This webinar explored student, campus and community capacities and readiness for mutually beneficial placements and partnerships within the context of community-campus engagement.

The guiding question for this webinar was: How can the CCE movement increase student experiential learning and community research opportunities from the undergraduate to doctorate levels while also supporting non-profit readiness and capacity to include students and to be involved in co-designing or leading research and engagement work?

Webinar participants learned how community-campus practitioners—Faculty, Students, and Community leaders—are supporting efforts that help address this question. Presenters also identified concrete suggestions for how we can increase student- community placements for mutual and societal benefit in Canada.

Video Link

If you missed out on the day-of presentation, not to worry. We’ve made it accessible below.

You can access some student and non-profit readiness tools below. Note: The training modules mentioned in the video are not yet available to the public but will be hosted on the Trent Community Research Centre’s website.

•  — Journal Article
• Research Toolkit for Community-Based Organizations

Presenters

Moderator, Isabelle Kim, Director, University of Toronto Centre for Community Partnerships (CCP): Isabelle and her team at the CCP work in partnership with students, staff, faculty, communities, and non-profit and public organizations to catalyze and sustain socially-responsive CEL and CER. Isabelle will moderate the discussion, and focus the questions for presenters on student and non-profit organizations’ perspectives on: critical issues of access and preparedness to participate in CEL/R opportunities; and the kinds of structures and systems needed to sustainably and equitably increase these opportunities in a way that will result in positive impacts for both student learning and community.

Stephen Hill, Associate Professor, Trent University – Stephen has been the academic lead for CFICE’s Student Pathways working group. With financial support from Trent University and eCampus Ontario his team created new open-access community-based research and experiential training modules for students as a means of teaching students the necessary skills for working in a community-campus engagement project.

Lisa Mort-Putland, Executive Director of Volunteer Victoria and National Board member, Volunteer Canada – Lisa will share Volunteer Victoria and Volunteer Canada’s experiences with the increasing national demand for student-community placements and ideas on how to increase and support non-profit readiness to include students while increasing the sector’s role in influencing higher education research and engagement.

The CFICE Student Pathways Working Group is mapping and reviewing the curricular pathways for students. Why? Because findings in Phase I of CFICE suggested that, while senior undergraduates at Trent University are offered the opportunity to pursue community-based research (CBR), they often lack experience, skills and necessary competencies to effectively work with community groups.

Community-based learning can be very different from the traditional academic research with which students are familiar. Conventional prerequisites such as having completed a certain number of courses or surpassing an academic average threshold are not always good predictors of a student’s ability to do a quality community-based research project. This has, at times, resulted in research that was not useful to community partners or, in some cases, compromised the relationship between the campus and community partner.

Existing courses and co-curricular experiences are available to improve skills in community-based research, yet there is little guidance for students to follow a scaffolded pathway of learning. This led our working group to consider the ways that universities can better prepare students so that they can be successful community-based researchers. This includes everyone from incoming high school students, through undergraduates, up to graduate students.

How is it being developed?

The research team includes Mystaya Touw, Stephen Hill, Jim Blake, and Taylor Mackey. We’ve reviewed the literature on curriculum mapping, along with literature on curriculum specific to community-based research, service learning, and civic education. We then identified a list of core competencies for CBR through one-on-one interviews with staff, faculty, students, and community members. This list was continually revised based on new research or feedback, including comments from CFICE meetings.

We next looked for examples of comprehensive community-based research programs at other institutions, including some high school opportunities, scholarship programs, and Canadian post-secondary examples. Then, we compiled our existing Trent University curricular and extra-curricular opportunities relating to community engagement and research. Using all of this information, we are attempting to create a plan for a community-based research curriculum pathway for students to follow at Trent University by looking for gaps, and ideas to help fill these. We have outlined a set of course work and experiences that help students become effective community-based researchers.

What will be the end result?

The result of our work will be a report reviewing the literature on curriculum mapping and community-based research, examples of other programs, as well as exploring the skills and competencies required for CBR and strategies for assessing these. We also compiled a list of curricular and extra-curricular opportunities for students at Trent that relate to or support CBR. Finally, we will make recommendations about how to improve and expand on existing opportunities to further develop the undergraduate curriculum and student experience in CBR at Trent, and other institutions.

How will this work help students, professors, and community organizations at Trent?

There is a renewed commitment to community-based research that is driven both internally and externally. Ontario universities, for example, are being encouraged and incented by the province to incorporate more experiential learning opportunities, including community-based research, into their degree programs. Trent has stated in their Strategic Mandate Agreement with the province that graduating students will leave having at least one meaningful experiential learning opportunity. This creates pressure on the in Haliburton, and the in Peterborough to expand the number of students working with community partners.

The increasing number of students involved in community-based research, combined with the identified need to improve students’ preparation, creates challenges. By surveying the literature and landscape, looking to identify best practices and learning outcomes for community-based research, our work provides faculty and instructional designers with a starting point for curriculum mapping, course development and redesign. Ultimately, by successfully supporting and developing students community-based research skills, we are also supporting communities.

Students Tessa Nasca and Katie Caddigan, Professor Nadine Changfoot, and community member Jason Hartwick discuss a community-campus project in Peteroborough.

How will this work help campus-community engagement practitioners at other universities?

We hope our report helps to prepare and engage students in community-based research, particularly at the undergraduate level. There is not a robust literature surrounding undergraduate curriculum for community-based research, so we also hope to publish some of this in the academic literature.

Hopefully, this report will be a useful tool for other institutions to examine their curricular and extra-curricular community engagement opportunities. The goal is to improve institutions’ service to students by better providing them with tools and opportunities. This in turn helps communities by creating knowledgeable, engaged students who are prepared and excited to work with their communities.

When will the curriculum mapping report be ready?

Our draft report is just about ready for review by colleagues and others at Trent and the CFICE network. The goal is for a final version to be complete this fall and shared through the CFICE website. We’re also presenting our work at the Council of Ontario Universities in October.

An excerpt of the article is included below, and you can read the full piece !

TrentU Master’s Candidate Emily Amon studies the effectiveness of Community Based Research

Emily Amon is a passionate community-based researcher.

She has completed THREE environmental science community research projects during her Bachelor of Environmental Sciences and Studies undergraduate degree at Trent.

Her current project as a Masters of Sustainabilities Studies Candidate at Trent University is focused on community-based research. This type of research involves working with a diverse range of partners to help gather different perspectives, contribute expertise and share decision making.

Emily is exploring how student research can be used to drive community activism�����Ի���influence sustainable community changes.  At the heart of all social and environmental movements, groups of people have worked together to achieve common goals.�� It is important to understand the process of how people band together to create meaningful changes.��

Community groups with research needs are partnered with Trent students to complete community-based research projects through Trent’s experiential education programs, facilitated by both U-Links Centre for Community Based Research (for projects in the Haliburton Region), and the Trent Community Research Centre (for projects in the Peterborough Region).

• Waste audits at the landfills in Algonquin highlands that led to a new recycling program
• Water quality monitoring projects which have engaged cottagers and improved awareness of environmental concerns around their lakes
• The establishment of community gardens�����Ի���nature education programs
• Improving operations for the local farmers markets

Emily’s research focuses on what happens���ٴ� the community after the student completes the research and how positive changes continue in the area.

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The Trent Community Research Centre in Peterborough, Ont. is just one of the many partners of the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) project. Since 1996, the Centre has been matching Trent University students with research projects derived from questions in the community.

John Marris, Community Co-lead of the Community Environmental Sustainability (Peterborough/Haliburton) hub and the Community First Tools and Practices Working Group

John Marris, Director and Project Coordinator of Community-Based Research at the Trent Centre and community co-lead of CFICE’s Community Environmental Sustainability (Peterborough/Haliburton) hub community co-lead, defines the Centre as an independent research broker.

“We develop research projects with the community that answer research questions they have. We then match those research projects with the university in conjunction with faculty,” Marris says.

The Centre has three main areas of research: Community development, social support and environmental sustainability. But Marris says the projects can be anything the community approaches the centre with.

“We don’t in any way want to dictate to the community what the brains of our research are,” he says.

“We have a principle where we want to improve the health, sustainability and well-being of our community – that’s what’s really important to us and we want to do that through research work.”

Marris says the Centre focuses on those areas because of the impact to the community.

“We work in areas of social support and environmental sustainability because that’s what helps community development.”

Marris says providing evaluation of the projects is also important to the Centre.

“Impact assessment is a big part of what we do and this is very useful for local community organizations. The impact to the community is doing the groundwork for community development and helping with planning of projects,” he says.

“More and more I’m trying to connect us with projects as they happen so that we can build the evaluation into the design of the project.”

Unlike other programs, one of the unique things about the Trent Centre is that it works with third and forth year undergraduate students to facilitate partnerships, not just masters students.

Students become involved in a project by signing up for one of three courses that run in different departments at Trent University: Forensics, geography and international development. The Centre chose these departments because of the versatility of learning and application.

“One of the critical things that we do is we’re not creating academic exercises; these are real research questions that the community really wants answers to,” he says.

A group of people work together for a project.
©Elizabeth Thipphawong

Students can also go to the ���ٴ� see a list of projects and approach the Centre themselves.

In the 2015/2016 academic year the Centre had 25 projects on the go, which Marris says is roughly the minimum.

Students really value the opportunity to apply what they’re learning in school to real life projects.

“We just had feedback from students for the academic year and fairly universally the response was ‘this is hands down the best thing I’ve done at university,’” Marris says.

As project coordinator, Marris offers students support, ideas and input throughout the project without grading their work, which is another aspect students really value.��But the community also sees value in the partnership as well.

“There’s a huge need for knowledge from the community because sometimes they don’t have the financial wherewithal to pay commercial research organizations to do that work,” Marris says.

“The community gain is they get answers to questions that sometimes they’ve been sitting on for years.”

Marris calls the partnership between students wanting to do research and the community needing answers a “very happy and beautiful coincidence.”

On April 7^th the Trent Community Research Centre, one of CFICE’s Community Environmental Sustainability (CES) hub partners in Peterborough/Haliburton, in cooperation with Trent University and Fleming College, hosted the annual Community Innovation Forum. At this event students, both undergraduate and graduate, who have been working on community-based research projects all year presented in poster form the results or progress of their work. This event was attended by students, faculty members, and community organisations.

A student explains her project to listeners at TCRC’s Community Engagement Forum April 7, 2016. ©Peterborough Examiner

The event was featured in publications by the Trent Arthur and the Peterborough Examiner. Raymond Yip Choy, a member of the forum’s 2016 Steering Committee, was interviewed by the regarding the benefits of these types of community-campus engagement (CCE) experiences for students. According to Choy, they are important to increasing students’ employability after graduation. “The ones who have gone through an applied project have a significantly higher percentage of those who get employment in their field than those who have not,” he said.

, CCE experiences teach students the important skill of translating theory into practice. Since the projects that students tackle are all proposed by community organizations, participating in the projects also allows students an opportunity to give back to the community.

For more information about the event and the interesting projects tackled by the students, check out the articles featured in the  and the .

Organizing focus group feedback on the ANC-CFICE project ©Nadine Changfoot

The Active Neighbourhoods Canada (ANC) CFICE demonstration project is underway in Peterborough, Ontario. The project, which is a part of a national network of twelve projects that use participatory design towards a goal of creating green, active, and healthy neighbourhoods, has been working with Peterborough’s Stewart Street neighbourhood since June 2014. The project creates opportunities for marginalized residents to engage in planning the public spaces, streets, and sidewalks in their neighbourhood.

Brianna Salmon, Peterborough GreenUp, and Tessa Nasca, CFICE RA, work with the feedback provided at the ANC-CFICE focus group. ©Nadine Changfoot

While the ANC project brings together a diverse group of partners and funders, CFICE’s contribution to the research and evaluation component of the project provides valuable capacity to the project. CFICE-funded graduate student researcher, Tessa Nasca, from the Masters of Sustainability Studies program at Trent University, has been embedded in the project steering committee from the onset of the project. Recently, she has started to conduct evaluative research. Through a series of focus groups with neighbourhood residents and project steering committee members, the research seeks to determine the efficacy of the participatory planning approaches used in the ANC project.

Organizing focus group feedback for the ANC-CFICE project ©Nadine Changfoot

In December 2015, neighbourhood residents were invited to attend a focus group to provide feedback on the project activities. The focus group for the steering committee took place in January 2016. Chevalier and Buckles’ Participatory Action Research Methods were used to guide participants through generating a set of evaluation criteria, in order to help the researcher to understand what effective community engagement looks like from a resident perspective. Using these criteria, residents reflected on the ANC project activities they had participated in, and ranked the activities relative to their evaluation criteria, creating charts as shown in the photos above.

While the data from these focus groups are still being analyzed and the results are not yet ready to share, they provided a rich opportunity for reflection on the ANC project, and on the efficacy of its activities in engaging neighbourhood residents.

Download a copy of the .��Podcast written and recorded by Lily Haines, CFICE Knowledge Mobilization RA.��

This report was created by Trent University, U-Links, and the Haliburton Highland Land Trust with the support of CFICE’s (Peterborough/Haliburton). Download a copy of the report by clicking on the image below.

On January 13, Trent University’s Masters of Sustainability Studies (MASS) Colloquium featured the work of local community leaders, students and faculty. This event was brought together by the (Ptbo/Halib) of the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) project.

, Chair of the Political Studies Department and MASS faculty, hosted the event as the Trent Academic Co-lead of CFICE . “Putting Community-First involves learning new ways of communicating and partnering among community and academy,” said Nadine.

, Executive Director, from the internationally recognized (TCRC) and Community Co-lead of CFICE, discussed research opportunities available through the Centre. TCRC is a bridge organization connecting Trent and community, bringing together students and community organizations for community-based research.

Sheila Ziman from the presented her experiences working with faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students to maintain and restore ecosystems in Haliburton. “The outcomes are important,” said Sheila.

Next, Heather Reid, the Operations Director of , and Melissa Johnston, in second year of MASS, shared their experiences from Melissa’s summer working at Abbey Gardens. “My immersion in the community created an ease and depth of interaction. My ‘insider status’ helped to build trust and open doors,” said Melissa.

Tessa Nasca, also in the second year of MASS, outlined her experience with the project that brings together the Stewart Street neighbourhood, community organizations, the City of Peterborough, and faculty to build capacity within the Stewart Street neighbourhood and the ability to strengthen community participation in planning processes. “High value comes from embedding oneself in the community,” said Tessa.

Finally, Prof. from Environmental Resources Studies and MASS spoke of his experience as a faculty member who seeks partnerships outside of academic institutions. The day’s speakers represent only the start of the many rewarding partnerships possible when academia and the community partner together.

Community-campus engagement opportunities like those featured at the Colloquium offer a platform for students to see local initiatives that build capacity for both community and Trent in Peterborough and the Kawarthas. Building upon the work of CFICE, the new  stream provides experiential learning and community-based action research opportunities for students in a full-time field placement in a community organization during Year 2 of the Program. “It aims to meet the growing need for professionals as a distinct group of skilled, entrepreneurial individuals with the knowledge, tools and practical expertise to address social and environmental challenges and opportunities in community based organizations,” said Asaf Zohar, Director of MASS.