Republic of the Philippines

Department of Education
REGION IV-A CALABARZON
SCHOOLS DIVISION OF BATANGAS

LECTURE
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT, SOLIDARITY AND CITIZENSHIP

The Value of Community Action Modalities

As stated previously in the first chapter of this module, Community Action refers to the
collective efforts done by people directed toward addressing social problems (e.g. social
inequalities, environmental degradation, and poverty) in order to achieve social well-being.

The attitude that we all have showcased during the eruption of Taal Volcano is unparalleled.
No amount of money can discredit the caring hearts of people. Those great and small acts of
kindness became true to what community action speaks of as its nature. People like us are
living proofs that the spirit of “Bayanihan” still lives on.

Community action can take the form of community engagement and solidarity. This
combination then strengthens citizenship in the process. To better understand the changes
brought about by community action, we must learn the concepts, factors, and theories of
social change.

Community engagement refers to the process of developing partnership and sustaining

relationships with and through groups of people affiliated by geographical proximity or
common interests for the purpose of working for the common good and of addressing issues
that affect their well-being (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1997; Lenzi et al.
2012). It is necessary for you as students to understand community engagement so that you
can learn social responsibility and develop your desire for civic engagement. In a school
setting, this community engagement can take the following forms:

Service Learning is a teaching methodology that employs community service and reflection
on service to teach community engagement, develop greater community and
social responsibility and strengthen communities
(Donahue et al.). Community Outreach refers to the voluntary services done by
students, faculty, school employees, or alumni in response to the social, economic, and
political needs of communities. Community Engaged Research (CEnR) is a
collaborative process between the faculty and/or student researchers and the
partner community in conducting research.

Characteristics and purposes of the forms of community engagement in the school setting
are:

Address: Provincial Sports Complex, Bolbok, 4200 Batangas City

(043)722-1840 / 722-1796 / 722-1437 / 722-2675 / 722-1662
[email protected]
www.depedbatangas.org

CRN 44 100 18 93 0045

 Republic of the Philippines
Department of Education
REGION IV-A CALABARZON
SCHOOLS DIVISION OF BATANGAS

SERVICE LEARNING

1. Collaborative effort between the community and the students

2. Use of scientific knowledge gained by students in their courses
3. Students develop leadership, communication, cultural understanding and critical
thinking.
4. Students who learned this are more likely to engage in the activities that promote of
civic engagement

5. Students were found to have higher levels of empathy and sympathy

COMMUNITY OUTREACH
1. It has two forms: community service and community development. In community
service, voluntary services are a one- way initiative from the one who devotes time and
resources to the

2. It is often one-time occurrence and does not require a long-term relationship between
the provider and recipients of the voluntary service.

3. In community development, it requires fostering partnerships and sustaining

relationship with communities. It allows a collective participation for the enhancement of the
community’s well-being. It follows the service-learning paradigm. It heavily draws from
volunteerism and it is not curricular.

COMMUNITY ENGAGED RESEARCH

1. Communities are considered as co-leaders in the design and conduct of the different
phases of the research process.
2. It is geared toward strengthening the academic discipline of faculty or student
researchers and promoting the well-being of the partner community (Isler and Corbie-Smith
2012).
3. Aside from being a community-centered research approach, CEnR also enables
faculty and/or student researchers to conduct research that can address community issues
and concerns.

The aforementioned forms of community engagement in the school settings serve as guides
in understanding different avenues through which school stakeholders could engage with
communities toward social transformation. More so, such forms of engagement allow you, as
students to:
1. have productive relationships with their surrounding communities
2. exercise dialogue and democratic deliberation of addressing community issues and
concerns

Address: Provincial Sports Complex, Bolbok, 4200 Batangas City

(043)722-1840 / 722-1796 / 722-1437 / 722-2675 / 722-1662
[email protected]
www.depedbatangas.org

CRN 44 100 18 93 0045

 Republic of the Philippines
Department of Education
REGION IV-A CALABARZON
SCHOOLS DIVISION OF BATANGAS

3. tap into wider perspectives in discovering potential solutions that will help people
achieve social well-being

There are four levels of Community Engagement:

Seedat (2012) and the Queensland Government (2011) explained each of the following
levels as follows:
a. Information
b. Consultation
c. Involvement
d. Active Participation

Information is a one-way relationship on disseminating information to community

members.

Consultation involves obtaining stakeholder approval for a particular initiative.

Involvement is about enlisting community stakeholders as volunteers and/or consumers of

an envisaged service learning/community outreach/CEnR project and its associated service.

Active participation allows the involvement of community members in the planning,

implementation, and overall assessment of development initiatives.

Aside from the levels explained above, there are also different modalities of community
engagement. These are identified by Bowen, Newenham-Kahindi, and Herremans (2010).
These modalities are:

Transactional
a one-way community projects or activities that come from the service providers to the
community. This may include voluntary work, free consultancy services, philanthropic cash
donations, skills transfer, and giving of technical support. In this level , interaction with the
community is occasional, service comes on a need per need basis or is seasonal, and the
service provider has full control of the community engagement process.

Transitional
a two-way community projects brought about by the process of consultation and
collaboration between the service provider and the community. Repeated engagements and
collaboration mechanisms in organizing and implementing community projects, but
resources mainly come from the service provider, who is in full control of the community
engagement process.

Address: Provincial Sports Complex, Bolbok, 4200 Batangas City

(043)722-1840 / 722-1796 / 722-1437 / 722-2675 / 722-1662
[email protected]
www.depedbatangas.org

CRN 44 100 18 93 0045

 Republic of the Philippines
Department of Education
REGION IV-A CALABARZON
SCHOOLS DIVISION OF BATANGAS

Transformational
a two-way community projects characterized by active dialogue and critical reflectivity
brought about by the process of involvement and acive participation between external agent
and the community. There is the involvement of joint learning and value-generation, and the
community leadership in the decision-making prcess is prioritized. With this, control over the
community engagement is shared by the external agent and the community, resulting to
mutual trust that is based on sustained personal relationships and shared understanding.

The modalities of community engagement operate in a continuum, parallel to the levels of

community engagement. This means that most community engagements begin as
transactional, which stops at the information level. However repeated engagements in the
community increases the chances of consultation and involvement of community members
in the process, which results to a transitional modality. This transitional modality can evolve
into a transformational community engagement depending on the readiness and maturity of
both parties to initiate active participation. But because it is a continuum, the levels of
community engagement and the modalities can either evolve or devolve.

SOCIAL CHANGE
As stated on the previous page of this lesson, for us to better understand the changes
brought about by community action, we must learn the concepts, factors, and theories of
social change.

Social change refers to the alteration of social interactions, institutions, stratification systems,
and elements of culture over time (Andersen and Taylor 2013). It could be manifested in the
rise and fall of civilizations, changes in the function of institutions, changes in the statuses
and roles of people in society, changes in the structure and size of families, and so on.

Social change on the macro scale involves variation and movement from one level to
another, usually a replacement of the old to the new. The term is often associated to similar
concepts such as:

 Evolution - a development from simple to complex

 Revolution - overthrow of an existing social order and system
 Progress - change in direction toward a desired goal
 Development -planned change towards a desired goal

Characteristics of Social change

1. It is ubiquitous but is uneven due to the phenomenon of culture lag. This means that
not everyone could easily adapt to social change.
2. It often creates controversy and conflict. It also can totally erase the past.
3. It is value – neutral, means neither good nor bad.

Address: Provincial Sports Complex, Bolbok, 4200 Batangas City

(043)722-1840 / 722-1796 / 722-1437 / 722-2675 / 722-1662
[email protected]
www.depedbatangas.org

CRN 44 100 18 93 0045

 Republic of the Philippines
Department of Education
REGION IV-A CALABARZON
SCHOOLS DIVISION OF BATANGAS

4. The duration of social change can either be rapid or gradual; nonetheless, it always
takes place within a specific cultural context.
5. The onset and consequences of social change are often unseen.

Social change is brought about by the different factors which could be internal and external.

Internal factors are differences that occur in the norms, values, and beliefs of people from
different ages, gender, social class, caste, psychosocial characteristics, ethnicity, and race.
These often produce tension and conflict that lead to social change.

External factors on the other hand are beyond human control. These are demographic,
cultural, political, and economic.

External factors are explained further in the following:

1. Demographic
refer to changes that occur in the number and composition of people in the community
brought about by variations in fertility rates, mortality rates, and migration rates.
Example:
National Capital Region (NCR) population in 1996 was 7.9 million that ballooned in 2010
with 11.8 million.

2. Cultural
refer to changes that occur in the elements of culture (symbols and languages, norms,
values and beliefs, rituals, and artifacts) due to cultural diffusion, fission, and convergence.
Cultural diffusion refers to the spread of culture from one region to the other.
Cultural fission is the breaking up of culture into two or more independent units from a
cultural origin.
Cultural convergence is the fusion of two or more cultures into a new one, which is
somewhat different from its predecessors.

Examples:
 spread of “K-Pop” phenomenon in the Philippines
 splitting of one tribe into two or more tribes that migrate to other places
 a person practicing different religions at the same time like Taoist, Buddhist, and
Christian faiths

3. Political
Refer to changes that occur in the political structure and system of society due to either
reformist or radical approaches.

Address: Provincial Sports Complex, Bolbok, 4200 Batangas City

(043)722-1840 / 722-1796 / 722-1437 / 722-2675 / 722-1662
[email protected]
www.depedbatangas.org

CRN 44 100 18 93 0045

 Republic of the Philippines
Department of Education
REGION IV-A CALABARZON
SCHOOLS DIVISION OF BATANGAS

Examples:
Reformist approaches
lobbying, creating and implementing new laws

Radical approaches
political revolution, war

4. Economic
Refer to changes that occur in the economic structure and system of society due to
modernization. Modernization is the transformation from a traditional, rural, agrarian society
to a secular, urban, industrial society (Encyclopedia Britannica Online 2016).

Examples:

Existence of technology, online classes

The main elements of modernization is industrialization, which is characterized by an

intensive use of machines and various forms of technology to manufacture goods and
services previously done manually by people.

Examples:

Car and clothing factories Call centers, hospitals Research and development companies

Industrialization then ushers urbanization which is characterized by an increased migration

of people to urban areas or cities to fine settlement and to work in: manufacturing industries
service industries high-tech industries

THEORIES OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Evolutionary. Communities are seenn to go through a series of linear stages from simple to
complex.

Cyclical. It presupposes that communities undergo a cycle of birth, maturity, decline, and
death, and they undergo stages of ideational, idealistic, and sensate culture (Sorokin 1957).

Functional. It presents that communities always operate on equilibrium where the social,
cultural, political, and economic structures of the community produce order, stability, and
productivity.

Address: Provincial Sports Complex, Bolbok, 4200 Batangas City

(043)722-1840 / 722-1796 / 722-1437 / 722-2675 / 722-1662
[email protected]
www.depedbatangas.org

CRN 44 100 18 93 0045

 Republic of the Philippines
Department of Education
REGION IV-A CALABARZON
SCHOOLS DIVISION OF BATANGAS

Conflict. It explains that changes take place due to conflicts that occur in societies.

Symbolic Interactionism. It argues that people in society continuously interact with one
another, and it is through this interaction that they are able to construct and alter existing
social, cultural, political, and economic structures.

Address: Provincial Sports Complex, Bolbok, 4200 Batangas City

(043)722-1840 / 722-1796 / 722-1437 / 722-2675 / 722-1662
[email protected]
www.depedbatangas.org

CRN 44 100 18 93 0045