The challenge of creating truly beneficial, community-engaged scholarship within the constraints of an academic calendar is significant. Traditional academic research can often instrumentalize community partners in service of university deliverables, losing sight of reciprocal benefits. However, an experimental graduate course in community development at Vanderbilt University centered on the “A People’s Guide to Nashville” participatory history project, offered a powerful model for integrating authentic, high-impact learning with genuine community partnership.
The success of this course provides critical lessons for participatory learning and, most notably for business, a model of value creation enabled through business-community engagement.
The Case Study: A People’s Guide to Nashville
The course linked its content to the creation of “A People’s Guide to Nashville,” an alternative tour guide that focuses on sites significant to social justice. The project was designed around critical participatory action, which emphasizes collaborative knowledge production. The aim was to enable community members to author their own narratives of historical locations.
Students built partnerships with community members to collaboratively research and write 500-word entries for the guide.
Lesson 1: Prioritizing Communication and Reciprocity
A key difficulty in community-engaged research is the tendency for academic deliverables to overshadow the needs of the community. This course countered that by making reciprocal communication central to the process, shifting the student’s role from “researcher” to “collaborator”.
Instructors coached students to frame their outreach as an invitation to be part of a community project, not a course assignment. Students were encouraged to offer their services as assistants, helpers, scribes, or co-authors. This emphasis on a service-oriented, collaborative relationship—supported by initial background research and scripted prompts for introductions—was essential for building trust and genuine partnership.
The result was mutually beneficial: Students valued tying class concepts to real-world experience and getting knowledge from community members instead of just traditional lectures. Community partners appreciated the facilitated opportunity to counter dominant, deficit-based narratives about their own communities and found the opportunity to build relationships with students rewarding.
Lesson 2: Emphasizing the Process
For participatory learning to be effective, students must first understand their own role in the community. Students were required to assess their own motivations, assumptions, and desires for the project, fostering greater self-awareness and the practice skill of articulating these to others.
Crucially, although a final write-up was required, the emphasis of the assignment was on process. Students were graded primarily on their efforts to build relationships, gather information, and collaborate with their partners on the writing and revision process. In this way, the university emphasized that the relationship is the deliverable.
Implications for Business
This case study demonstrates that it is possible to train students – or employees – in rigorous, customer-engaged communication, while maintaining customer benefits. This approach:
- Reorients Expertise: Positions customers and clients as the primary experts in their area of interest, enabling their leadership in writing narratives and solutions which align to their intended outcomes.
- Emphasizes Communication: Framing the discussion as a partnership highlights mutual respect between customers/clients and the company.
- Prioritizes Relationships Over Product/Service: The quality of the engagement and collaboration is key, and to be regarded as the final deliverable, reinforcing that reciprocal relationship building is the ultimate measure of success.
By implementing these strategies, businesses can create sustained, collective spaces where company representatives can create value through the cultivation of customer relationships.
Questions for business
- Are we thinking of our stakeholders as experts?
- For Customers/Clients: is a business simply extracting feedback or sales, or is it authentically collaborating with customers to co-create solutions?
- For Employees: is a business soliciting their input to benefit the organization and their productivity?
- For the Community: Are community projects just public relations, or are they rooted in the community’s agency to effect change?
- How can we turn our stakeholders into expert advisors?
- For Customers/Clients: does onboarding and communications build trust and gather context?
- For Employees: is there investment in time for self-reflection and candid feedback that strengthens team relationships?
- Are we working from “desire-based” perspective?
- As noted earlier, the academic study leveraged the intended outcomes of the student and community stakeholders, by forcing questions like, are we solving problems to achieve future goals (in other words, moving beyond “problems” to “desires”)?