the community-based university - penerbit.usm.my · the ‘golden’ era of islam. during this...

164

THE COMMUNITY-BASED UNIVERSITYbudd l hall, walter lepore & nandita bhatt

Is there any value to Asian and African education if it is conceptualised and presented in the context of what happened in a very provincial place called Western Europe and then imposed upon us?

Tan Sri Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, Malaysia

I do think that universities must stand for the right thing as power institutions. Stand for democracy. Stand for human rights. Stand for social justice. Stand for a more equal world.

Professor Derrick Schwartz, Vice-Chancellor, Nelson Mandela Municipal University, South Africa

It is time to review and reconsider the interchange of values between university and society.

Cristina Esgrigas, former Executive Director of the Global University Network for Innovation

The achievement of post-abyssal thinking will depend on the achievement of a radical co-presence of all knowledges with an understanding of the incompleteness of knowledge.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Unless we value local knowledge there will be no new knowledge.

Rajesh Tandon, President, PRIA, India

Introduction

Higher education is both a contributor to and a product of the swirling winds of promise and peril that envelope our world. The contemporary interest in the idea of a community-based university is intermingled with questions of the role of higher education in addressing the 2030 United Nations Sustainable

The community-based university 165

Development Goals (UN SDGs), with responding to the increasing calls for decolonising our universities, and with acknowledging that the one-time perceived monopoly of knowledge production by universities has been broken. How can we construct a more equal and sustainable world through higher education if the content of our higher education is limited to a small proportion of knowledge that we most often refer to as the Western canon? Can our universities become spaces for knowledge democracy? Can the knowledge of our indigenous people be found in all of our universities? Can the specific knowledge of our social movements, of community action groups, of local government workers, of artists, of poets, or singers and dancers? Can we really break open the walls of higher education so that learning from without will wash over us all? If a university with all of its resources cannot contribute to making life better for the communities where it is physically located, how can this university be recognised as meritorious on some international scales?

This article traces the history the community-based university from the perspective of the global South. It presents the concept of knowledge democracy and it also shares key characteristics of what a contemporary community-based university might look like sharing some examples from other parts of the world. One very important point to make is that pursuit of elements of the community-based university does not take away in any way from the desire to excel. The idea of local relevance and international significance are part of the spirit of the community-based university.

Ancient Roots: Taxila and More

We quite comfortably accept that some majority world scholar activists of the 20th and 21st centuries have made contributions to the mainstream literature of what we refer today as the community-based university. But generally the literature of the community-based university is dramatically dominated by theories, stories, accounts and conjecture made by writers from Europe, North America and Australia. It would be easy to assume that the origins of the concept of the community-based university were from the global North. This is simply untrue. The first universities and the first systematisation of socially relevant knowledge systems were created in what we can call the majority world. The majority world is that part of the world where most of our people live. It covers Asia, Africa, Arabic speaking world, Latin America, the Caribbean and the indigenous peoples of the planet. It is the home of our oldest intellectual traditions, but it also contains the largest number of people living in poverty. Africa is the place where human life is generally said to have originated. The indigenous African knowledge that gave us the ability to survive and indeed eventually flourish as human beings, we would argue can still be drawn upon

B.L. Hall, W. Lepore & N. Bhatt166

(Wangoola, 2002). The world’s first known university was not founded as we often see in Bologna, Italy, but 1400 years earlier in Taxila. The university in Taxila was founded in the former India, now Pakistan in 700 bc. At its peak, it had 1,800 scholars engaged in research and teaching and nearly 8,000 students in residence. The leitmotif of this university was “service to humanity”. Taxila is the earliest known community-based university (Tandon & Hall, 2014, p. 54).

The Abbasid period of Islamic history (750–1258 ad) is sometimes referred to as the ‘golden’ era of Islam. During this period, Islamic scholarship and dedication to education was leading the world. Islamic scholars created centres of elite scholarship where the very foundations of contemporary mathematics, astronomy, physics and geography were created. One of these early universities, al-Azhar University (969 ad) is still active, located in Cairo. But the Abbasid Caliphate also supported the first expansion of mass education with schools created wherever there was a mosque. By contrast, the push for the common school in Europe did not come until the late 19th century. The Abbasid period also has a claim to being among the foundational sources for community-based learning as there was much focus on applied research resulting in new agricultural systems, water transportation methods and other tools.

Moving forward centuries, we approach contemporary times where in the 1930s, as part of the need to create a set of political cadres who would work for the independence of India, Gandhi-ji urged the New Delhi based Islamic intellectuals to create the Jamia Millia Islamia, a large and profoundly community-based university. Gandhi-ji also urged his supporters to create the Gujarat Videapeeth with a focus on Mother tongue scholarship and politically effective community-based research and learning. A third university that Gandhi-ji named as one of the three decolonised universities in India of the 1930s was in fact already in existence. It was the Shantiniketan, a university in West Bengal founded by the Nobel Prize winning poet and intellectual Rabindranath Tagore. If we had the space, we could document both institutions and knowledge systems in Malaysia, China, the indigenous empires of the Inca, the Mayans and the Aztecs and many other parts of the majority world. It is troubling that attention to these diverse roots has remained invisible in our 21st century discourses. Perhaps this will change as economic and political power on a global basis shifts with time.

Knowledge, Democracy and Community

Presenting elements of the community-based university cannot be done in some cookbook manner without exploring more of the contemporary thinking on knowledge. If we are happy with the status quo role of higher education, then


there is no need to explore other models. But if the management of knowledge lies at the central core of our universities then the question what is knowledge and whose knowledge counts is key.

The discourse of knowledge democracy has been emerging in recent years to help us to understand the relationship of knowledge to a more equitable world for at least two reasons. First, we have found the use of the concepts of the knowledge economy and knowledge society to be wanting from the perspective of justice. Second, we have seen a more general loss of confidence in the capacity of western white male Euro-centric science to respond to the profound challenges of our times.

Knowledge democracy refers to an interrelationship of phenomena. First, it acknowledges the importance of the existence of multiple epistemologies or ways of knowing such as organic, spiritual and land-based systems, frameworks arising from our social movements, and the knowledge of the marginalised or excluded everywhere, or what is sometimes referred to as subaltern knowledge. Second, it affirms that knowledge is both created and represented in multiple forms including text, image, numbers, story, music, drama, poetry, ceremony, meditation and more. Third, and fundamental to our thinking about knowledge democracy is understanding that knowledge is a powerful tool for taking action to deepen democracy and to struggle for a fairer and healthier world. Knowledge democracy is about intentionally linking values of democracy and action to the process of using knowledge.

Ecologies of Knowledge and Cognitive Justice

De Sousa Santos (2007), a Portuguese sociologist and legal scholar, has a narrative that begins with his observation that in the realm of knowledge we have created an intellectual abyss that hinders human progress. Abyssal thinking, he notes, “Consists in granting to modern science the monopoly of the universal distinction between true and false to the detriment of … alternative bodies of knowledge” (de Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 47).

The global dividing line that he is referring to is the one that separates the visible constituents of knowledge and power from those who are invisible. Popular, lay, plebeian, peasant, indigenous, the knowledge of the disabled themselves and more cannot be fitted in any of the ways of knowing on ‘this side of the line’. They exist on the other side of the ‘abyss’, the other side of the line. And because of this invisibility they are beyond truth or falsehood. The ‘other side of the line’ is the realm of beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings, which at best may become, “objects or raw material for scientific inquiry” (de Sousa Santos,


2007, 52). de Sousa Santos (2007) makes the link between values and aspiration tightly in saying, “global social injustice is therefore intimately linked to global cognitive injustice. The struggle for global social justice will, therefore, be a struggle for cognitive justice as well.”

He sees a way forward in the concept of ‘ecologies of knowledge’. Post-abyssal thinking is linked to the notion of subaltern cosmopolitanism, or what he also refers to as an “epistemology of the global South”, ecology of knowledges centred in the knowledges from the ‘other side of the line’ and based on the idea that the diversity of the world is inexhaustible. If the diversity of the world is inexhaustible then we need a form of epistemological diversity, which allows this diversity to be acknowledged. The contribution of knowledge, he suggests, is to be measured through knowledge as intervention in reality rather than knowledge as representation of reality. “The credibility of cognitive construction is measured by the type of intervention in the world that it affords or prevents” (de Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 57). The achievement of post-abyssal thinking will depend according to de Sousa Santos on the achievement of a radical co-presence of all knowledges with an understanding of the incompleteness of knowledge.

Shiv Visvanathan, an Indian intellectual linked to the environmental movements of India, contributes to this discourse with concept of ‘cognitive justice’. He notes that (Visvanathan, 2009),

The idea of cognitive justice sensitizes us not only to forms of knowledge but to the diverse communities of problem solving. What one offers then is a democratic imagination with a non-market, non-competitive view of the world, where conversation, reciprocity, translation create knowledge not as an expert, almost zero-sum view of the world but as a collaboration of memories, legacies, heritages, a manifold heuristics of problem solving, where a citizen takes both power and knowledge into his or her own hands.

Edward Said, the Palestinian American scholar underscores the choice facing us noting (Said, 1996, p. 35),

I think the major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the victors and rulers or-the more difficult path – to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of extinction, and take into account the experience of subordination itself, as well as the memory of forgotten voices and persons

Paulo Wangoola, the founder of the village-based Mpambo Afrikan Multiversity makes an eloquent call for intellectuals to come home for resetting of our knowledge systems to the Great Lakes basin of Africa. As quoted from Wangoola (2002):


At this time of deep troubles, profound threat, uncertainty and even confusion, together with all the attendant opportunities in even greater measure, the Source of the Nile is the place to go! Indeed, since the 1970s the Source of the Nile, where all started, has been awaiting her children to return for substantive consultations. Mother Afrika being the oldest continent, she has the longest and most complete memory of human habitation on earth; and probably within her is locked the secret to survive the current crisis.

Stories from Community-Based Universities

Interdisciplinary Laboratories at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS), Argentina

The Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS) is a small-size public university intentionally created to meet local and regional education needs that were not covered by traditional academic offers. Its main campus is located in the Province of Buenos Aires, more specifically in Malvinas Argentinas, a locality marked by high levels of poverty and other related factors that have an adverse impact on living conditions. Since its inception in 1992, the UNGS has been conceived of as a space to articulate the convergence of research, teaching and community services to contribute to the socio-economic development of local communities. The relationship with the local context is a key component of the identity of the UNGS, which has determined its origin, strategic project, institutional design and ongoing development. Most UNGS students are first-generation college students (Lepore & Herrero, 2015).

The UNGS has followed since its creation a university model that is mainly articulated around problems and themes, instead of traditional disciplinary bodies. Briefly, this involves adding to the traditional functions of production and dissemination of knowledge, the explicit intention of doing multidisciplinary research linked to the needs, problems and challenges that emerge from the interaction with social actors of the immediate context. Interdisciplinarity is core to the UNGS, in such a way that the research, teaching and services functions are grouped into four multidisciplinary institutes: (1) Institute of Science (ICI), (2) Institute of Conurbano (ICO), (3) Institute of Human Development (IDH), and (4) Institute of Industry (IDEI). The Institutes are academic management units that define the democratic and horizontal governance structure of the university.

Curriculum change happens through the integration of service learning, community-based research and community action. The UNGS has a Community Service Centre intentionally designed to connect students, faculty members and a variety of stakeholders [governments, private firms and civil society organisations


(CSOs)] through the management, promotion and dissemination of local and regional development projects. This unit integrates the service learning (S-L) and outreach initiatives presented by UNGS professors that have an impact on teaching, technical assistance and research. Thus, the three principles that structure the institutional identity of the UNGS (i.e. research, teaching and community services) are embodied in the development of training courses and diplomas for non-academic stakeholders, external consulting services, basic and applied research, and local development projects that contribute to the strengthening of science and technology. These services are offered to achieve two critical goals: (1) to provide solutions to problems identified by civil society actors and (2) to strengthen the entire process of knowledge production and the existing training and teaching practices within the UNGS.

In order to institutionalise the interaction mechanisms between the UNGS and the community, the Community Service Center – advised by local CSOs – created the Social Council of the UNGS in 2012. This is a collegial body that presents projects that attend social, economic, cultural and educational needs of the community, recommends actions and procedures to consolidate community-university engagements, promotes contracts and agreements between the UNGS and CSOs, and provides advice to the authorities of the university in matters related to the institutional articulation and cooperation with the community.

Regarding the engagement of faculty members in S-L activities and projects, the provision of community services by the academic staff is a main component of its participation in the institutional life of the university. Going beyond what is mandated by law – and in line with the institutional identity of the UNGS – the selection and promotion processes of the academic staff have incorporated specific criteria and scores to assess (and award with extra points) the candidates who have provided community services and incorporated civil society actors in the co-creation of knowledge in their previous academic experience.

Regarding the curricular links of the S-L practices promoted by the institutes, the UNGS has systematised a pedagogical experience called ‘interdisciplinary laboratories’ aimed at overcoming the traditional, paternalistic approach to university extension. The UNGS has three laboratories (environmental, entrepreneurial skills and social networks and living conditions) that are part of the curricular structure of all the careers. This pedagogical approach articulates the acquisition of specific theoretical knowledge with practical interventions to solve a problem presented by the civil society to the UNGS (Abramovich et al., 2012). As stated by an UNGS professor (Lepore & Herrero, 2015, p. 64).


The contribution made by the university has to be embedded in a strategy that belongs to other people. You may agree with them due to political-ideological reasons but it has to be externally defined, it does not belong to you... The impact [of this pedagogic practice] on the UNGS is huge; the impact on the CSOs depends on the institutional relevance of the problem or need that has to be addressed.

Since the implementation of the Laboratories about 10 years ago as mandatory courses, the UNGS has collaborated with over 35 social organisations and networks of the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. In 2008 and 2010, the Laboratory of Social networks and living conditions has been selected by the Presidential Prize “Solidary Educational Practices in Higher Education” as one of the top 20 S-L experiences of Argentina. This recognition has helped the systematisation and consolidation of the Laboratories within the UNGS and the external dissemination of the learning experiences through the participation of teachers, community partners and students in congresses, seminars and international meetings on university extension and S-L.

A course on refugees, democracy, and action at the University of Victoria, Canada

This example illustrates a course-based community engaged learning curriculum innovation brought about in response to a global issue of some magnitude. In September of 2015, a photograph of a policeman in Greece holding a young Syrian child in his arms, a child who had died in the attempt to travel from Turkey to Greece to seek asylum in Europe ignited a wave of interest by people from around the world in the plight of the Syrian and other refugees. The School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria decided to organise an experiential course for year to students to provide them with an opportunity to learn more about the refugee situation as it pertained to Canada and the community of Victoria as well as the world. The course was also designed to provide students with an opportunity to learn skills in community development that could be used in other settings. The course was based on the premise that the global refugee crisis had local implications.

The course was based on a model of experiential learning using a pedagogical approach called pedagogy of hope. The pedagogical framework drew in addition to experiential learning, on transformative learning theory and indigenous ways of knowing. In addition the course was co-designed, a form of community-based curriculum design, with the lead immigrant settlement agency in Victoria, the Intercultural Association (ICA). Students were responsible for their own learning through a contract learning arrangement where students contracted for grade that they wished to receive. They could improve their grades by taking on additional tasks. All students were expected to participate in the collective planning of


a World We Want fund-raising event that marked the end of the course. In addition they had a choice to participate in a community-based research course with ICA members, in the creation of video documenting the course, or in video story telling with immigrant students at a local secondary school.

Dr. Nick Claxton, a Tsawout indigenous scholar, grounded the course an introduction to the land done from a local sacred mountaintop, P’Kols. Students were told the story of the land and people who have lived there for more than 10,000 years. Two critical points came from this experience: the importance of place to all peoples of the world making the necessity of leaving home such a loss and the historical fact that with the exception of the indigenous peoples of Canada, the full population of Canada have been refugees, immigrants and other forms of settlers. As the course continued, speakers included recent refugees to Victoria, scholars of immigration studies, leaders of the settlement agency, artists and community development workers.

The arts in the form of theatre, drawing, mural making, poetry and song were introduced to the students as tools for representing complex social and political issues related to the issues of immigration. The arts were taught as well in preparation for the World We Want closing festival and fund-raising event at the end of the course. The final event was a public event at our city hall in Victoria. The students had created ‘stations’ representing the journey of refugees from escaping from their country, to life in the refugee camps, to travel to their new homes, and to learning in their new homes.

System-wide innovation: TeWhareWananga O Awanuiarngi-New Zealand/Aotearoa

The second example is an illustration of an institution-wide, a system wide curriculum innovation in response to the desire to create decolonised higher education institutions in New Zealand/Aotearoa. TeWhareWananga o Awanuiarangi was established in 1991 by TeRunanga o Ngati Awa, opened in 1992 and officially became a Wānanga in 1997. Awanuiarangi is one of only three institutions designated as Wananga under the Education Act 1989. A Wananga is a tertiary educational institutional designed to provide learning opportunities in particular to Maori students and to focus on the development of Maori studies in general. The establishment of Awanuiarangi was an important step that recognised the role of education in providing positive pathways for Maori development. This means that Maori knowledge and practices are key components of the academic programmes, teaching delivery and student experiences.


Kaupapa Maori is the conceptualisation of Maori knowledge that has been developed through oral tradition. It is the process by which Maori mind receives, internalises, differentiates, and formulates ideas and knowledge exclusively through te reo Maori. Graham Smith Hingangaroa, a distinguished Maori scholar and academic leader, has been the Vice-Chancellor of Awanuiarngi. He is credited with playing a key role in the modern day conceptualisation of the concept of Kuapapa Māori (Smith, 1997).

What is of particular interest in the case of the establishment of a Maori university with an entire set of courses, certificates and diplomas build around Kuapapa Maori is that this one of the few examples of a university somewhere in the world that has been built on a knowledge system that differs from the dominant university content worldwide based on Euro-centric Western knowledge. There are 350 million indigenous peoples in the world. There are thousands of knowledge systems or epistemologies. This example shows that under certain circumstances even what seems to be a quite radical curriculum chance can take place.

The University as a Garden: Educating for Sustainability – Universiti Sains Malaysia

The environmental movement with its first global meeting in 1992, followed by Rio +20 and linked to the contemporary climate change concerns is another global challenge that has had the power to influence higher education curricula. When higher education leaders are able to articulate the links between the calls for a more sustainable way in manners that can carry at least some of their academic colleagues, change is a result. A case in point is the role played by Tan Sri Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, the former Vice-Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and the current President of the International Association of Universities. The story of how USM has undergone a series of substantial curricular changes through learning by doing is worth telling (Razak, 2009, pp. 1–6).

Convinced that universities everywhere must change to embrace a globalising world, USM has embarked on a long-term strategy to make sustainability a major mainstream guiding principle. USM believes that its large pools of disciplinary experts, high quality research facilities, excellent infrastructure and a cohort of students with varied academic interests will help to promote sustainability in the communities it serves. The USM has also tacitly accepted a responsibility to be the ‘social conscience of society’, in addition to playing the traditional role of disseminating knowledge.


Drawing on the metaphor of a ‘university in a garden’, the USM leadership encouraged members of the university community to imagine being in a garden and learning from the environment. Becoming aware of ancient knowledge, ecological and spiritual knowledge can be learned from a new relationship with the rest of nature. The means moving beyond the Western concept of nature as other or as non-human towards a perception of all knowledge, all life forms all ways of knowing as part of that river of life including spiritual life. A point made by the USM leadership is that attention to the local, the community, the ecological, the indigenous and the Malaysian is also a way to achieve high level global recognition. The Western model of higher education is not the only yardstick for measuring excellence.

Communities and universities acting together: Campaigning against violence against Women Bhagat Phool Singh University and the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), Haryana, India

Bhagat Phool Singh University (BPSU) is the first women’s university in Northern India. There are over 6,000 students studying a full range of undergraduate and graduate programmes. In a climate of public visibility towards violence against women and girls in India, BPSU began working with Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) in a campaign approach to tackling the issues of violence in the communities near the university and including the university itself. The campaign was conceptualised, designed, strategised and driven by youth; boys and girls from urban and rural spaces. The goals were to develop an understanding of gender inequalities and discrimination at the root of violence against women and girls. Partners were universities; adolescent youth groups and Community Based Organizations (CBOs). It was an example of community university engagement with equal participation of boys and girls.

Findings

A study of the collaboration showed that the university was not all safe as was assumed to be by the management. Spaces such as the academic block, library, hostels, cafeteria, staff quarters were all found to be extremely unsafe; leaving only the main gate and the road leading to it as safe. One of the findings of the study was that there was no anti-sexual harassment committee in the university. Recommendations for actions were put forward and taken up by the university authorities. Students shared the study with the management and a committee was formed and PRIA was invited to be a third party facilitator. One of the cases that the committee dealt with later was a case of sexual harassment of students by their male professor.


Campaign activities

The university hosted an event at the end of the campaign on its premises. More than 600 youth (boys and girls) from 22 villages attended the event. The event was the first youth sports event in which boys and girls participated (Figure 1).

Figure 1 CBPR in action: Students of BPSU with youth from the community after the sports event

Proposals for Action on Decolonising Our Universities

A review of innovations in community-based universities in various parts of the world suggests that the following actions would be helpful in accelerating institutional change:

1. Re-examine and reinvigorate debates about what constitutes knowledge in the academy, and whose knowledge counts.

2. Re-establish the centrality of justice and transformation at the centre of knowledge in a world that everyday grows more unequal, more unloving, and less sustainable.

3. Create structures and processes for the co-creation of knowledge with social movements and civil society partners.

4. Adhere to the principles of open access to all knowledge created for all people free of charge.


5. Support the expansion of community engaged learning so that all students may have an opportunity for well-supported reflective action learning in community and social movement contexts.

6. Create offices of Community University Engagement or similar organisational structures that bring the engagement mission to impact better integration of research and teaching.

7. Increase interdisciplinary opportunities for teaching and learning linked to critical global issues such as those expressed by the UN SDGs.

8. Support the development of community-based curriculum development jointly between academics and community organisations.

9. Creation of problem or issue focussed teaching and learning centres or institutes that cut across disciplinary boundaries.

ReferencesAbramovich, A.L., Da Representacao, N. & Fournier, M.L. (Eds.). (2012). Aprender

haciendo con otros. Una experiencia de formación universitaria en articulación con organizaciones sociales. Los Polvorines: Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento.

de Sousa Santos, B. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledge. Eurozine, 33, 45–89.

Lepore, W. & Herrero, M.A. (2015). It takes two to tango: Community-university research partnerships in Argentina. In B. Hall, R. Tandon & C. Tremblay (Eds.), Strengthening Community – University Research Partnership: Global Perspective (pp. 53–72). Victoria, BC: University of Victoria. https://dspace.library.unic.ca /handle/1828/6506

Razak, D.A. (2009). USM Apex University Status: Transforming Higher Education for a Sustainable Tomorrow. Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences, 16(1), 1–6.

Said, E. (1996). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Random House.Smith, G.H. (1997). The Development of Kuapapa Maori: Theory and Praxis. Auckland:

University of Auckland.Tando, R. & Hall, B. (2014). Majority – World Foundation of Community-based

research. In R. Mcllrath, B. Hall & R. Tandon (Eds.), Higher Education and Community-Based Research: Creating a Global Vision (pp. 53–68). London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Visvanathan, S. (2009). The Search for Cognitive Justice. Retrieved 8 September 2012 from http://bit.ly/3ZwMD2

Wangoola, P. (2002). Mpambo, the African multiversity: A philosophy trekindle the African spirit. In G. Dei, B. Hall & D. Goldin-Rosenberg (Eds.), Indigenous Knowledges in the Global Contexts: Multiple Readings of the World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

the community-based university - penerbit.usm.my · the ‘golden’ era of islam. during this...

Documents