Community Engagement Webinar

Community Engagement Webinar – Engaged Scholarship and Scholarship of Engagement, differences and Similarities

The Community Engagement office hosted its third virtual webinar on Friday the 18^th September.

In her welcome address, Professor Mabusela addressing the attendees, she noted that, this will be a nice engagement and discourse where the academics are going to be able to learn these differences and similarities.,” we will be able to take the good practices and engage further within our context of teaching and learning and in the scholarship of engagement. I also hope this will increase our hope of understanding in terms of how we are supposed to be dealing with community Engagement during this time of COVID.” Said Prof Mabusela

Professor Cornel Hart from the University of the Western Cape who was the guest speaker, focused on how the colleagues and attendees from higher education can connect and engage the dialogue was around that.” If we look at higher education institutions, we are in power seats colleagues. We are the best place as innovation and production agencies to drive this plan and make sure that our regional and national strategies bring this significant change. Hopefully we will walk out of here today” said Prof Hart.

This webinar had two facilitators, Professor Darren Lortan who is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the Durban University of Technology, has expertise and a keen interest in Community Engagement (CE). He shared his insights,” Cornel and I do not dis agree with each other. I am just going to do a quick look at what I think the differences are between using the term scholarship of engagement and engaged scholarship. Some of the potential dangers of emphasizing one above the other . I hope I convey that sufficiently without losing you, for me the best way to characterise between the two is to remove engagement from the phrase and think of other areas for which its almost natural for us to say.”.

The discussant for the day Dr Maxwell Shamase added to the discussion by saying from what has been presented this morning it could be said that  ,” from the presentations of Dr Hart and Prof Lotan we can argue and conclude that community engagement and engaged scholarship is not serving on a departmental committee, not on a university wide community, not serving on a disciplinary committee, not voluntarily or related to your discipline we can safely say all scholarship, including community engaged scholarship they require high level of disciplinary expertise or interdisciplinary expertise.From the address by the two distinguished scholars, we can conclude that by engaged scholarship, it means work that can be described as public goods, asset based as well as scholarly.” Concluded Dr Shamase.

There were a lot of questions from the attendees, there were a lot of inputs in this webinar. It was a resounding success.

• Precious Shamase