Global Campus Partnerships: Community-Engaged Projects in Vancouver, BC
By CETR
August 8, 2023
Over the 2022-2023 Academic Year, the University continued focusing on Northeastern as a “Global Campus.” While it was unclear what Community-Engaged Teaching and Research role would be on each campus, we did what we knew to do: have conversations and build relationships across the network. We knew we wanted to be “ready” (or as ready as we could be!) for the evolving culture of the university – especially as it related to community-engaged experiential learning. Our team met with leadership and staff at the Roux Institute, Toronto Campus, Oakland Campus, and Vancouver. These chats led to many new ideas and the sharing of support systems. One major outcome of this work was supporting conversations for ethical software development partnerships in the greater Vancouver area.
The Vancouver campus has a rich network of friends in community-based organizations, industry, academia, and everywhere in between. A team led by Bethany Edmunds (Khoury College) and Upkar Singh Tatlay (Oxus Machine Works) brought together academic, industry, and community partners in December 2022 to discuss what ethical partnership building looks like for the Software Development Life Cycle. They spend time together exploring potential themes and guidelines, leaving the workshop with a list of themes and a big question: “Is anyone at Northeastern already doing this or something similar?” This is how Bethany and her partners found our CETR team.
Continued conversations brought together team members from across our network and led Chelsea Lauder (CETR Assistant Director) to visit the Vancouver campus in June 2023 to co-lead a part-2 workshop with the Vancouver-based group from December. This “Community Engagement Workshop” welcomed new and returning community and industry partners to explore further the role of ethical guidelines in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Driven by the format of a past CETR event: Manifesting Principles of Ethical Engagement in Context, led as a part of the Publicly Engaged Scholar-in-Residence 2022 series, the 2023 Vancouver convening continued energy for the group. Following this time together, they plan to bring their edited key themes to community members and pilot a cycle with interested industry and academic partners. The CETR team hopes to see this blossom into continued and evolving inquiry of ethical practice across disciplines and maybe even a new Vancouver-based service-learning course!
Unveil the full story of our remarkable efforts and groundbreaking initiatives on our web page on the thrilling 2022-2023 year!