Page 206 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

students at ITT a couple of years ago in 2016 to apply the required communications course content

I was teaching into leading community-based activities such as hosting their own local Community

Conversation. This gave students experiential opportunities to learn in real world contexts and

develop skills of community engagement, while affording community partners (the local groups

and organizations my students approached) opportunities to address their significant needs. This

also gave me ample information as my students became ‘co-researchers’ outside the classroom.

John Bilorusky, PhD, Founder and President of the Western Institute for Social Research

(WISR.edu) wrote “In the realm of social change, community improvement and institutional

reform, collaboration not only enhances the quality of the knowledge-building and insights that

ensue, but collaboration is often absolutely essential to the putting knowledge into action.

Knowledge without active citizen participation is at best limited, unfulfilled potential, and at its

worst, worthless. This is the basis for WISR’s vision for community action think tanks, where

groups of people from all walks of life would come together to wrestle with challenging problems,

in hopes of coming up with new insights for feasible, change-producing actions.” (Bilorusky,

2011) Indeed, when the approach is well rounded and done right, I have found for myself that

teaching through community engagement (CE) benefits the entirety; students, faculty,

communities, and institutions of higher education and now we can apply it locally to communities

in a conversation.

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