By Nosipho Simelane

 

Rhodes University has joined forces with three very different institutions: Mangosuthu University of Technology, the University of Venda and private provider Eduvos, in a partnership now formalised under the University Capacity Development Programme (UCDP). What started as a shared conviction has become a clear, ambitious plan: to formalise community-based methods of teaching and research.

The proposed methods aim to transform how universities relate to the places and people around them and, in doing so, drive positive societal change.

Learning as a partnership, not a project

Critical Service Learning (CSL) links classroom learning to real community life, so students don’t just practise skills, they apply them in ways that probe the root causes of social problems. This approach differs from service learning, which has long been the default form of “community engagement” learning in higher education – but, the group argues, this is no longer sufficient.

Diana Hornby, Director of Rhodes University’s Community Engagement (RUCE) Division, illustrates the difference between service-learning and CSL with this example: “Where service learning might involve preparing and serving food at a community centre, CSL demands that students investigate the underlying causes of food insecurity and work collaboratively with the community to contribute to long-term, sustainable solutions.”

CSL asks students to do more than volunteer. They are invited to work with communities to understand the systems behind issues such as hunger, inequality or environmental harm, and to design responses that can last. “It’s a shift from a student-centred to a partnership-centred model,” Hornby explains. “Everyone’s knowledge counts.”

Hornby and the group believe CSL is critical in today’s landscape because it goes beyond mere transactional service. It deals with issues of power and social and epistemic justice – and recognises that universities have a responsibility to the common good.

Research as collaboration, not extraction

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) asks researchers to step out of the detached observer role and work alongside communities to identify issues, collect evidence and find solutions together. Instead of researchers arriving with questions and leaving with data and recommendations, they stay in dialogue with community members, understand local priorities, and make sure the research actually changes things on the ground. It makes a shift from researching about communities to researching with them.

CPBR recognises communities as co-creators of knowledge rather than passive subjects. In practice, this means valuing local and indigenous expertise on par with academic knowledge, so that research outcomes matter not only for academia but also to the people who need them most.

As Hornby warns, without this kind of collaboration, research findings “would probably not be significant” to the people they are meant to help.

From margins to mainstream

For the partnership project team, this work carries both a moral and practical urgency. They believe community engagement should fundamentally influence what students learn and how researchers conduct their work.

Hornby puts it plainly: “Community engagement is not charity work. It’s about using the academic project to tackle some of the deep, complex challenges communities face at grassroots level.”

Over the course of the project, the four universities will develop four short courses, publish two books on CBPR and CSL, host an international conference and colloquium, and contribute research to the African Journal of Higher Education Community Engagement. The intention is to make engaged learning and research visible, train educators and students to practise it, and create a body of work that other universities can draw on.

The partnership deliberately brings together diverse institutions: a technical university, a rural university, a research-intensive university and a private sector provider. And this mixing of different campuses, different kinds of students, different disciplinary strengths is exactly what the project’s architects hope will make the work practical, scalable and rooted in many types of community experience.

This project aims to move community engagement from the margins to the centre of university life: taught in classrooms, embedded in research methods, and held up as a legitimate, rigorous, and even crucial, part of academia – so that universities are not only creators of knowledge, but agents of positive change.