Background: Literature indicates the need to prepare health professionals who are clinically competent and socially conscious. Engagement in community projects, as an extension of workplace learning, can build professional competence and social awareness. Aim: To interrogate one such engagement; an emergency first aid responder training course was orchestrated by undergraduate students studying Emergency Medical Care. Setting: The intervention was offered in response to a community need emerging from the research project being conducted in a community in the Western Cape, South Africa. Method: Qualitative data were gathered as narrative texts from participants in the intervention and student reports about their learning experience. The data were interrogated through the application of reflexive thematic analysis and the theoretical lens of asymmetrical reciprocity. Findings: The three themes that emerged were: from research to a student led intervention, deep authentic learning, and learning as a shared experience. Benefit accrued to the students and community through a partnership of asymmetrical participants. The community offered a learning experience while students offered desired skills acquisition to community members. Conclusion: Through this interaction, students learnt respect for local knowledges, and gained enhanced social awareness, in a transdisciplinary partnership, that aimed to create a learning environment where academics, students, and community members are partners in a project delivered with a core value of social justice. Contribution: A pedagogy of partnership describes an education model arising from community-based research that enabled a social programme intervention as a relevant learning project for health science students.
Det är en strävan inför framtiden att skapa en hållbar utveckling där sociala, ekonomiska och ekologiska aspekter vägs mot varandra i en kontinuerlig process. I denna bok har forskare, författare och lokalt historiskt verksamma personer samlats för att ge olika perspektiv på Klarälven med omnejder som ett bidrag för skapandet av en hållbarare framtid.
Environmental justice principles are widespread at national and global levels of transition discourse, but this is sometimes irrelevant to marginalized communities. To address this issue, we apply environmental justice theory to a participatory postcolonial urban case study where poverty, unemployment and inequality continue to incentivize unregulated exploitation of vulnerable environments and people. It is unclear how national legislation can provide for indiscriminate access to environments that promote wellbeing in complex postcolonial communities, where xenophobic and economic discrimination reproduces colonial-style inequalities. To resist this injustice, the combination of academic and ordinary expressions of critique that confront regressive praxis and orthodoxies becomes a valuable and constructive political innovation for transitions. Empirical results suggest that enfranchising the most vulnerable proponents of transformation could advance their political capital to advocate for themselves, formulate and enculturate decolonized visions of urban sustainability, demand governmental and commercial accountability and foster urban reform that is relevant to them.