Getting out there: the scholarship of community engagement and the reality of practice

Community engagement in the Australian University context exists in many different forms. In centres of community policy and research; as a strategy to recruit potential students and to further embed the university in its wider geographical or social community; and as community engagement learning - learning that enhances the core business of Learning and Teaching for educators and undergraduates, through the design and development of learning experiences that go `out there¿. It is in this third kind of engagement that this paper is interested. This paper explores community engagement learning through an account of the process of developing two community engagement electives in partnership with teaching staff from the disciplines of Applied Media and Communications and Engineering. Drawing upon our practice, this paper seeks to contribute to understandings of the pedagogy of community engagement learning. By doing so, we seek to inform the emerging scholarship of engagement across the higher education sector and to make explicit key challenges to the emergence of this scholarship.