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Personal Agency as a Primary Focus of University-Community Engagement: A case study of Clemente Australia
Butcher, Jude O'Gorman, John Howard, Peter
Butcher, Jude
O'Gorman, John
Howard, Peter
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Abstract
Clemente Australia is a collaboration of Australian Catholic University (ACU) with not-for-profit agencies, other universities and the broader community directed to developing and implementing a model for community-embedded, socially-supported university education. It involves people from backgrounds of disadvantage taking semester length university courses in the humanities for credit.
The paper presents an integrative model explaining the development of personal agency through the Clemente Australia program. In terms of the model, Clemente Australia builds ideas of hope, meaning, and identity into the personal narratives of participants through reflection on their experiences in the program and the competencies and changed expectancies that these bring. This integrative model can both shed light upon participants’ reports of the program and suggest ways of making it more effective.
Data drawn from Clemente student case studies are analysed with respect to changes in personal agency and social inclusion to show how the model can be used as a lens for understanding the benefits of community-embedded, socially-supported university humanities education.
Keywords
Clemente Australia, community engagement, personal agency, hope, personal narrative
Date
2012
Type
Journal article
Journal
The Australasian Journal of University Community Engagement
Book
Volume
7
Issue
2
Page Range
39-55
Article Number
ACU Department
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
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DOI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Open access
License
File Access
Controlled