Community engagement curriculum

This curriculum was designed to help college students apply their writing and communicative skills towards a "real world" collaborative project with local nonprofit organizations.

Category: service-learning; marketing; public relations

Attributes: lecturing; assignment design; community outreach and engagement

Target Audience: third- and fourth-year college students

Client: non-profit organizations

Year: 2020

Analyze

Within higher education, pedagogical approaches like co-teaching, interdisciplinarity, and service-learning often require meticulous planning and coordination between the instructors and the other participants. When these elements are integrated into a single course, the classroom becomes a much more nuanced site of learning: co-instructors must not only synthesize their disciplinary knowledge into a single curriculum but must also serve as community liaisons when establishing public-facing activities and assignments.

The reward is well worth the logistical challenges. Students walk away from the experience with a much more comprehensive understanding of not just their academic skills but also how to apply those skills in "real world," professional settings.

The following section showcases the main tenets of an experimental interdisciplinary service-learning course that I co-taught with a professor from Oakland University's Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations called “Promoting Non-Governmental Organizations through Service-Learning.”

Design and Development

The curriculum's basic structure was designed using the Backward Design (BD) process, from McTighe and Wiggins’ book Understanding by Design.

Step 1: We began by identifying the knowledge and skills that we wanted students to gain by the end of the course. This led to the creation of three learning outcomes:

Students can effectively transfer rhetorical skills and a traditional public relations model into a non-profit setting
Students would investigate and critique the social impact that non-profits play in the community
Students demonstrate an ability to collaborate in both academic and non-academic contexts in order to solve problems

Step 2: We then had to determine how to evaluate the students' performance and understanding of the course material. For us, it was crucial that students not only interacted with non-profit organizations but that they also used their writing and design skills to create a tangible deliverable for them, as if they were a client. These deliverables would ensure that the partnering non-profits leave with beneficial resources while simultaneously providing me and the co-instructor with an assignment to assess and evaluate. Finally, in the process of creating these deliverables, students would be required to speak and communicate regularly with their clients, thereby giving them an opportunity to learn more about the social impacts that non-profits play in our local community.

Step 3: The co-instructor and I developed the necessary learning materials and activities that students would need to complete to achieve the three learning outcomes. After careful deliberation, we decided to build our curriculum around a single project: a multifaceted promotional campaign that addressed a non-profit's goal or need.

While we ultimately left the vision and direction of the campaign up to the students and their client to decide, there were certain elements each final project was required to include:

Two deliverables that utilized a blend of visuals and text
Ten social media posts across two platforms (of the group’s and community partner’s choice)
A collaboratively written summary report that articulated primary and secondary research approach, significant changes made during the campaign design process, and modifications the group would make if they more time and resources
An in-class presentation to an audience of their peers, the instructors, and all of the participating community partners.

Each final project would be evaluated using this criterion, which assessed the quality and comprehensiveness of each of the above elements.

Implementation

My co-instructor and I began by separating the students into four groups during the first week of the semester. These four groups would remain together for the duration of the course and each one worked with a different local non-profit client.

Each group was then given the promotional campaign assignment prompt. In fact, this was the first prompt my co-instructor and I distributed to our students because it was the main project that would govern all the subsequent work that they completed during the semester.

After each group held a formal meeting with their client and gathered information on the history and mission of their organization, my co-instructor and I introduced two analytical heuristics that would help students process that information so as to guide their campaign's design process.

First, students used SWOT analysis to map out their client's strengths and weaknesses as a non-profit. This helped students determine their eventual campaign's goals/objectives.

Second, we introduced the students to genre analysis to investigate and unpack the most popular types of promotional material that non-profits tend to utilize, again so that students could better understand the contexts in which they were working.

Integration of these two heuristics enabled students to analyze both the circumstances surrounding their client as well as the content (i.e., the textual and visual conventions) of suitable promotional material.

After meeting their non-profit clients and conducting SWOT and genre analysis, each group was asked to collaboratively write a proposal that would outline a vision of their campaign.

In the proposal prompt, we asked each group to outline and articulate the following:

Situation: The client’s history and mission statement and a summary of the current issues facing the organization
Objectives: The goal(s) and purpose(s) of the promotional campaign
Audience: The campaign's target audience(s) and their assumed values, beliefs, and attitudes
Campaign elements: The specific deliverables of the eventual campaign (e.g., social media, physical resources, etc.) and an explanation of how each component contributes to the campaign’s objectives
Timetable: A schedule of how the campaign will be rolled out
Evaluation: The mechanisms used to measure the effectiveness of the promotional campaign.
Research design: The research methods (quantitative or qualitative) that will be utilized to collect data for the design process

My co-instructor and I felt it was imperative that each proposal received feedback from a variety of reviewers. Therefore, in addition to receiving feedback from the two of us, each group also sent their proposal to their client for further comments. Furthermore, we also held an in-class peer review session where each group read and commented on every other group’s proposal.

Similar to the final project, each proposal was also assessed using a criterion, which looked at the quality and comprehensiveness of each of the above elements.

Sample campaign: Sanctum House

One of the non-profits that a group worked with was Sanctum House, a safehouse for female human trafficking victims in the local Metro Detroit area. Through SWOT analysis, the student group determined that the most appropriate promotional campaign for the client was one that would help combat social misconceptions of human trafficking, as well as desensitize the topic.

Thus, their campaign focused on three key deliverables: public service announcement flyers that could be reproduced and distributed in local spaces (examples shown here); pre-designed social media posts that simultaneously got the word out on Sanctum House as well as encouraged positive social action; and a newsletter template that could be used to maintain communication with current Sanctum House sponsors and donors.

Evaluation and Takeaways

Most students found the course to be a meaningful experience for them to apply their learned skills to solve a genuine social problem. One student reported:

"As [our community partner] came to trust our group with sensitive information and nondisclosure topics, our group was able to see through the eyes of [the organization and their participants]. By understanding more and more of what [the community partner] set out to accomplish and the image they wanted to have, we were able to gear our campaign to what their needs were."

The non-profit partners also expressed satisfaction with the partnership experience. In an unsolicited email, one director wrote:

"These students blew me away…They are so professional. I actually have some experience (years ago) with a top advertising agency… in downtown Detroit. I was a small business owner with a small budget, and they couldn’t answer my data questions the way your team did...Thank you so much for this opportunity. Hopefully, I will get to employ these tools in the next few weeks."

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