VC’S DISTINGUISHED AWARD 2023 WINNER: Dr Jessica Cockburn
Rhodes University is pleased to announce the winner of the Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Award for Community Engagement for 2023 - Dr Jessica Cockburn!
Dr Cockburn receives this award for her leadership and coordination of several projects including the River Rescue service learning course, Tsitsa Project and partnership with Assegaai Trails.
The adjudication panel unanimously agreed that Dr Cockburn embodies the ethos of community engagement through her wide and deep ranging efforts to bring together a multitude of stakeholders in the service of both social and environmental sustainability and justice. Through various integrated engaged teaching and research activities, Dr Cockburn has pioneered a transdisciplinary and holistic approach to community engagement which is rich and inspiring.
Dr Cockburn’s various projects also provide a testimony to how community engagement has evolved at Rhodes University. She has applied teaching, learning and research resources to meet community needs, and to specifically address the pressing social-ecological sustainability crises the community faces. These initiatives have thus promoted university social responsibility.
Dr Cockburn's work involves organic processes of “weaving engagement into teaching and research”. Implementation of projects has entailed joint planning, innovative monitoring and evaluation, and efficient utilisation of resources. As a result, the local natural environment, community partners, as well as students and staff have benefited.
Initially a volunteer at River Rescue, a small, local volunteer-based organisation which started in Makhanda in early 2020 to clean the rivers in the city of Makhanda and to restore them as sources of clean water and recreation for all the residents of the city, Dr Cockburn’s role is now facilitator of a learning partnership between River Rescue and the Department of Environmental Science.
Environmental Science Honours students participate as volunteers in clean ups, they bring their knowledge of environmental science into discussion and planning of River Rescue activities, students develop their own specific projects to benefit River Rescue, such as social media campaigns, mapping activities, and educational outreach activities. In this way students share their knowledge with the River Rescue community, and they are in turn enriched by gaining knowledge from the community partners of the local context and challenges related to water and waste management.
With regard to the River Rescue service learning course, one community partner highlighted Dr Cockburn’s alignment of theory and practice in the curriculum to respond directly to the realities not only of the diversity of her students, but also the diverse range of stakeholders in the community. Complementing this teaching initiative is Dr Cockburn’s engaged research, which focuses on landscapes, linkages, and learning, and which ultimately aims to conserve the watercourses of Makhanda.
Dr Cockburn’s endeavours as an engaged researcher are best described through an account of the Tsitsa Project. This is a large collaborative project started in 2014 involving numerous stakeholders including researchers, local community members, natural resource managers, policymakers, local NGOs, and more. The project aims to generate tangible ecological and social outcomes for the landscape and its residents. Its goal was to bring together a range of stakeholders to collectively work towards more sustainable landscape management and rural livelihoods development in the Tsitsa River catchment.
Key benefits of the Tsitsa Project to local partners have been capacity development, job creation, knowledge-sharing and creating opportunities for collaboration among diverse participants. Crucial skills development benefits have been derived through many of the project partners participating in a short course facilitated on social learning and stakeholder engagement. Rural participants have been supported in learning the relevant technology to participate in such a short course. Importantly, knowledge benefits have not only been focused on disseminating academic knowledge to other stakeholders (through annual Science-Management meetings), but on co-producing new knowledge together in reflective social learning workshop spaces.
Dr Cockburn continues to expand and evolve her community engagement activities. Currently, she is reworking a practical component of the a course to introduce students to basic research tools to inform and support environmental management, in response to the needs of their community partner, Assegaai Trails.
Dr Cockburn’s conceptualisation of transdisciplinarity as a practice situated at the nexus of science, society, and self, has informed her engaged research, as well as engaged teaching in the form of service learning. Indeed, one community partner describes Dr Cockburn as having a profound understanding of the interconnectedness of people, animals, ?ora and fauna of the riverine environment. It is this crossing of disciplinary, methodological, social and physical borders, and the concomitant appreciation of interconnections that makes Dr Cockburn a worthy recipient of the 2023 Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Award for Community Engagement.