As we sat in our online reading group meeting for the third time over winter break, about an hour into this particular meeting and 5 hours of previous discussion behind us, a silence bloomed and blanketed our discussion. It wasn’t your classic online meeting awkwardness, it wasn’t that we were lost discussing the issues at hand, instead it was a shared understanding that we just opened a box and that we couldn’t ever stuff the goods back inside. It was the moment of realizing that we had set off the first movements for liberation, that we were confronting, challenging and rejecting the status quo in order to better address student inclusion, belonging and success.

Here, we consider higher education for the world we need, we advance the notion that we need to bring farm life generally, rural life specifically, from the margin to the center of higher education policy. Rural education K-16 often resides at the periphery of both the policy arena and academia (McShane & Smarick, 2018; Schafft, 2016; see also Center for American Progress, 2020). Not only is “The peripheralization of rural ... detrimental to rural people and places,” (Schafft, p. 138), “...a critical and pragmatic rethinking of education policy in the rural context may help to illuminate new educational practices that enhance the vitality of rural communities and clarify a U.S. rural policy” (p. 139). This is because, within rural communities, education is a principal site for rural social and economic development. 

In this blog post, I discuss how educators and program administrators can reimagine community-engaged global programs as tools for liberation. Drawing from research conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation on Community-Based Global Learning (CBGL) programs, I use excerpts from a collective testimonio to honor community voices in reimagining CBGL scholarship and practice.

I don’t know it for certain, but my brief time at Haverford College has led me to gather that the decision to hire me was prompted at least in part by the campus-wide strike of Fall 2020, led by a group of sagacious BIPOC students. After taking part in a summer of Black Lives Matter protests that shook awake American society and empowered young people to lead a multi-racial, intergenerational movement against the forces that oppressed the most vulnerable in our society, Haverford students returned to campus ready to make their school a place of empowerment. Among students’ demands for institutional change were the addition of courses that centered decolonial praxis, that is, philosophy and action. Their privileged education in the distant suburbs of Philadelphia would no longer mean their isolation from integrated approaches to grassroots activism.

Perhaps most daunting about imagining higher education for the world we need is the indisputable fact that we are being asked to navigate a complex and turbulent world while sitting within institutional structures that reward us for exclusion, binary thinking, silos and narrow expertise instead of inclusion, interdependence, collaboration and iterative processes.

When I, a career community engagement professional and administrator with an academic-activist identity in environmental sociology, was approached in Spring 2022 about the possibility of taking on leadership of our University Honors Program, I looked behind me to make sure it was me being asked. As someone for whom community engagement and social justice are core values and drivers in my work, I admittedly saw not just our Honors Program, but the institution of ‘Honors’ as I have come to know it to be in stark contrast with those deeply held beliefs.

Poetry is not a luxury for the colonized, the enslaved, the exploited, the silenced. It is not a luxury for the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated poets, artists, activists, and intellectuals we’ll be reading and talking to over the course of the semester. But is it a luxury for “us,” the “us” of the liberal arts classroom, with our access to technology, to the communal kitchen, to the intellectual property of people in prison?

Agenda and resources (Powerpoint presentations) from the 2023 Collaborative Institute at Haverford College.

This experience led us to ask: how can we better work together knowing that our sense of “borrowed time” is dependent not only on the structure of our institutions, but also on matters of access, oppression, ability, and resources?

Early bird registration deadline is Friday, September 15. Don’t miss this exciting group of speakers and institutional change organizers including Amy Anderson, Samantha Brandauer, Richard Kiely, and Marisol Morales!

Join global educators Samantha Brandauer (Dickinson College), Nedra Sandiford (Dickinson in Spain), and Erin Sabato (Quinnipiac University) for an overview of and opportunity to apply the Global Solidarity, Local Actions Toolkit. Various faculty have used the toolkit in classes, in co-curricular settings, in both civic engagement and education abroad, as well as within sustainability education.

This institute is an opportunity for faculty, staff, administration, and community leaders to connect with colleagues who are making space for integrated, experiential learning aligned with public purposes, disciplinary understanding, inclusive student development, and civic and global learning. 

The Collaborative is proud to accept The Innovative Technology award from the GoAbroad Innovation Awards, recognizing the Global Solidarity, Local Actions Toolkit. When we see the Toolkit in syllabi, or linked in a blog post, or sourced for scholarly articles, or used to develop a workshop or a training – we see each other. We know that there is a team out there, a network, a hive, a tribe – all working in their ways and in their part and in their locations for a world that is more just, inclusive and sustainable.

The discussion of university reform and its participation in liberation processes is not new for Latin American universities. Since the wars of independence in the 19th century, the emerging nations promoted the creation of universities that would break with the legacy of the colonial university and respond to the needs of the new national and modernizing projects. In this blog, we share the experience of Latin American community engagement that, in the twentieth century, disputed the structuring logic of elite universities to create "another possible university." We analyze three crucial episodes in the history of community engagement, its advances, and its limits. We conclude by reflecting on the possibilities of continuing the engagement movement, but under new statements according to new challenges, opening a path for a global dialogue.

The Periclean Scholars program, now in its 20th year of operation, has significantly evolved. It was originally conceptualized as a traditional international service-learning initiative and historically engaged in many of the problematic practices related to service learning that have been criticized by Eby (1998) and others. In recent years, the program has made intentional progress to more closely align with multiple best-practice frameworks, including Mitchell’s (2008) “critical service learning”, Hartman et al.’s (2018) model of critical global inquiry, the Guidelines for Community Engaged Learning Experiences Abroad (published by The Forum on Education Abroad), the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Ethical Reasoning, Global Learning, Intercultural Knowledge and Competence, and Civic Engagement VALUE rubrics, and the CORE Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability. 

Leveraging online engagement to advance the UN SDGs. 5 years since global online collaboration began, The University at Buffalo and their network of global partners have entered a new stage. A directory of organizations and SDGs identifies potential speakers and panelists for classes and presentations. In-country meet-ups are being planned to coincide with a Fulbright project involving a faculty member traveling to Uganda to host training sessions on digital resources and model development. 20 community leaders from across Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda are exploring opportunities leveraged through engagement.

From a community standpoint, the infusion of organization-centric neuroscience expertise has ignited a new wave of community collaboration that is rooted in neuroscience and the value of human connection. This is seen most tangibly in the formation of a community capacity-building movement called Self-Healing Communities of Greater Michiana.

The most valuable asset elite universities can contribute is a network of experienced mentors committed to supporting early career scholars’ emergence as intellectual leads. African researchers face multiple layers of structural and institutional challenges that reinforce each other, but programs such as STAARS can help address some of these challenges, offering a small step towards decolonizing development economics.

“As a humanist whose primary teaching happens in Spanish, this focus — a culturally-rooted response to structural violence — is where I most want to hold our students’ attention.” Here in Philadelphia, “This begins at the partnership level… This course was embedded in a larger vision of shared concern and mutual trust manifest through alignment with projects like Lessons of Da Land.”