新作坊 Humanity Innovation and Social Practice

Fulfilling the university social responsibility by doing community engagement and offering practical courses has becomes a global trend in higher education. The Ministry of Education initiates the USR project to facilitate Taiwan’s universities to fulfill social responsibility, contribute to local development, and act as a think tank for local governments. However, for most USR project teams, it is difficult to shift from theory-based and goal-oriented teaching in the classroom to contextualized and process-oriented projects partnered with local communities in fields and tailored to local needs and challenges. This paper aims to explain why it is difficult for universities to collaborate with local communities. I conduct participatory observations and in-depth interviews from the perspectives of a project collaborator in
the USR office and a practitioner in a USR project team for this inquiry. In this paper, the difficulties emerged from university-community engagement are clarified. Moreover, the roles of universities and communities and their functions in university-community engagement are reconsidered according to the interactive feedback obtained from their co-working processes. Finally, this paper provides some suggestions that may be conducive to the promotion and practices for future USR projects.