Engaging Citizens and Transforming Designers: Analysis of a Campus-Community Partnership Through the Lens of Children's Rights to Participation

• Published in: Journal of community engagement and scholarship 2016-10, Vol.9 (2), p.53-64
• Main Authors: Derr, Victoria, Malinin, Laura Healey, Banasiak, Meredith
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Child Advocacy; Children & youth; Children's rights; Childrens Rights; College students; Community education; Community service; Decision making; Democracy; Design; Equal rights; Experiential learning; Handbooks; Human rights; Initiatives; Methods; Participation; Science education; Service learning; Student community service
• ISSN: 1944-1207

While an engaged citizenry is often the goal of community service learning, the rights of children to be active agents in this process are largely considered in a separate academic literature. Yet community service learning and children's participation share much in their goals and approaches to engagement. This paper analyzes a campus-community partnership between undergraduate environmental design and middle school applied science students. The partnership began as a way to promote participatory design processes for the redesign of a middle school and evolved to a proactive co-design program. We describe the goals and approaches to service-learning employed through the partnership, and critique the evolution of the program through the realm of a participation model that has emerged from three decades of children's participation research. By analyzing a campus-community partnership through this framework, we hope to deepen the discourse on approaches to and evaluation of successful service-learning programs.