RU : Vice-Chancellor’s Awards Lectures – Community Engagement
This is awarded annually to a Rhodes University group or staff member who has dedicated time and knowledge to forge socially significant initiatives and partnerships in the local community.
Date: 09 May 2017 18:30 – 09 May 2017 19:30
Location: Eden Grove Blue
Organiser: Conferencing (Phone 046 603 8520)
Event Type: Alumni
Community engagement serves as one of the core purposes of higher education, transforming traditional teaching and learning as well as research practices in order to break down the boundaries between institutions which were isolated from the societies in which they should rightly have been embedded, and making them more responsive to those contexts. Community engagement is also a crucial way to transform individuals who are involved, changing people’s ways of being and perceiving each other and the world around them, undermining biases and prejudices, and cultivating criticality, reflexivity and civic values. In its broadest sense, community engagement is an important way for universities to operate as institutions which work for the public good by partnering with community based organisations and broader society to tackle issues of local importance in a unified way. By making university assets available through volunteerism and community engaged learning programs, and harnessing the assets available in local communities, we can work together to overcome some of the major challenges faced in society today.