Community engagement was a relatively unknown concept in South African higher education until the late 1990s. In response to the call of the White Paper on the Transformation of Higher Education (1997) for `feasibility studies and pilot programmes which explore the potential of community service in higher education' the Joint Education Trust launched the Community — Higher Education — Service Partnerships (CHESP) initiative in 1999. The purpose of this initiative was to assist South African Higher Education Institutions to conceptualization and implementation community engagement as a core function of the academy. This article tracks the development of community engagement in South African higher education through the CHESP initiative and identifies some of the processes and outcomes at a programmatic, institutional and national level. The article includes four South African universities as case studies to illustrate the processes and outcomes of embedding community engagement in South African higher education.

As of 2009 service learning has been integrated into the music programme at the Odeion School of Music, University of the Free State (South Africa), as a compulsory module for final-year students. In order to uphold academic and institutional standards, it was stipulated that the said module had to include mechanisms that would promote quality interaction and engagement activities within a framework that would ensure the implementation and coordination of meaningful, sustainable service and learning.The need for the development of such a module formed the rationale for this study, which draws on relevant pedagogical theories and perspectives on the relation between service learning and the social and educational realms of music in order to formulate a framework for the implementation of quality service learning. It is believed that the framework presented in this article may offer a generic basis for the implementation of service learning at higher education institutions, specifically in music departments.

Contradictions and contestations seem to plague the notion of community engagement in South African higher education. This is surprising in view of its overt links to Utopian ideals espoused by policy directives for higher education transformation in a democratic South Africa. This situation has an impact on the knowledge enablement potential in the interaction between higher education and the third sector. In this chapter I propose a perspective on this state of affairs that is influenced by Marxism. Creative tensions between ideological limitations and Utopian impulses in the field were investigated, using Fredric Jameson's notion of the Political Unconscious (Jameson 1981) as an exploratory tool. Based on a review of literature I illustrate manifestations of the dialectic between ideology and the Utopian vision of a classless society. I contend that this reading deepens our understanding of political factors in the broader society that maintain contradictions between public pronouncements and the experience of scholars, civil society organisations (the third sector) and community members involved in engagement practices. It also enables engaged scholars to reimagine South African society and the role of higher education. Erasmus M, Albertyn R (eds) 2014. Knowledge as Enablement. Stellenbosch: SUN PRESS

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Background: Service learning is used as an educational approach in many undergraduate occupational therapy programmes in South Africa and the rest of the world. Evidence for the impact of occupational therapy service learning engagements in communities, from the perspectives of community partners, is limited. Aim: The purpose of this study was to describe the perceptions of community representatives regarding the outcomes of occupational therapy service learning engagements. Methods: A descriptive qualitative enquiry design was used. In-depth interviews were conducted with eight purposively sampled community representatives and analysed using inductive qualitative content analysis. Results: This paper reports on the theme related to community outcomes of occupational therapy that emerged from the data, consisting of seven categories, namely: (1) increased knowledge and skills, (2) attitudinal change leading to practice reform, (3) increased access to resources and infrastructure, (4) enhanced community connections, (5) enhanced confidence and dignity, (6) enhanced occupational participation, and (7) non-realisation of partnership goals. Conclusion: The findings of the study demonstrated that although there were some instances in which partnership goals were not realised, occupational therapy service learning engagements contributed to occupational enablement, occupational justice, health and well-being for community members. LITERATURE REVIEW Bringle and Steinberg 14 point out that studies conducted on the community outcomes of service learning tend to focus on contribution to quality of life in communities, or on relationships between the community and other stakeholders. Others 9 critique that research in service learning tends to conflate community outcomes with