Building A Community Garden: A Collaborative Cross-Disciplinary Academic Community Engagement Project

Abstract

Most research concerning service learning discusses the benefits students
experience when working on a project; however, for faculty, the challenges
involved in facilitating the project are also great. We designed a collaborative cross-disciplinary
project to address two goals: 1) to increase student engagement through
service learning, while also 2) redistributing the work involved in managing the
project from the instructor to a second group of upper-level operations management
students. Specifically, we used the Academic Community Engagement (ACE)
pedagogy, which combines community engagement with academic instruction, in
a collaborative project between a freshman-level environmental science class and
an upper-level operations management class. The project goal for the students was
to research and establish a formal plan for the creation of a community garden in
the local town. The community garden project goal was achieved over the course
of the semester and survey results suggest that we accomplished both of the cross-disciplinary
project goals. Specifically, many of the students developed a deeper
sense of connection to the local community and a more tangible idea of how they can
serve their communities in the future.