While universities certainly provide an excellent environment for students to learn in, most of that learning happens exclusively inside a classroom, with few interactive components. One special program at the University of Saskatchewan, however, aims to help students take academics out of the classroom and into the local community.

Collaboratorium students gather for community-engaged history.

The Community-Engaged History Collaboratorium builds partnerships between students, faculty and the wider community through the creation of unique, collaborative research projects.

U of S undergraduate students are paired with local non-profit, community and First Nations organizations for a fully paid summer research internship. Unlike traditional summer jobs, these undergraduate students participate in every step of the research process, from creating the outline, to collecting data, to writing out the final report.

Collaboratorium comes as an extension of the work of Keith Carlson, history professor at the U of S and research chair in Aboriginal and community-engaged history. For Carlson, the idea for Collaboratorium grew out of a desire to combine community-engaged scholarship with something that would directly benefit U of S students.

“I thought, ‘Well, what’s a way to do community-engaged work that will achieve community priorities and community interests, be academically rigorous, be the kind of thing that the university might deem — that a department might see as worthwhile use of my time and that would give students more than just a research assistant experience? Isn’t there something we could do with senior undergraduates where they would have a bigger role?’” Carlson said.

Now entering its second year, Collaboratorium saw 18 undergraduate students participate in the 2016 program. Although the program is based out of the history department, participants came from a range of academic backgrounds, including political studies, Indigenous studies and education, in addition to history.

Students worked on a wide variety of community projects. Some students helped process oral histories with the Whitecap Dakota First Nation, while others analyzed the historical relationship between the North Saskatchewan River and the people that lived around it. Regardless of the subject, all the research projects were designed and implemented by the students themselves.

In addition to working on their individual research projects, students also completed two weeks of rigorous academic training with Collaboratorium research co-ordinator and PhD student Colin Osmond.

According to Osmond, students who participate in Collaboratorium receive a wide number of benefits, both practical and personal.

“For some students, these projects serve as excellent experience to apply for graduate school, or, more practically, to see if a job in community-engaged history or graduate school is something they want to pursue,” Osmond said. “Also, some students have continued working with their community partners beyond our summer program, and others have [begun] discussing master’s projects in the future … We also get a lot of pleasure out of hearing students brag about how shocked their parents were about getting a full-time job in history!”

For Carlson, Collaboratorium ultimately provides evidence that, despite contrasting opinions, there is significant value in studying the humanities and social sciences.

“We’re always being criticized — anyone with a liberal arts degree, right — is being criticized with ‘that’s not practical’ … You hear that all the time and what I was trying to do [with the program] was say … you can actually put these [skills] to use in a way that could lead to paid employment, but it also gives you a way of seeing the world,” Carlson said.

Regardless of academic discipline, Carlson emphasizes that undergraduate students have important contributions to make to their communities, both local and beyond.

“If you have a good liberal arts background, a good solid education — whether it’s in English, philosophy, history, political science, sociology — in those areas, what you are developing are skills that contribute to the world in a meaningful way, and there are people out there that want those skills.”

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Emily Klatt

Photo: Colin Osmond / Supplied