Learning in Action: Bridging the Classroom with Community Engagement

Speaker A: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Partnerships with Purpose podcast. We're going to explore ways to engage communities through service lending, projects and research. I'm Cedric Scheib.

Speaker B: And I'm Jamie Hicks Masterson with the Texas Target Communities program at Texas A and M University. We're hoping these stories will highlight and inspire more community engaged partnerships.

Speaker A: So today we have Javas Mithapa. She's our senior program coordinator here at Texas A and M. And we have Dr. Evis Garcia. She's a associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. And yeah, these women, I think are both planning leaders. They are, uh, community engagement experts, I would say. I've learned a lot from G working alongside her. And Evis plays, um, a big role in the master's program at Texas A and M and Urban planning. Um, so yeah, G, Evis, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: Okay, um, so why don't you guys just introduce yourself. Um, tell us a little bit about how you made it to College Station, Texas. I mean, you guys are both from two different continents here in College Stations. Um, so tell us how you got here and how you got started in planning.

Speaker C: So I came to Texas A and M in 2014. Before that I was in my hometown in Kathmandu, Nepal. So my background is in architecture and I had few years of experience in architecture and I realized I was more interested in planning. In my second year, or I would say first year, maybe the first summer in College Station, I had the opportunity to work in a Texas Target Communities internship. And during that time I got exposed to communities in Texas. I worked closely with Jamie and we worked on creating asset maps, resource lists for multiple communities. And I was fortunate that I could take that internship into a full time job. And you know, I was in love with the program. And when Jamie offered me the position, I took it. And ever since then, I'm here in College Station.

Speaker B: Over a decade now.

Speaker C: Yeah, over a decade.

Speaker D: Right. Well, um, I'm Ibis Garcia and I'm, um, associate, um, professor, um, in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning here at Texas A and M. So I had to learn how to say howdy about three years ago. Go, that's how long. And now I go, uh, to places and I make people say howdy and um, then look at me like, what's going on? But, uh, I have the privilege of, um, serving here also as a master's, um, program coordinator. I said that's a privilege because it's also shaping the program. And actually we changed the class that we will be talking about today, Plan 661, it was like communications in planning and now it is community engagement. So when I first moved here, I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. That's where I did a dual master's degree in um, community and regional planning and also Latin American studies. And at the time I was attracted to the Latin American studies because I thought there would be a lot of salsa dancing, a lot of fun, uh, things, which it was true. It was true. But I also fell in love with uh, urban planning and now I get to do it, um, here in Texas with you all.

Speaker A: That's amazing. Yeah. So yeah, you guys both have tons of experience in community engagement and architecture and planning and classes nowadays, I feel like, are trying to embrace this like, thing called community engaged learning. And before we step more into it, like especially with Plan 661 which is a community engaged learning course. Now, can you guys explain to us what community engaged learning is? Sure.

Speaker C: So I would say community engagement learning is when students work on real world projects with actual community partners working side by side, um, addressing complex local challenges that these communities face. And this is not just a simulation or a textbook case study or even a hypothetical issue that they're working on. It's active partnership. And from our Texas Target communities, we connect university courses directly with cities, counties and other community organizations so that our students can not just learn about community from textbook, but they're learning from these communities and working together with community partners.

Speaker D: Right. I think that that is an amazing M definition. So maybe I can define it backward what community engagement is not. And I think a lot of people go to um, especially like universities in an extractive manner. So they go there because they got a big grant and that big grant said that they needed to do surveys. You have to start where people are at. Right. And you have to create partnerships, which means it's like questions that the community really wants to answer. Right. So I think that that's um, absolutely key and for the researcher or um, professor to be of service to what they want and what they need. So I think that a key difference is reciprocity. So communities are not just this teaching laboratory. And um, no offense to those labs. We know we have a lot of types of cool labs and some labs do very good community engagement. But here the idea is that we are partners into um, help uh, shaping the questions are with the community as well as learning objectives. Of course in all of that there's uh, a student benefit. And that student benefit is that they get to do hands on work and sometimes it's uh, messy work and sometimes, um, and it can be of course very rewarding. But, but the point is it's in the real world and they have to get ready for when they have a job. And that's part of why we are offering them.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that you said, um, finding the right questions that communities want to answer. I think that's a great, that's a great framework to start. It's like our students going to the program and they're becoming leaders in engagement in cities all around. I wanted to ask you guys about the type of communities that we partner with. Uh, in Texas Target, we don't just partner with any community. We don't just like blindly pick a community. What specific communities come to the classroom.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, with our program we focus on communities that have need but may not have the capacity to um, address some of these needs, whether it is because they're too small or they have low capacity in terms of professional staff or they cannot afford consultants. We try to bridge the gap of need and resources by leveraging classes like EVISAs and students who have so much energy and passion to do this kind of work. We match them so that students can help with these communities. So our focus has, have been on small towns, maybe rural counties or other places in bigger cities that might still have a lot of needs but less capacity. And um, you know, often we ask communities to apply to the process. With this project Port Arthur, it was a little different, but communities apply to our process and we talk to them to understand if they're ready for this process. It is quite an intensive, um, 15 months sometimes depending on a project. You know, um, sometimes we try to uh, start small and match them with uh, whatever a class can do. But I think an important piece here is the community should be ready to have so many Aggies come into this process and work with them because whatever partnership we build, we think of it as a long term partnership and we want to help the community move the needle towards action. We want to build their capacity. So we want the students to be giving them something that they'll be using. So we want the communities also in a position where they're ready and can be part of this process.

Speaker A: That's great. Yeah. And not every community is quite ready to start a project. Some, um, you know, they apply and some, you know, they wait a year or maybe a couple years and apply again and get the process started right.

Speaker C: I think with Community Engaged Learning, we're putting the focus back to the community. Yes, we're Going in and helping these places. But we're training the students to be thinking from their perspective and seeing community partners as these holders of local knowledge and us coming in to support their vision, to support any sort of ideas they have into uh, something that we can provide. You know, as EVIS is saying, it's a win win. This is a great opportunity for students to get that hands in experience before they're even in the workforce. And they're doing this in a place that is safe because they're in their confines of a university program guided by instructor like evees, like our staff at ah Texas Target Communities. So it gives them more opportunity to learn and expand and become better professionals.

Speaker B: So this project um, that you're kind of alluding to, uh we wanted you to come m today to talk about the work that you did IVIS in UM Plan 661 which was engaging with community members in Port Arthur and it was through the Texas Target Communities program of course. But we want to take a little bit of a deeper dive into the classroom for a second. Obviously this was a real world work with real communities and I think if you could pick it apart a little bit so we can understand how it plays out in the day to day like in the classroom itself. So um, could you kind of walk us through what that looks like um from like the kickoff to like final deliverables um in the classroom.

Speaker D: Right? Yeah, I can talk about the dynamics of the classroom um and I think that maybe g can talk about deliverables for the community if that's okay. But my classroom um is a flip uh teaching method in where students they watch videos and sometimes those videos could be about. There's focus groups and they can observe that and then they come to class and then they practice how to do um a focus group. So there's a combination of. There's these online lectures and readings. We also look at case studies um as well of uh many types of controversial uh topics as well. Not that our communities are always controversial but it's very important um to gain um that skill and go two scenarios where um people want um different things and not everybody has the same vision for the future for um um that community. And then um. Inside of all of these things that we are practicing in the classroom and um studying then we try to just um use poor atar as to apply some of the concepts. For example when we identify stakeholders we go through the exercise of doing that and we do it with a case study and then we do that in port author the same Thing with like thinking about like um, power dynamics and stakeholder mapping. So the idea is that at the end students are creating a uh, community engagement plan. And uh, we use a lot the structure of the International association of UM Public Participation. So we go through like some um exercise in order to know which kind of engagement the students should be doing. So we go from like inform, right? Which is like you collect some data and you present that data to people because they need to know what's going on even before they participate. They need to be informed and then um, you can consult them. So it's thinking about surveys and how can they different manners of having their voice, um, being heard and that that could be also like collaboration and involving and collaboration are kind of like together. I see them many times. So it's just like maybe thinking about how deep you're going to go with a collaboration. Like for example, I know that TTC does uh, a lot of engagement with like advisory groups, which is something that um, the class doesn't interact with. Right. But it is like a deep level of engagement. So they learn about what is the role of these advisory groups and how do you collaborate in the long term. So I think that with the International association of Public Participation they can understand a little bit like the overall engagement process from beginning to end. Because many times these UM processes can take a year. Right. And we could say for example that the city council is going to make a decision on December of like 2026, but the students are doing the engagement fall of 2025. So they might not see all the steps. Right. But it's very important for them to know that this is about um, some long term engagement. They're playing a piece and later on when they're planners, they can see the whole creation of the plan and not only that but the implementation and the evaluation. So those are things that the students have to know as well.

Speaker B: That's really, that's really. That what you're talking about is that community engagement continuum. Um, so that's a really helpful wording and framework to think about too. G. Did you have something? Sure.

Speaker C: So we have had a history of working with this class and we've worked with EVs previously, um, in Liberty county and with text target communities. How we work with communities are communities apply to the process. But sometimes we have projects that are evolving and we try to match the community needs with the coursework that is most effective for that kind of partnership. And for this project, just as a background, this project is part of the Southeast Texas Urban Integrated Feed Lab, uh, which is a Department of Energy funded partnership led by UT Austin. And this project is special because it brings in six different institutions in Texas plus nationally too, including our University Texas A and M Lamar, UH, Prairie View A and M, Oak Ridge National Lab and Los Alamos National Lab. And this team of researchers and engagement staff were working in Southeast Texas to understand how environmental, social and infrastructural systems connect together. Especially when it comes to flooding, air quality and community resilience. And as we had worked with EVs previously, we saw this opportunity for this class to contribute towards building that relation in the community and also helping with some of the engagement needs this project had. So Plan 661 basically contributed to this project by going into the community and launching this community engagement, supporting the project's commitment to co producing knowledge with local residents. So I would say this is the first step for us to understand what were residents really concerned about, what were their priorities that we could incorporate into the research project. And along the way if there's anything we can provide to City of Port Arthur, uh, we wanted to be able to give that to the community. And for this project we really had a really good basis in the community through our partnerships with Lamar University, which is on the ground. They've been in the community for a long time and we had staff member who had deep connections with community members there. And through those relations we were able to identify what might be the best way to engage in that community. So we worked with our partners in Lamar University who had partners in Port Arthur. Then we worked with EVs and her class and we figured out, you know, the best way to engage there would have to be multi method engagement, where we're going in the ground, meeting people where they are, but also utilizing tools that might let people to engage beyond this place based in person engagement. So this class connected with trusted local organizations like we had a food bank at a church, uh, we had ymca, the local high school there. We also had city staff who opened their doors to the City hall county courthouse. And we selected seven of these community gathering places where students could hold and organize pop ups, where community members can learn about the project, learn about their community and provide their thoughts and feedback on what are their priorities. And for this the students really thoroughly thought, looked at the community makeup. They studied the community before coming up with this engagement idea. Um, so they created these bilingual survey because Spanish, uh, language was an important feature in this community. So um, we had students um, talk to residents, um, in English, in Spanish and engage with over 175 residents through these meetings, surveys and pop ups.

Speaker B: And in the end, what was the result? What was the product?

Speaker C: So the end product was students synthesizing all of these comments and coming up with a written report which was then presented to the community, to our community partners and the city and also something that was put on a website. So as part of an engagement, student launched application called Social Pinpoint, where they had all their information about the project, all sorts of engagement activities and also a way for them to close this loop and present this result. And this is 50 page report that summarizes all the findings. And it is something that's going to be helpful, you know, not just to the research team, but also to city staff who engaged in the process to really get to know what are people concerned about and what are their priorities.

Speaker B: And that report is winning the Texas American Planning association. Um, yeah, Student Project award. So that's really cool.

Speaker D: Yeah, we are really, really excited. And the cool thing about that, uh, is that the award will be received here in College Station, in College Station because um, Texas APA is coming to us and ah, we are excited because our alumni will be here as well and they were very excited about um, winning the award.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's so much work. It's so much work for the students too, how they're on the ground, they're doing all those surveys, they're talking to people, they've got the digital survey. So how do you prepare students to do that kind of work with community partners? Are there different ways that you frame it for them? Are there different expectations for this kind of class? Uh, how do you, what are some things that you do?

Speaker A: If you'd like to learn more about our program, check out our Instagram AMU M TXTC or head on over to our website TX AG TXTC.