As Kansas State University puts forward its strategic plan with emphasis on applied learning, how can our faculty prepare to engage with community and create stronger, efficient, mutually-beneficial relationships that enhance the student experience and fulfill a community need? One way is through service-learning.
In spring 2023, the Staley School of Leadership welcomed Lori Kniffin, former K-State instructor, to campus for a guest lecture on engaged learning experiences. Here, Kniffin introduces a strategy for examining and strengthening relationships with partners.
This is the fourth blog in a series about service-learning, its origins, and how to incorporate service-learning into classrooms and programs. Read more posts from this series: What is service-learning?
Creating and deepening relationships for service-learning
In a previous blog in this series, Advancing our work through democratic engagement, an important distinction is made between technocratic and democratic engagement—democratic being more aspirational. Democratic engagement entails a multi-directional flow of knowledge, sharing of power, and asset-based thinking. To move toward this type of engagement, it’s helpful to consider the relationships at the core of that interaction.
Service-learning relationship participants and forms
Relationships among community and campus members are a key aspect of service-learning. The SOFAR Model summarizes the categories of people involved in service-learning relationships. From the campus, Students, Faculty, and Administrators can be involved and from community, community Organization representatives and community Residents can be involved (Bringle et al., 2009).
These relationships can take different forms:
- dyads (one community and one campus representative)
- triads (three people with at least one representative from each community and campus)
- networks (any combination of people with at least one representative from each community and campus), and
- partnership entities (same as network but with a co-created, shared identity) (Kniffin et al., 2020).
If you are creating new relationships for a service-learning experience, consider intentionally determining who should be involved at the start of the initiative. All partners can help in goal setting, activity design, teaching, and reflection. However, it is important to recognize that campus and community organizations have different cultures. Campus cultures typically run on semesters, value student learning, make change fairly slowly, and have crazy parking! Community cultures usually don’t operate on semesters and may have their busiest times over winter or summer when campus is on break. They often value measurable outcomes that help them meet their mission and secure future funding. They can make change more quickly than higher education. While they are great navigators of the community, they may not have all academic buildings on campus memorized. Being aware of these differences and having dialogue about how they impact the relationship and the project goals can help everyone work together better.
Understanding and improving quality of service-learning relationships
Community-campus relationships can vary in their quality, and it can be valuable to assess and reflect upon your partnership quality. The Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale (TRES II) can be used to assess partnership quality. It includes questions about 10 domains of relationships (ex. goal setting, conflict) across a quality continuum:
- exploitative (one or more partners are harmed),
- unilateral (benefits or knowledge transfer in one direction),
- transactional (mutual benefit), and
- transformational (co-created) (see Kniffin et al., 2020 for TRES II and the EUTT continuum).
There is value in evaluating your partnership quality from your perspective. However, engaging others in evaluating the partnership quality and reflecting collaboratively on the results can lead to a change in practices and perspectives (Kniffin et al., 2023). The TRES II Reflection Framework is a critical reflection tool that facilitates collaborative reflection and action planning for service-learning and community engagement relationships. Whether you use a formal tool or not, it is worthwhile to engage in assessment, conversation, or reflection with others in the relationship. Consider how you might carve out time for this intentional deepinging of your relationships. Is it having coffee with a partner? Is it designing reflections during regular meetings? Is it debriefing together after the end of an activity?
Many of my service-learning relationships include a key community organization representative. I try to meet with that person twice a year at a time that makes sense for both of us. Sometimes this includes planning for the semester and other times we debrief. I’ve learned about their personal lives and professional goals. I usually meet them in their office or at a community location and this can also lead to better understanding their context or meeting their staff. During one of these meetings last year, my partner and I decided we desired to have a network of relationships rather than our dyad. We’ve now convened two meetings of a larger network, and they have been so rewarding. There is investment beyond the two of us in our long-term work.
I also try to show up to their world outside of our specific activities. In my partnerships, this might mean going to get a cup of coffee at the site of our dialogue program, checking out a book from my library partner, or attending a fundraiser. This is to show that I’m interested in their overall work in the community and not just their activities with my students. So take the time to have the conversations, buy the coffee, attend an event—to create or deepen the relationships that are so foundational to all that transpires from a service-learning experience.
References
Bringle, R. G., Clayton, P. H., & Price, M. F. (2009). Partnerships in service-learning and civic engagement. Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, 1(1), 1–20. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/4580
Clayton, P. H., Camo-Biogradlija, J., Kniffin, L. E., Price, M. F., Bringle, R. G., & Pier, A. A. (2022). The Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale II (TRES II) reflection framework: Version 2 [Learning tool]. IUPUI ScholarWorks. https://doi.org/10.7912/zy6w-xj66
Kniffin, L. E., Camo-Biogradlija, J., Price, M. F., Kohl, E., Williams, J., Del Conte Dickovick, A., Goodwin, J., Johnson, K., Clayton, P. H., & Bringle, R. G. (2020). Relationships and partnerships in community-campus engagement: Evolving inquiry and practice. International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, 8(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.37333/001c.18586
Kniffin, L. E., Clayton, P. H., Camo-Biogradlija, J., Price, M. F., Bringle, R. G., & Botkin, H. (2023). Deepening community-campus relationships using a critical reflection tool: A multisite, mixed-methods study. International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, 11(1), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.37333/001c.91729
