Paper long abstract:

Globally, higher learning institutions (HILs) are required to play a pivotal role in resolving world and local-based challenges. This is made possible through teaching & learning, research and community engagement. It is imperative however that in community engagement, the higher learning institutions avoid marginalisation of the community's involvement but rather encourage that community members are recognised as co-knowledge producers and co-researchers.

The emergent contextual basis and core-principles of community engagement prompt for a shift from the discipline based boundaries to trans-disciplinary interactions, industry-based partnerships and collaborative approaches to enable deeper meaningful engagement with societal issues as opposed to single-directional interventions or 'hit and run' approaches that are self-serving, intrusive and extractive, compromising the magnitude impact of engagement from the community perspective and often leading to research fatigued communities. Higher learning institutions are thus obligated to be integrated to communities by playing a pivot role in 'working with communities for communities' to resolve complex local and global-based societal challenges as opposed to just 'using communities to find solutions for communities'. It is therefore, crucial for institutions to establish collaborative and inclusive research methodologies to ensure that community engagement does not exploit communities but rather promotes social justice. Such expectation brings forth a need for a transformative action on how higher institutions implement community engagement pedagogic approaches to engage communities.

This paper emanates from an ongoing community engagement project titled Siphila Kanje (This is how we live), led by academics and students from the University of Zululand in partnership with women from Hluhluwe in the Northern KwaZulu Natal Province and the Sweden partners, through a project (South Africa Sweden University Forum - SASUF), which promotes the achievement of Sustainable Developmental Goals 1,2,3,5,10 & 17.

Methodology:

The project approach is interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder with facilitators from diverse academic, socio-cultural and economic trajectories. Inclusive and participatory-action research is used. Participants take lead in dialogue avoiding the 'us' and 'them' binaries. Knowledge sharing is two-way and not a one-way top down approach. The project adopts empowerment principles, through facilitated dialogues. An innovative methodology referred to as Call and Response music is used to prompt and encourage full participation. Local languages and frames of references are also used to encourage full engagement. The underlying principles of using this methodology is to encourage communities to take ownership and pride of their socio-economic development and ideologies.