Working with Students

Students working on projects with community partners can provide rich opportunities to build professional skills and experience. It can also help students connect academic learning to contexts outside of the classroom, and give them a sense of making a positive impact in the world. In order to make the experience productive for both students and community partners and their constituents, it is important to prepare students, and to some extent partners, for the experience of working together.

Student Positionality and Reflection

Students reflecting on their own positionality is a useful, perhaps even vital component to preparing students to work with/for minoritized and/or vulnerable communities. Taking time for students to consider their intersecting identities makes visible dynamics of power and privilege, which can facilitate greater awareness of pre-existing assumptions that may have otherwise gone unchallenged when working with community partners.

Positionality and identity cover a range of categories, including race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, class status, immigration status, ability, and more. Because we all carry multiple identities, this activity can be a good opportunity to introduce students to Kimberle Crenshaw’s formulation of intersectionality and the ways that identities overlap, compete with, and/or complicate each other. Danielle Jacobsen and Nida Mustafa overview the importance of researchers’ mapping their social identities, and provide a useful template that can be used with students in mapping their own social identities.

Rachel Johnston, class of 2019, does a project pitch for the investment group. A presentation board is seen in the background, with a laptop on the desk.

Building time into class, homework, or other student engagement to do this work has benefits for both students who have all or primarily non-minoritized identities and students who have one or more minoritized identities because it calls attention to differences that have engendered cultural inequities and power imbalances. By deepening their awareness about their own positionality, students gain knowledge into how power and privilege dynamics may be at play in their work and lives. They can also learn about and understand the situatedness of the academic—student, researcher, collaborator, or other. Michael Muhammed, et al. articulate the dynamic, varied, and crucial ways that researcher identity and power can impact work with community partners and why it is so crucial to consider these factors when doing this kind of research and collaboration:

Our identities and how those affect our relationships with communities matter in our research processes and in our research outcomes, especially if we care about the broadest possible outcomes of strengthening community capacities in research and action, and creating collectively based knowledge to confront and change the historic social conditions that produce inequities. (conclusion)

Faculty can model this reflection and reflexivity by being open with students about their own positionality and how they see that influencing their work as a teacher, researcher, and collaborator with community partners. Depending on the project and partner(s), faculty may want students to also reflect on their relationship with the community in question, whether they are from within or outside the community, and how that insider/outsider status impacts the work being done. This reflection is valuable learning and growth for undergraduates, and also an important practice for graduate students looking to develop and lead research and community-engaged learning in their own careers.

Students & Partners

Beyond this exercise, faculty should give students guidance in how they interact with community partners and their constituents. Students in positions of greater power and privilege should be coached to recognize and respect other expertise and ways of knowing, such as lived experience and Traditional Knowledge. Insist that students treat with respect those they interact with as part of the project. Emphasize the roles of collaborator and learner for yourself and your students in working with communities, rather than roles such as “helper,” “fixer,” or “savior.”

Faculty should also provide mentorship and encouragement for students with minoritized identities, who may face discrimination, dismissal, or more from their fellow students or community members. Make sure students know that if they share an issue that you will support them by believing them and working to remedy the situation on their behalf. Faculty may also want to point students to resources meant to support their particular identities or needs (see below) but the existence of those resources does not absolve white or otherwise privileged faculty from supporting and advocating for their minoritized students or for students who have different identities than they do themselves. Amanda Cornwall provides thoughtful reflection and advice for white faculty and staff on mentoring underrepresented and minoritized students.

Despite what may feel like sticky challenges, doing community-engaged learning and PAR can be transformative for students. In “Who produces knowledge?” the authors detail student growth from doing PAR that results in transformation both personal and as developing researchers. They also argue that because of deserved suspicion of science and scientists among some communities, as well as the unequal effects of events such as global warming on those very communities, that teachers have an ethical obligation to develop students who can do responsible, community-engaged, participatory research.

Showcasing Student Work

Last, one of the great joys of doing community-engaged and participatory work with students can be providing students an opportunity to showcase their work. Such showcases can include poster or paper presentations, whether at formally organized conferences or events organized by the faculty member or department. They can also include online presentations of student work, with both student and partner permission of course. (See the Community Based Digital Work Products page for more on this subject, with both students and partners.) Doing a final showcase or presentation can provide students with a sense of completion, accomplishment, and celebration, helping to cement the learning and feeling of value in doing important, collaborative work with communities. University of Oregon faculty can encourage (or require) students to present their work at the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium and can check out other student research support and opportunities offered by the Center for Undergraduate Research and Engagement (CURE).

UO Resources to Support Students

The following UO resources can support students and faculty with various identities or specific support needs. When in doubt, direct students to (or check out yourself) the student One Stop page for a round-up of resources and offices.

The Dean of Students has offices to support students of varying identities, including resources for students who identify as women, men, LGBTQIA+, veterans, non-traditional, Black, and multicultural.