Raisuyah Bhagwan
Durban University of Technology, South Africa.
Title: Community engagement scholarship within the context of nursing education
Biography
Biography: Raisuyah Bhagwan
Abstract
When community engagement becomes embedded within nursing education it enables academics to partner with communities in ways that produce credible scholarship. Community-engaged scholarship holds promise for advancing both the good of communities and enabling teaching, learning and research within a nursing context. This holistic view of scholarship, must be seen as a core imperative of contemporary higher education, vital not only to its civic mission, but to co-create and transmit new knowledge with communities for their good. Universities rest within an eco-system of knowledge, in which “academic knowledge interacts with and is shaped by community-based knowledge” (Sandmann, Saltmarsh and O’Meara, 2008, p.47). This alludes to the fact that knowledge is not restricted to privileged academic discourse, but is enriched through interaction with communities. This paper will highlight some of the academic practices and structures that need to be created within nursing education, to enable engagement with communities. It illuminates service learning within the curriculum as an important dimension and the need for community based research, that can only be increased through a transformation of current educational practices that support this type of engagement. Most importantly this paper will highlight how health educators and students learn within rural contexts in South Africa and how this type of engagement advances knowledge production through community based research .