Conceptual Work Layout
The Workshop for Community+Collaboration is an idea, a relationship, and a space. The Workshop seeks to nurture collaborative and creative development in response to local educational and community needs. The Workshop values joint and collective thinking with a focus on fostering joy, creativity, and respect as it centers the questions and concerns of its community partners that serve children and families between the home, school, and work.
As an idea, The Workshop was and remains open and flexible as its vision and mission get revised with each widening of the circle of it partners.
As a relationship, The Workshop functions, and can only function, with mutualistic engagement between EMU-based collaborators, which includes students, between The Workshop and community partners, and between community partners. The Workshop seeks to support and strengthen engagement between partners, serving partners’ needs, maximizing the power of available intellectual and material resources, and providing real-world opportunities for students and faculty to develop their capacities and address community need. In this way, The Workshop as a relationship is a service-oriented group that convenes a variety of university-based expertise, reflecting its cross-sector approach.
As a space, The Workshop is multiple, leveraging university and community space and blurring the line between “the academy” and “the community,” while providing a place, as a community partner put it, “to collectively dream” about making a just community.
The Workshop operates from a collaborative and participatory model that is emergent.
It relies on the trust that collaborators understand The Workshop’s working principlesand it operates on the understanding that a deep culture needs to be fostered such that leadership can be assumed by any of The Workshop’s collaborators. This is a value and goal that engenders trust among community partners in the durability of The Workshop vision.
The Workshop envisions becoming a regionally known center that provides resources and opportunities for students, faculty, and community partners to conduct “courses” or workshops, host community events, and do research on the intersection of advocacy and community-involved education. The Workshop also envisions becoming a service-oriented group that facilitates and supports cross-agency efforts between The Workshop partners, while providing organized opportunities for pre-service teaching hours, volunteer, and internship opportunities for students across undergraduate and graduate programs in the COE.
The Workshop emerged from an idea based on wheel mechanics that Chris Robbins introduced. After speaking with a variety of faculty outside of Teacher Education and administrators about this idea in late January and early February 2023, Chris convened a series of weekly visioning/working meetings over the spring of 2023. The Workshop went live on July 13, 2023, when it hosted its first “Summer Incubator” that convened 50 people and included representation from local schools and 20 agencies that address issues ranging from youth mentoring and housing to healthcare, food insecurity, literacy, and youth advocacy.
"[P]lacing EDST as the axle in the hub of the wheel suggests that it responds to or rotates when forces at the rim of the wheel spin the other components of the hub that encases the axle.
In this way, I see EDST as a centerpiece, but not the sole piece, in making the COE a research and advocacy hub for the region. It can and should be a centerpiece given the definition and values of the program (research- and advocacy-oriented) and the expertise and interests of faculty and past and current students. The axle, however, has no function without the other components of the wheel; it is just a glorified bolt."
-Chris Robbins
