a community of practice

Description

This Community of Practice (CoP) invited participants to learn about models for integrating digital components into civic engagement projects and to develop individual project plans in a supportive environment.

Digital civic engagement offers both exciting possibilities and challenges for campus-community partnerships. Digital tools, like blogs, maps, archives, videos, and exhibits, can facilitate broader community participation in projects, wider public engagement with scholarship, and new perspectives on pressing social issues. In the context of COVID-19, digital tools may be especially valuable when immersive community engagement may not be possible. Yet, digital civic engagement projects also pose challenges around communication, ethics, sustainability, and how to manage projects that may combine direct engagement with the digital. Establishing clear frameworks for campus-community partnerships, understanding and selecting appropriate digital tools, and developing a project management plan to provide support and sustainability for the project are all especially important when there may be fewer opportunities for face-to-face interaction.

Participants in this CoP arrived with experience in civic engagement and had a community or campus partner in mind for a potential digital project. The CoP did not require knowledge of specific digital tools or experience with digital projects. The CoP’s primary focus was on projects that can involve students and that are developed in collaboration with a partner or shared with the public.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Gain a broad overview and inspiration for potential digital projects.

2. Develop a basic understanding of the ethical and design questions surrounding digital projects.

3. Identify resources and consider ways that a digital project can be sustained and could be structured into teaching and impact goals

Product Outcomes:

1. Create an initial proposal for a digital civic engagement project. This proposal will include a project charter identifying stakeholders as well as the campus collaborators and technical infrastructures necessary to implement the project.

2. Develop a peer network for support and learning.

Facilitators:

• Paul Schadewald, then Senior Program Director, Community-Based Learning and Scholarship, Macalester College

• Aisling Quigley, then Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Liberal Arts, Macalester College

Schedule: Second Friday of each month from 1:00 to 2:30 pm (Oct. 9, Nov. 13, Dec. 11, Jan. 8, Feb. 12, Mar. 12, Apr. 16)