Avoiding Microaggressions within Service Learning and Community Engaged Learning

Community-engaged experiences provide the opportunity for faculty to collaborate authentically and reciprocally with partners who often represent historically disenfranchised communities where policy, resource allocation, and deficit-based communication strategies had an impact on growth, perception and development. This recipe results in implicit bias that exists in everyone, and as a result, microaggressions occur. That is exactly what happened on our campus and in our community. As Community Engagement professionals, during our support of faculty service-learning instruction and implementation, we started to see and hear an increasing number of microaggressions from faculty members, community partners and students. In response to these microaggressions occurring within service-learning experiences on our campus we developed workshops for students, faculty, staff and community partners to dedicate time and space to explore their journey with these concepts and to arm them with tools and strategies to address bias in community engagement work and to respond to microaggressions when they occur. This interactive session provides attendees hands-on learning about implicit bias, microaggressions, microresistence strategies and lessons learned from one campus’s journey to involve all community engagement stakeholders in these conversations. Participants will explore how they can engage their campus and community in opportunities to learn about microaggressions and microresistance and to develop strategies for their own community-engaged work to address these issues.

Speakers:  Kirsten Case Fuller, Julie Dierberger, Latrina Parker