Shelter U: A community-engaged, evaluative pilot with non-traditional adult learners


Aaron Klassen, Booth UC

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a pilot project in which I engage community-based participatory methods to support the design, implementation, and evaluation of Shelter U, a program offering free university for the vulnerable in and around an inner-city emergency shelter in a Canadian prairie city. Shelter U (SU) is modeled on the Radical Humanities program developed by the sociologist, Earl Shorris (2000), also called Humanities 101 or Clemente, to counter poverty through anti-oppressive, collaborative, experiential learning. Variations include higher ed for people experiencing the effects of homelessness, returning veterans, and newcomers. However, despite commendable gains evident in its graduand’s discovery of learning and experience of social mobility, past program iterations have been shown also to limit such outcomes because of the institutional objectification of the student (Czank 2020) including by external economic influences (McNamara, Cummings, Pulis 2018). Community engaged participatory research provides a methodological framework that actively seeks to incorporate its subjects’ interpretive practice into its analysis (MacKinnon 2018). As such, community engaged sociologists take on the role of collaborator together with their subjects as members of a specific community. Considering the multiple relations making up Shelter U, a synthesized community, between the interests of my own higher educational institution, that of the emergency shelter with whose staff I will be partnering to offer courses, potential funders, and those of the non-traditional adult learners whose multiplicative vulnerable status demands serious ethical consideration, community-based research (CBR) is conducive to the pilot’s aims. In this paper, I will be highlighting community-based research insights as they have informed my strategy to this point in developing the pilot (Van de Sande and Schwartz 2017; Bird-Naytowhow et al. 2017), leading to three key considerations for further investigation framed by the local context of poverty in Winnipeg’s inner-city having to do with the following: Indigeneity, freedom of knowledge, and how a rise in precariousness at the global level may impact Radical Humanities programs going forward. Such insights include first the identification of key figures whose interests, in this case in the pilot, in turn have influenced the pilot’s design, from my own institutional interests to those of the host shelter to those of the vulnerable. Second, the creation of an advisory committee and subcommittees to help guide the pilot’s design and implementation. And third, the organization of a reading group in which anti-oppressive and decolonial pedagogies were considered and discussed for their appropriateness for the classroom (Freire 1970; Robinson 2020). Further developments include the creation of a community of instructors who are preparing innovative course design considerations such as experiential learning (Kolb 2024) and tertiary learning through the arts and music, or community-music therapy (Ansdell and DeNora 2016), and a student recruitment strategy that will allow students and shelter staff to contribute their own preliminary interests through incoming interviews. Finally, this community-engaged research allows me to sketch the outline of a theory of educational self-transformation for which the conditions of its possibility can be manipulated so as to minimize possible harms and maximize the potential for real change. Thus, my multiply mediated, collaborative approach to community-engaged sociology illustrates possibilities for sustainable social change.

This paper will be presented at the following session: