2019 Annual Conference

Undergraduate Student Education

Shared Concurrent Session (Approx. 12 or 20 minutes)

A one-week long role-playing exercise was developed in an introductory undergraduate architecture course to engage students in the program’s focus on community engagement. By teaming up with community partners devoted to socio-economic justice, the exercise strives to foster the development of civic purpose that should carry over into professional life.

This session will be of value to individuals with an interest in university-community partnerships, especially in the area of professional education, who implement such partnerships or seek to implement similar partnerships, as well as adult educators who practice in community education.

1. Provide an example of a community-university partnership that fosters life-long learning and professional development.
2. Describe the process and product of curricular development that supports a community-university partnership.
3. Identify adult education strategies utilized in the development of curriculum within professional education.

Fostering civic and social responsibility within professional education will help advance human rights, economic empowerment and environmental sustainability. To accomplish this, incorporating community engagement into formal education coursework is called for at the program and discipline level. Thus, it is integral that it be placed as early as possible in the curriculum. This session describes the introduction of a community engagement role-playing exercise into the introductory course of a small architecture program at a mid-southern public university. Initiated from an internal university-supported grant, coursework adaptation has been implemented for the past four years. This timeline offers a good beginning point for evaluation of the purpose and process of the alteration to the coursework to include adult and community education perspectives, most notably through the project used to facilitate the engagement: service to non-profits whose goals include socio-economic equity and justice. Overviewing the product and process also opens the project to further assessment from a community of practitioners with insights that could advance its potential for student retention and transformative learning.    

The session will begin with a brief introduction to the history of the curriculum, including an overview of community engagement as it is seen within the professional program. The process of developing the course exercise, as well as its four iterations, will be presented. The iterations will be described under the plan-act-observe-reflect model of action research, which was utilized in the original review of the coursework. The presentation will conclude by intersecting lessons learned with adult education perspectives in order to present the project for further reflection and development.