiatives that work in tandem with established programs these organizations already have in place. Greenwood, Whyte, and Harkavy note that there must be “participatory intent” at the outset that may be sustained by “building participatory processes into the activity within the limits set by the participants and the conditions.” The CBPR methodology seemed to me more focused on inquiring into those conditions and setting the parameters for collaboration, which requires time to develop deep relationships before arriving at the research objectives. For students in my semester-long class, it makes more sense to focus on working within constraints. That’s an idea I touch upon throughout the term. I initially encourage students to be open to discovery, but eventually they need to commit to a limited scope and to working with the information and experience they are able to gather.

The theme of my UNIV 200 course is the social construction of technology, and next year I’m going to stress design parameters—conditions, intentions, emergence—to encourage students to think more critically about technology. I have focused on communities’ access to technologies, but I believe I also should help students examine design choices and effects more closely. Eric Gordon and Jessica Baldwin-Philippi’s article on “Playful Civic Learning” through a game environment might be a great example to share with them. It was fascinating how the Community PlanIt platform encouraged players to build networks by sharing their views, which ultimately provided them with an alternate means of civic engagement. Their contributions offered researchers with one set of data, and studying how players actually took advantage of the interface was another.

Over the summer I’ve been researching social design (also known as design for social change/innovation) as another possible point of entry, with the hope that the subject might inspire students to recognize design as a heuristic for their service and research. The Civic Media Project could provide useful illustrations for discussions on social design. Gordon’s work gives me a lot to think about as I redesign my course description. I really should try to complete the statement of my theme in time to share it with the class before the Collaborative Curiosity course reaches its conclusion.

Open Scholarship: Accessible to Whom? [#CuriousCoLab]

Jun 05 2015

George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons’s article “Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship” provides an excellent overview of the ways that open scholarship is poised to transform academic research. Yet it doesn’t really consider open scholarship from a community partner’s point of view. This was something I had to consider when teaching a service-learning course and having students blog about their experiences. There are obvious arguments against having raw reflection publicly available, though on the other hand there are benefits to sharing one’s working thoughts with others and collaborating online. Should there be—or can there be—limits on whom the preliminary work reaches? While incremental open scholarship upholds transparency, community partners may have qualms about discussing in a public forum difficulties their clients face and the difficulties of addressing those needs. So in some cases, it may be better to hold off until there are final outcomes from CEnR so that everyone involved can weigh in on how those results might be presented. It would be important, too, that these outcomes are not expressed only in discipline-specific or academic discourse. Open scholarship demands that large audiences be able appreciate the value of the work.

Here’s where we also need to consider dissemination venues. One assumption Veletsianos and Kimmons discuss is the role of Internet technologies in open scholarship, which is thought to be “an emergent scholarly phenomenon that is co-evolutionary with technological advancements in the larger culture.” But is access to the technologies we’re using for open scholarship limited for the underprivileged communities and less established organizations that may be involved in our CEnR? For example, my service-learning students last semester at first thought social media would be the perfect way to get the word out about an initiative, only to realize that the community didn’t use the web as much or in the same ways as they did. Veletsianos and Kimmons note that “scholars need to develop an understanding of the affordance of the participatory web for scholarship and consider the implications of online identity and digital participation.” For CEnR, I argue that this requires thinking about how the community you collaborate with actually engages with these technologies (or what alternative technologies it prefers to use). Otherwise, what difference is there between a blog post and an article in a small journal if the post doesn’t reach and engage the community it is speaking about?

Visualizing Shared Power [#CuriousCoLab]

May 29 2015

My visualization of what shared power looks like is a scale that works by balancing the masses on two platforms. This is a metaphor I’m fond of and use often in my teaching. It’s appropriate here because, in order to balance the scale, mass may be added or taken away from either platform. I would compare this functioning to consensus-building in the design of effective community-engaged research. The community partner, on one side, brings certain ideas and expectations to the table, as does the researcher on the other side. Both need to be flexible and add or take away mass on their respective platform so that the project balances out. Also keep in mind that mass—here representing power—equals volume times density. The community partner and researcher bring different materials to place on their platforms, reflecting the diversity of their investments in the collaboration, yet power can remain equal.

Twitterpation; Community-Engaged Research in an Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Curriculum? [#CuriousCoLab]

May 26 2015

Twitterpation (Twitter + participation * twitterpated)

This past week I participated in the VCU Institute for Inclusive Teaching, and so my engagement on Twitter for the Collaborative Curiosity course took a backseat. It was insightful to compare my real-time participation on Twitter during the institute, which used the hashtag #VCUIIT15, with the catching up I did with the #CuriousCoLab conversations. I’m especially grateful for the Storify summaries of the discussions I was absent for. (Thanks, team!) What a fantastic tool for archiving snapshots of exchanges on Twitter. During the institute I was retweeting and favoriting to create within my profile the same kind of account that was produced retrospectively using Storify. I like how tweets build up a record that I and others can refer to later; they become communal reflections that supplement the individual notes I take. I retweet and favorite to bring in insights voiced by others to stand beside my own ideas. This week I realized that this active curation can be performed or appreciated even from a temporal remove. That is an important understanding, since I’ve been frustrated before when I feel like I’ve fallen behind on Twitter. Now that I know I can yield control and still reap benefits, maybe I will be more comfortable dropping in and out of Twitter conversations. With that, I believe I can better take advantage of Twitter as a tool for emergent discussions, when in the past I have used it primarily for posting links.

Community-Engaged Research in an Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Curriculum?

I also wanted to take this opportunity to describe two questions that have come out of following the course so far. Answering them, I expect, will be my ongoing investigation in the weeks ahead, in lieu of a project-centered research proposal that those taking the course for credit will craft. Both questions are important because they will help me build a bridge from my existing community-engaged pedagogy to community-engaged research. I’m interested in my service-learning course opening on to research opportunities, rather than designing a research proposal from the ground up.

My first question is what does community-engaged research look like as an interdisciplinary practice? Thus far it appears that most CEnR leverages disciplinary or field-specific knowledge in collaborations with community partners. I explore a broad topic, namely technology and design, in my partnerships with a variety of community organizations. I don’t see myself as bringing specialized research methodologies, and for me investigating the needs of the community takes precedence over outcome-driven objectives.

Second, what are the benefits of introducing undergraduates to community-engaged research, and how is it best to do so? My students design an inquiry whereby their service experience serves as evidence alongside their research from traditional sources. Are there relatively simple concepts relating to CEnR that would help these undergraduates focus their projects? I’m working within an already demanding shared curriculum and must be sure that this addition has a clear payoff, even when students begin developing their inquiries before they thoroughly get to know their partners and the populations they serve.

Community: A Composite Construction [#CuriousCoLab]

May 17 2015

This post is the first of hopefully many as a participant in the “Collaborative Curiosity: Designing Community-Engaged Research” online connective learning course sponsored by the Division of Community Engagement at VCU. (I will affix the same category—CuriousCoLab—to subsequent posts for the course. The #CuriousCoLab tag is also being used in Twitter conversations among participants.)

“Jan Vormann travels the world repairing crumbling monuments with Lego,” Lego fills up the cracks in the walls of Yaffo in Tel Aviv, Israel, during 2008, telegraph.co.uk

“Filling In City Holes With Legos,” Gothamist

“Filling In City Holes With Legos,” New York City, Gothamist

When I came across the fascinating documentation of “Lego infills” done by Jan Vormann, I didn’t immediately see these images as a representation of community. I remembered them, though, when trying to come up with a visual metaphor for the term, knowing that I wanted to emphasize community as a construction. It may be tempting to think of the way we organize ourselves as the result of a natural, organic process. But community is as much something that we consciously build in order to satisfy mutual needs (here I mean the walls to be associated with shelter and structure, not segregation).

The Lego infills illustrate that what we collectively construct we often need to repair. These plastic bricks are crude yet creative and colorful ways of completing intentions that suffered some loss along the way. So often we know what sustaining structures we want in place but struggle to maintain that unity. (The tiny plastic bricks, as opposed to uniform brick and mortar, appear more adept at filling the gaps that might develop over time. Both are necessary and reinforce one another.)

Significantly, these Lego infills don’t restore an original but instead preserve historical traces and mark the present conversing with the past. I believe it’s important to recognize the additions to existing and previous community structures to understand what is possible in the future. Communities aren’t seamless, so why not acknowledge their composite nature?

Seamless Service-Learning

Feb 26 2015

Last week I co-facilitated a Department of Focused Inquiry faculty symposium with my colleagues in the Service-Learning FLC. We titled our event “Seamless Service-Learning” and focused on how to make service-learning an integral part of the shared curriculum for UNIV 111, 112, and 200.

The first half of our presentation described the wide range of service-learning options by citing examples from our own courses. Here we emphasized the possibilities for indirect as well as direct service, and compared individual volunteering to project-based service. I described how I place students in groups based on common availability and have them consider all community partners paired with the course before deciding on one. For each partner the groups brainstorm ideas for individual and group service contributions that draw on their talents and meet the partners’ needs.

For the second half of the symposium, we discussed practical strategies for integrating service-learning into our courses. We offered suggestions on matters of course design, including adapting Focused Inquiry assignments for service-learning sections, and how to handle logistics. I spoke of the course email address shared by my teaching assistants and me. We have students and partners carbon-copy this address on all correspondence to keep everyone in the loop and to document indirect service in the form of advance planning over email. I also shared the Google Spreadsheets my students use to map out their service across the term and keep track of their hours.

We were happy that the symposium attracted instructors who hadn’t yet taught a service-learning course. Hopefully we inspired them to give the possibility more thought in advance of the VCU Service-Learning Institute scheduled for early May.

There was some discussion that the FLC should follow up this event with another that centers on working through particular challenges for different courses in the Focused Inquiry curriculum—something like a course design workshop. (I think this is a great idea! I’ll keep you posted.)

Dr. Matthew James Vechinski is an associate professor in the Department of Focused Inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University. His teaching draws on his interest in process-based writing instruction, communication design, and service-learning. His research centers on authors’ relationships with editors and publishers, with a particular focus on writers of short fiction for American periodicals as well as postmodern and contemporary experimental novelists. He has also written on design, collecting, and social media.

@bostonry28 Jenny Lewis: Puppy and a Truck | The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon https://t.co/rNFciXDP5l via @YouTube

2 years
@bostonry28 https://t.co/C6erdqdwbo

2 years
@gabrielledean Thanks! I made many fascinating finds when researching the John Barth collection at JHU. It’s a jewel.

2 years
@hollyglolightly @emilyrohrbach1 @doessheeek @kelsey_squire @DrKLMatthews Love Bayard. Matei Calinescu’s Rereading… https://t.co/Tvz6aDWG81

3 years
@puretalkusa Thanks, Taylor!

4 years

Tag - community engagement