Periclean Scholars: Promoting a Reimagined Model of Collaborative and Co-created Community Partnerships for Undergraduates
By Mathew H. Gendle & Amanda Tapler, Elon University, Elon NC, USA
Throughout higher education, institutional relationships with community-based organizations are often conceptualized in a way that prioritizes, potentially inadvertently, the needs and goals of academic institutions. Furthermore, they frequently focus on the student, faculty, and institutional impacts and outcomes versus the impacts and outcomes of the community organization, let alone the community members. However, these community-based organizations are highly valuable to academic institutions because of their off-campus locations (sometimes geographically distant) as they provide an opportunity for students to study away/abroad, explore diverse cultural, social, and environmental contexts, and/or to volunteer and participate in transformative community-based learning. Thus, it is imperative that we reimagine how institutional-community relationships have been previously created, and in so doing, challenge institutions of higher education to promote and implement mutually beneficial partnerships where student learning and community outcomes are always accorded equal importance (Hartman et al., 2014).
What if community-based global learning (CBGL) programs were intentionally co-designed, from the ground up, to benefit host communities to the same degree that they benefit visiting students? What if these programs took an asset-based approach to their partnership? What if partner community goals were prioritized along with the goals of the institution? What if institutional-community-based partnerships were created in equitable ways?
The Elon University (Elon, NC, USA), Periclean Scholars Program may provide examples that begin to answer these questions. The Periclean Scholars program is a faculty mentored, immersive undergraduate learning experience, co-facilitated by the authors. Periclean Scholars spend their sophomore, junior, and senior years working collectively as a cohort (typically < 15 students) and taking approximately 18 semester hours of coursework learning about a specific country or region of focus. At present, Periclean Scholars cohorts are at various stages of engaging in community partnerships in Sri Lanka, Morocco, Costa Rica, and India. Each cohort partners with a local and/or international community organization that seeks a mutually beneficial partnership. These partnerships are built on a shared responsibility to address societal challenges and enact social change through cross-cultural collaborations, capacity building, and multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable development. Each cohort follows a three-year partnership cycle of learning, planning, and co-creating with the community partner and/or partner connections starting in the sophomore year. Further partnership development, including community assessments and the development of common goals, lead to the co-development and initial execution of a collaborative project in the junior year. During the senior year, scholars and community partners work together to continue to implement and co-evaluate the project. It is important to note that the end of each project cycle does not necessarily entail the termination of a project or partnership. The program recognizes that students will be moving on to other things in life after graduation, so projects are intentionally designed so that they either arrive at a functional end point, can be sustained by the community partner, or are continued with a future cohort of Periclean Scholars.
The Periclean Scholars program, now in its 20th year of operation, has significantly evolved over the years. At the start, it was conceptualized as a traditional international service-learning initiative and historically engaged in many of the problematic practices related to service learning that have been criticized by Eby (1998) and others. In recent years, the program has made intentional progress to more closely align with multiple best-practice frameworks, including Mitchell’s (2008) “critical service learning”, Hartman et al.’s (2018) model of critical global inquiry, the Guidelines for Community Engaged Learning Experiences Abroad (published by The Forum on Education Abroad), the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Ethical Reasoning, Global Learning, Intercultural Knowledge and Competence, and Civic Engagement VALUE rubrics, and the CORE Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability.
It is our opinion that the Periclean Scholars program can serve as an example for how academic initiatives can reconceptualize traditional service-learning programs, revisioning and developing them into community-based global learning programs (CBGL) that pragmatically integrate the aspirational principles of Fair Trade Learning (Hartman, et al., 2014) to create a more just and equitable model for undergraduate CBGL. For example, since 2017, the Periclean Scholars program has worked closely with Sarvodaya (the largest and oldest NGO in Sri Lanka) on what has become the initiative’s longest standing and most fruitful partnership. Founded in 1958, the Sarvodaya movement is grounded in Dr. Ahangamage Tudor Ariyaratne’s vision for a poverty, affluence, and conflict-free society, and welfare for all through local community mobilization (Clark, 2005; Gendle 2021). Sarvodaya promotes local community-initiated self-development and inclusive participatory democracy, with a focus on eliminating poverty and addressing community needs within hyper-local contexts (Clark, 2005; Gendle 2021). Through this partnership, the Periclean Scholars have been afforded the opportunity to co-create, co-implement and co-evaluate local community projects to promote the development of sustainable and just community tourism and issues related to LGBTQIA2S+ rights.
What follows is a brief overview of a “typical” Periclean Scholars project cycle (sophomore – senior year), using the program’s ongoing relationship with Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka as an example. Highlighted are some of the best practices and themes of this blog series, used by the Periclean Scholars program to advance inclusion, resource sharing, collaborative methods, expansive imagination, and structural change. Throughout our work, the program strives to be intentional about decolonizing its CBGL practices. Like many other institutions of higher education, ours has a history of utilizing external communities in an extractive way for the exclusive or nearly exclusive benefit of creating positive student learning outcomes. The Periclean Scholars program resists the perpetuation of these historical norms of practice, and instead emphasizes the concept of dual purposes, where program activities are intentionally designed to benefit both student learning outcomes and the expressed and desired goals of external communities.
The Periclean Scholars begin their CBGL journey in their sophomore year, primarily engaged in learning about their country or region of focus and undertaking research that serves as the basis for creating connections with community partners. During this time and guided by their faculty mentor, Scholars delve into primary readings to better understand and contextualize the cultural, historical, social, economic, religious, and political landscape of the geographic location of their future partnership. From these readings, Scholars begin to develop ideas about potential project topics and generate white papers that present structured research on these topic areas. This research is then used as a foundation to initiate conversations between the Scholars and Sarvodaya leadership regarding the potential viability of these topics. At this point, Sarvodaya leadership also engages with local partner communities to determine their interest in entering a defined partnership involving one or more of these topic areas. From these collective conversations, a short-list of 3-5 general potential project topics is agreed upon by the Scholars and Sarvodaya leadership. Through on-the-ground efforts in Sri Lanka that typically occur during May and June immediately following the sophomore year, the Scholars, their faculty mentor, and Sarvodaya organizational leadership meet with local community partners and stakeholders to assess the viability and potential outcomes of value associated with each proposed project topic. Following this exploratory stage, additional discussions are had between community stakeholders, Sarvodaya, and the Scholars to create the framework for a specific project. Projects are intentionally constructed so that they are in line with the Scholars’ interests, positively leverage the goals and assets of community partners (as defined and expressed by the community partners themselves) and have significant potential to provide a meaningful outcome or outcomes to a Sri Lankan partner community. Thus, the Periclean Scholars CBGL experiences are equitably co-created in a way that, from the beginning, is both fully inclusive of community voices and deeply collaborative.
While many CBGL partnerships may require or include a memorandum of understanding (MOU), it has been our experience that the detailed and legalistic framework of traditional MOU’s can be confusing and off-putting to community partners. In our work, a less formal “Partnership Standards of Practice Agreement” is co-designed to be reflexive and open to future amendment by all parties and focuses on defining a set of shared general standards of practice that the Periclean Scholars, Sarvodaya, and community partners all agree to (sample agreement available from the authors by request). Part of this agreement includes an important part of Scholar’s first year--working with Sarvodaya to plan their initial experience in Sri Lanka, which usually occurs at the conclusion of the sophomore year.
Program-related travel also parallels the project cycle described above, with learning about partner communities, co-creating and co-planning, and developing relationships with community partners being the goals of in-country work. Rather than dictate specific travel agendas from afar, the Periclean Scholars program collaborates with Sarvodaya to set a general timeline, identify needs, expectations, and goals regarding their collective work while in Sri Lanka. The staff of Sarvodaya’s International Division also work closely with community members to create, develop, and execute the specific arrangements for all aspects of the in-country experience, utilizing local and community-owned assets whenever possible. This process is then mirrored for visits made during the junior and senior years. In this way, the program follows Fair Trade Learning best practices by not unilaterally dictating how these travel experiences will be structured. Rather, ample space is made for the community partner(s) to decide what the most valuable experiences for the Scholars will be, and to create opportunities and spaces for these experiences to happen in ways that the community recognizes to be in their best interest.
During the junior year, collaborative efforts to further enhance partner connections and co-develop/co-execute the project is the focus. The Scholars rely on community asset mapping activities and a strengths and opportunities orientation to guide their work. Shawn Humphrey’s “Sidekick Manifesto” has served as a critical resource that provides a jargon-free operational scaffold to guide the program’s community engaged work. Following Humphrey’s model, Scholars focus on functioning as “sidekicks” to the community partners and identify how to best utilize resources to both support and meet their unified goals.
The senior year is dedicated to the co-execution of the project with Sarvodaya, community members, and Scholars as well as the creation of a plan to either facilitate long-term project sustainability (via another Periclean Scholars cohort, the community partners, or Sarvodaya) or define a mutually agreed upon project termination point. Throughout the senior year, Scholars engage in extensive scholarly reflection on the development of the partnership and on co-evaluation of both the project and the partnership. An important piece of this evaluation is the utilization of a community centered assessment, the Community Benefit Survey (CBS), a 17-item measure of how the community has benefited from student involvement, as perceived by the community members themselves (Gendle, Senadeera, & Tapler, 2023-in press). The CBS was created by the authors and Sarvodaya leadership, and intentionally centers the voices of community partners in project evaluation. The CBS is intended for use as a starter tool to facilitate additional conversations between student groups, community members, and community organizations and promotes further discussion regarding how students and faculty can improve the program and benefits with the community.
Although the Periclean Scholars program is far from perfect, we continue to aspire to ensure our work with students and community partners is in line with the tenets of Fair Trade Learning. In so doing, we hope to “lead by example” and encourage other programs (both at our home institution and beyond) to adopt these practices into their everyday operations. We especially wish to inspire traditional study abroad/away programs (which all too often continue to be grounded in neocolonial frameworks) to carefully examine their current policies and activities and replace them with reimagined practices that prioritize equitable community partnerships, sustainability, and a focus on reciprocity.
Works Cited
Clark, J. (2005). The gift of hope: Sarvodaya Shramadana’s good work, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 16(2), 97-105. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455750500108377
Eby, J. W. (1998). Why service learning is bad. http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/slceslgen/27
Gendle, M. H. (2021). A Non-Violent and Local Path Forward: Can the Sarvodaya Social Movement Offer a Viable Populist Solution to Governmental Dysfunction in the U.S.?, The Progressive Populist, 27(2), 11. http://www.populist.com/27.02.Gendle.html
Gendle, M. H., Senadeera, B., & Tapler, A. (2023-in press). A novel instrument for the community-centered assessment of outcomes resulting from visits by foreign student groups. Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement.
Hartman, E., Kiely, R., Boettcher, C., & Friedrichs, J. (2018). Community-based global learning: The theory and practice of ethical engagement at home and abroad. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC.
Hartman, E., Morris Paris, C., & Blache-Cohen, B. (2014). Fair Trade Learning: Ethical standards for community-engaged international volunteer tourism, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 14(1-2), 108-116. https://doi.org/10.1177/1467358414529443
Mitchell, T. D. (2008). Traditional versus critical service learning: Engaging the literature to differentiate two models. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 14(2), 50-65.
Owen, J., Arochi-Zendejas, C., Lane-Toomey, C., Odhiambo, P., Sabato, E., Somchanhmavong, A. K., & Trail, K. B. (2022). Guidelines for Community Engaged Learning Experiences Abroad. The Forum on Education Abroad. https://forumea.org/resources/guidelines/community-engagement-service-learning-and-volunteer-experiences/. doi.org/10.36366/G.978-1-9-52376-16-0
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Mathew H. Gendle is the Director of Project Pericles and is a Professor of Psychology at Elon University in Elon, NC. Mat is a cis-gender white man originally from upstate New York. His research and professional interests include ethics and best practices in higher education-community organization partnerships in international settings, as well as disciplinary research in neuropharmacology, consciousness, and the social and geopolitical components of drug use and commerce. Mat has cultivated and supported a multi-year partnership between Elon and Sarvodaya, the largest and oldest NGO in Sri Lanka. He earned his PhD in biopsychology from Cornell University. As a mid-career tenured full professor, Mat has centered his professional life around utilizing the privileges that have been conferred upon him to serve others. Mat believes that tenured full professors have no greater professional responsibility than to function as active advocates and co-conspirators for institutional disruption and change.
Amanda S. Tapler is the Associate Director of Project Pericles and Senior Lecturer of Public Health Studies at Elon University and is originally from upstate New York. Her research is rooted in Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Diffusion of Innovation, focusing on health knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Currently her scholarly interests focus on the ethics and best practices in higher education-community organization partnerships in international settings; mentoring of undergraduate students in global engagement; intercultural learning; and undergraduate research in global and diverse contexts. Tapler has partnered with the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP) in Jamkhed, India for more than 10 years, offering a unique public health practicum, and experiential learning experiences including community based participatory research projects in rural health and sustainable development. She currently serves as a Faculty Fellow for CRHP. Amanda earned her MPH in Community Health from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Institutional Context: Elon is a selective, mid-sized private university renowned as a national model for engaged and experiential learning. Students work closely with faculty who are dedicated to excellent teaching and scholarship. The curriculum is grounded in the traditional liberal arts and sciences and complemented by nationally accredited professional and graduate programs.
Snapshot Institutional Profile (for comparative purposes as part of the broader project described below):
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This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.
Join us for, Stepping into the Work: Expanding understanding of global positionality, responsibility, and opportunity, a Collaborative gathering in partnership with the Global Engagement in the Liberal Arts Consortium at Haverford College, immediately outside of Philadelphia, November 10 and 11, 2023. Registration is open.