Community as Partnership

Over the last few months, I've been engaged in a research study, trying to better understand the thought processes that civically engaged individuals go through when they are considering how best to act toward a perceived issue. While I'm collecting some excellent data, there are also things that I am learning that don't necessarily pertain to my study questions but as rather useful for us all to consider. One such comment made by one of my participants has had me thinking all week. When I asked her what she thought the biggest asset in the community was, she replied, "The community itself."
Now, I have to admit, when she first said this, I thought that she had possibly misheard the question. How could the community be its own asset? I had been expecting her to list specific local organizations, people, and/or spaces that enabled the community to thrive. Instead, she was defining the whole with the whole. I was a bit confused by all of this until she explained that there was a civic ethos within the community that allowed it to continuously approach issues as a community. Sure, there are organizations, specific people, and places that are important to this work but she adamantly maintained that the community (or at least its sense of civic responsibility) was its biggest strength.
As an argument, this all made a lot of sense to me. But how do you "map" civic responsibility, as we teach students to community map? How do you teach it within the confines of the school day, school curriculum, and state assessments? These were some of the questions on my mind when I began my last lecture of the summer term and when I asked my students, "How do we teach this thing called multicultural education on a consistent basis?" One of my students put it all together quite nicely. He argued that, aside from the strictures of the curriculum and the 46-minute classes, we had to engage our students in the community. We needed to show the students that our diversity is more than an asset; it is who we are and who we are proud to be. In essence, we have to show that we--the whole community--are partners in this thing called community.
As I'm beginning to think about my fall classes, I trying to take what I have learned, both from my study participants and from my students, to heart. Specifically, I'm trying to develop activities and lessons that enable my students to see that the communities of which they are becoming a part of (e.g., their academic communities, the College community, and the local community) are assets unto themselves and that being active in those communities is what we do. I am slowly coming to believe that the more they make connections between their various communities, taking responsibility for their care, maintenance, and improvement, the more they will learn... probably more than any term paper assignment I could ask them to research.