Mindful of Mutual Benefits:
Service Learning and Civic Engagement
Laura Lawson
Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Director, East St. Louis Action Reserach Project
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
10:15 - 10:45
Design College Room 411
Residents and students working side-by-side to build a new playground,
students producing GIS maps that help a neighborhood organization document
flooding problems, teenagers being trained to repair computers and service
community computer labs these images, products, and programs are satisfying
examples of the intent driving sustained community-university partnerships.
Referred to by various names service learning, civic engagement, or
community-based learning the general philosophy is to encourage a mutually
beneficial partnership between students and a community group, with students
providing needed service to a community that in turn provides rich, applied
learning experiences to the students. These examples are drawn from a
twenty-two year engagement known as the East St. Louis Action Research
Project that has involved faculty, students and staff from multiple
disciplines and over 30 community organizations in the economically
distressed City of East St. Louis.
This presentation will showcase the
complicated process of building relationships between university and
community, even as both are evolving. This presentation will frame the
goals of civic engagement and service learning, particularly the vision,
expectations, myths, mistakes, and constant evolution. Examples of
engagement will be drawn from design, planning, and technology. The goal is
not to present a model but to reflect and evaluate the meaning and future
for sustained engagement.
Laura Lawson is an associate professor in Landscape
Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research
and teaching has focused on community activism in open space planning and
design. Her ongoing research on community gardening and greening has been
published in the book, City Bountiful: A History of Community Gardening
in America (University of California Press, 2005), the co-authored book
Urban Community Gardens: Greening the City and Growing communities in
Seattle (co-authored with Jeff Hou and Julie Johnson, University of
Washington Press, expected 2008), and in several articles.
As director of the University of Illinois' East St. Louis Action Research
Project (ESLARP), Dr. Larson has worked with several resident organizations
on neighborhood planning and park revitalization projects. In the midst of
high levels of poverty, unemployment, environmental degradation, and minimal
municipal support, these neighborhood groups in East St. Louis are leading
efforts in community and economic development. Park revitalization,
reclamation of vacant land to productive use, and safe social and
recreational activites are central to these efforts. Dr. Larson's
involvement has included both action research and service-learning studio
instruction. She plans to expand her research on park activism in
low-income communities through a series of case studies of parks in other
cities. Her current research project is a study of activism around Garfield
Park in Chicago, Illinois. At the university level, Dr. Larson is involved
in efforts to expand community-based learning and plans to continue to
advocate for the inclusion of community-based design in landscape
architecture pedagogy.
The East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP) is a program of
sustainaed engagement with distressed urban areas through service learning
and action research.
Together with residents and community organizations in severly distressed
areas, faculty, staff and students from across the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign work on highly tangible and visible projects that address
immediate and long-term needs.
Since 1987, this program of mutual learning and assistance has been an
important part of neighborhood improvement and other community-based efforts
in East St. Louis, Alorton, Brooklyn, Centreville and Washington Park,
Illinois.
