Director's Message
National Policy provides Higher Education Institutions with
a guideline that HEI’s need to implement in order to ensure that their role and
responsibility in the transformation of this country is accentuated. The United Nations Sustainable development
Goals for Transforming the World by 2030 also requires that HEI’s need to
incorporate the goal of sustainable development into its core activities of
teaching, learning, and research and community engagement if we seek to reach
this objective.
The University of the Western
Cape is therefore committed to its role as an institution of higher learning
that regards social responsibility and civic engagement as a critical graduate
attribute which its students need to portray as a result of their educational
experience at this university. The importance
of engaging society and essentially developing a scholarship of engagement that
encompasses and facilitates the development of graduate attributes and
sustainable development through action, reflects UWC’s history and ethos.
Ernest Boyer’s scholarship of
engagement refers to community engagement as a process that involves an
evolution and transformation of knowledge as opposed to the simple transfer of
information from one learning partner to another. It provides a theoretical framework for the
Community Engagement Unit at UWC which calls for HEI’s involvement within
communities through applied scholarship which results in development,
improvement and enhancement of the community and the university.
As the Community Engagement Unit
seeks to identify a suitable definition for Community Engagement that is
appropriate within our context and highlights this unit’s role at the
institution, the following definition provides a guide to our approach:
“...Community Engagement describes the collaboration
between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local,
regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of
knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity [...]
Partnerships are ongoing long‐term relationships in which each partner brings
individual goals, needs, assets and strategies, and through collaborative
processes blends them into common goals and outcomes...”
(The Carnegie
Foundation for Advancement of Teaching)
This definition highlights
the sustainable partnerships within the university and with broader society as
we strive to collectively deliver on the institutional goals and strategic
objectives of the University of the Western Cape.