Collaboration, Community and Creativity: Reciprocal Relationships in WIL in Rural Areas

Presented by Mount Allison University:

• Dr. Rachelle Pascoe-Deslauriers
• Dr. Susie Andrews
• Rebecca Leaman

This interdisciplinary, interactive panel brings together faculty, students, community partners, and experiential learning specialists to explore the co-imagining, co-design, and co-implementation of 8 Mount Allison-based WIL projects. At the heart of these projects are substantial collaborations with community partners that support their work, while providing motivating opportunities for applied learning to undergraduate students who experience how their academic studies are relevant in the “real world”. Dr. Susie Andrews (Religion) has led 6 iHub funded projects with education, food-agri, and GLAM sector partners including the “Representation Matters” where students applied learning about religious storytelling to catalogue one library collection and evaluate the extent to which it reflects the diversity of our community. During the same period, Dr. Rachelle Pascoe-Deslauriers (Business) has developed 2 successive iHub projects into a series of experiential partnership projects with the Mount Allison Students’ Union in Human Resource Management, giving students experience in conducting job evaluations, and developing job classification structures, pay scales and recommendations related to fair employment practice for student employees. Although in disparate academic fields, these projects share common goals of bringing in-course learning to life in way that centre real world relevance, increase voice and fairness of participants and stakeholders, and that make sustained impacts long after the projects have finished.

This panel will also include contributions from community partners and students from Andrews’ and Pascoe-Deslauriers' projects to speak to the impacts and relevance of these initiatives. Mount Allison’s Director of Experiential Learning, Rebecca Leaman, will highlight how, rather than viewing these projects as isolated examples, these innovative WIL projects are exemplars of approaches used by MtA faculty in a small, rural liberal arts context. As a small predominately undergraduate university with around 2,300 students, MtA is located roughly 60 km from the nearest urban centre. While the rural location can pose barriers for access to forms of WIL, the CEWIL iHub program has given structure and scalability to existing partnerships and created new opportunities for creative, collaborative and community-oriented experiences.