2023 VICE CHANCELLORS DISTINGUISHED COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AWARD WINNER
It is with great pleasure that we announce that Dr Jessica Cockburn is the recipient of the 2023 Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Award for Community Engagement. Dr Cockburn wins this award for her leadership and coordination of several projects including the River Rescue service-learning course and Tsitsa Project. The adjudication panel unanimously agreed that Dr Cockburn embodies the ethos of community engagement through her wide and deep ranging efforts to bring together a multitude of stakeholders in the service of both social and environmental sustainability and justice. Through various integrated engaged teaching and research activities, Dr Cockburn has pioneered a transdisciplinary and holistic approach to community engagement which is rich and inspiring.
Dr Cockburn’s various projects also provide a testimony to how community engagement has evolved at Rhodes bck体育app_bck体育官网下载-二维码平台. She has applied teaching, learning and research resources to meet community needs, and to specifically address the pressing social-ecological sustainability crises the community faces. These initiatives have thus promoted university social responsibility. Her transdisciplinary and integrated methodologies, what she describes as organic processes of “weaving engagement into teaching and research”, have been developmental and participatory, and the partnerships built with River Rescue, the community around the Tsitsa River catchment and Assegaai Trails are reciprocal and collaborative. Implementation of the projects has entailed joint planning, innovative monitoring and evaluation, and efficient utilisation of resources. As a result, the local natural environment, community partners, as well as students and staff have benefited. Balancing the advancement of teaching and research with community development with remarkable synergy, Dr Cockburn is described by her students, colleagues and community partners as deeply aware of the importance of context, connections and care.
Initially a volunteer at River Rescue, a small, local volunteer-based organisation which started in Makhanda in early 2020 to clean the rivers in the city of Makhanda and to restore them as sources of clean water and recreation for all the residents of the city, Dr Cockburn’s role is now facilitator of a learning partnership between River Rescue and the Department of Environmental Science. Environmental Science Honours students participate as volunteers in clean ups, they bring their knowledge of environmental science into discussion and planning of River Rescue activities, students develop their own specific projects to benefit River Rescue, such as social media campaigns, mapping activities, and educational outreach activities. In this way students share their knowledge with the River Rescue community, and they are in turn enriched by gaining knowledge from the community partners of the local context and challenges related to water and waste management.
This service-learning project involves two staff members from the Department of Environmental Science, and all the Honours students. It contributes to the transformation of the way in which local rivers are managed and cared for; the way in which local residents interact with and relate to the river; the relationships between the university and the local community and physical environment; students at a personal level in terms of personal growth, skills and knowledge beyond what they get in a formal classroom setting. Reflective practice is embedded as a key aspect of the course. Students reflect with facilitators in regular meetings, and in quarterly reflection reports which they submit for assessment. The project includes reflective meetings with River Rescue team members, and rich collaborative discussions with community members who presented their work with River Rescue at a Department of Environmental Science Seminar. At this seminar, community partners showcased the value of other forms of knowledge, beyond the academic, in addressing sustainability issues.
Regarding the River Rescue service learning course, one community partner highlighted Dr Cockburn’s alignment of theory and practice in the curriculum to respond directly to the realities not only of the diversity of her students, but also the diverse range of stakeholders in the community. Complementing this teaching initiative is Dr Cockburn’s engaged research, which focuses on landscapes, linkages, and learning, and which ultimately aims to conserve the watercourses of Makhanda.
Dr Cockburn’s endeavours as an engaged researcher are best described through an account of the Tsitsa Project. This is a large collaborative project started in 2014 involving numerous stakeholders including researchers, local community members, natural resource managers, policy makers, local NGOs, and more. The project aims to generate tangible ecological and social outcomes for the landscape and its residents. Its goal was to bring together a range of stakeholders to collectively work towards more sustainable landscape management and rural livelihoods development in the Tsitsa River catchment. For this project, Dr Cockburn has acted as advisor and leader of the Knowledge and Learning Community of Practice. She has also co-led the reflective social learning components in the project and has supervised several of students who based their research on this project.
Key benefits of the Tsitsa Project to local partners have been capacity development, job creation, knowledge-sharing and creating opportunities for collaboration among diverse participants. Crucial skills development benefits were derived through many of the project partners who participated in a short course facilitated on social learning and stakeholder engagement. Rural participants have been supported in learning the relevant technology to participate in such a short course. Importantly, knowledge benefits have not only been focused on disseminating academic knowledge to other stakeholders (which has been done through annual Science-Management meetings), but on co-producing new knowledge together in reflective social learning workshop spaces. Worthy of mention here is Dr Cockburn’s role as co-leader of this project’s innovative approach to monitoring and evaluating its engaged research. This collaborative, pioneering approach: Participatory Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (PMERL), provided an important platform for the wide range of stakeholders in the project to monitor project progress, and to regularly reflect on successes and challenges and lessons learnt, as reflected in an article which Dr Cockburn and her collaborators published on the project (see Cockburn et al 2018a at this link). PMERL is a means of using on-going knowledge production to inform management and decision-making for improved landscape function. In other words, it brings knowledge to life to support practice.
Dr Cockburn continues to expand and evolve her community engagement activities. Currently, she is reworking a practical component of the ENV301 Course on Environmental Management Concepts and Methods, where students are introduced to basic research tools to inform and support environmental management, in response to the needs of their community partner, Assegaai Trails. Historically, this practical had been a field-based practical task for students to learn how to collect and analyse data. By incorporating community engagement principles of ‘community learning’, the course will now involve “authentic assessment” where students are taught and assessed through tasks which have real-life relevance and application. The relationship with Assegaai Trails farm is a long-standing one as it has been a site for field trips and practicals, but now the relationship is developing into a more collaborative and reciprocal one as the landowners and their staff are co-designing the research and collecting and analysing data on specific environmental management issues they have identified. This practical will therefore form part of a long-term research project and partnership with Assegaai Trails and will be an opportunity for students to be introduced to the principles of community-engaged research and teaching activities.
Dr Cockburn’s conceptualisation of transdisciplinarity as a practice situated at the nexus of science, society, and self, has informed her engaged research, as well as engaged teaching in the form of service learning. Indeed, one community partner describes Dr Cockburn as having a profound understanding of the interconnectedness of people, animals, ?ora and fauna of the riverine environment. It is this crossing of disciplinary, methodological, social and physical borders, and the concomitant appreciation of interconnections that makes Dr Cockburn a worthy recipient of the 2023 Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Award for Community Engagement.
Congratulations to Dr Cockburn!