Teaching students how to talk about, think about, and do community

Abstract

This article charges student affairs professionals who work with student leaders to become more intentional in how they and their students create and contribute to community. Towards that end, this article delineates a process called community-praxis that teaches students how to talk about, think about, and do community. Organization advisors who utilize community-praxis will help student members more deliberately conceptualize and create and recreate the type of community associated with their particular club, organization, or association. The process may have educational value for the advisors as well. By facilitating the community-praxis delineated here, advisors will be prompted to review the democratic theories and procedures that have long shaped educational communities. Additionally, they likely will be introduced to viable postmodern theories and practices that have not traditionally informed the ways educators conceptualize and operationalize their own campus communities.

The Dynamics of Social Indicator Research for California’s Central Valley in Transition

“…The PAC project employs undergraduate and graduate students as researchers, assisting in almost every phase of the project. By incorporating students in the research process, PAC collaborators are practicing a model of community-praxis education on a grand scale (Varlotta 2008 ). Whereas the process of community-praxis encourages students to think about being part of groups, how to build relationships and to think critically about communities on campus, our project requires students to extend this practice to broader community contexts.…”