Associate Professor, Dr. Vincent Russell, gave a virtual presentation called “Radical Community-Based Learning: Tapping into Students’ Sense of Justice” on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023 to the Department of Economic and Management Sciences at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa.
The presentation title is drawn from his article recently published in the International Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement and coauthored with Dr. Spoma Jovanovic.
“Dr. Martin Chanza at North-West University in South Africa read my article and invited me to deliver a lecture to his colleagues explaining radical Community-Based Learning, CBL,” said Russell. “Dr. Chanza expressed that his colleagues are relatively inexperienced with CBL, and so he hoped that my talk would give them ideas about how to incorporate CBL into their teaching.”
Radical CBL connects students directly to grassroots community organizers who lead efforts to change the political, social, and economic systems of oppression that are present in students’ locales. Its foundational pillars are activism, politics and answerability to help students advance social justice.
“Radical CBL is a pedagogical approach that Dr. Jovanovic and I developed,” said Russell. “In the presentation, I outlined the need for radical pedagogy, provided an overview of CBL, discussed the central commitments of radical CBL, and then offered suggestions for how to implement that pedagogy.”
Dr. Russell and Dr. Jovanovic were inspired to develop radical CBL because of the numerous sociopolitical crises facing humanity.
“My favorite takeaway was the opportunity to collaborate with scholars in South Africa. Dr. Jovanovic and I developed radical CBL based on our experiences working in the United States,” said Russell. “It was insightful to learn about the challenges and opportunities that faculty in South Africa have been experiencing when it comes to teaching students to promote social justice.”
Russell is still in contact with people at North-West University and hopes to collaborate more in the future. He has another article about radical CBL that will be published soon in Protest.