Community Service Initiative: Dave McKenzie

Dave McKenzie shares unique insights and strategies for promoting excellence in teaching at JMSB and how these relate to Professor Michèle Paulin's approach to teaching marketing through service design. 

What do you think of this approach for creating lived experiences through case studies?

John Bentley: Thanks very much David for speaking with me today. I wanted to ask you about your work with Michèle Paulin and your thoughts regarding what you experienced while participating in the two courses Michèle teaches, Marketing 451 and 485. What do you think are the benefits of some of the methodologies Michèle uses in her pedagogy in terms of getting the students to dramatize and roleplay the creation of a lived experience through case studies.

Dave McKenzie: When I first got the opportunity to talk to Michèle about her courses she said, I'm teaching these undergraduate classes, and it would be great if you could come at the beginning and just talk to the students about how you see using education for the greater good and the opportunity to make a difference. So, she gives me that opportunity to come to talk to them, maybe the second class or so and I tell them about what I'm doing in the community service initiative (CSI), and I explained that we want you guys to do more. We saw the issues that we are faced with today, you didn't cause, we kind of caused it but you are going to be the ones trying to come up with the solutions for this and now is a good time to start. I feel all the courses should have some element of experiential learning and my particular area is experiential learning through community service so you could do all kinds of experiential learning for different purposes. For my work in particular, it happens through community service, so the work Michèle is doing resonates with me when students are tackling some of the key issues of the day, like homelessness or even bringing it into the university context. I've sat in on some fabulous roleplay where they’ve looked at fixing a student service because they're the users and they're saying that the service isn't what it's supposed to be. But they went further, they didn't just complain and say we didn't like it. They came up with actual solutions and I told them I'm going to follow up with the undergrad director and I did. I followed up with the director and said listen, you have an opportunity where these students are willing to come and do a 15-minute skit, act out for you and do the roleplay to show you what some of the problems are and how they can be fixed. I explained to the director that the students are bringing the report to life to show you what they are experiencing and here is what they suggest. Students are coming to Concordia for this exact experience that we say we provide, they want to know how to connect some of the dots and make a difference. Another group said look, because of the hybrid work setup now, they can't build any relationships. Every time they get a different person, so they have to tell their story over again.

To me, this has such value because there are those alternate theories and approaches like service design and Michèle is also saying to her students, you don't have to sacrifice your empathy and your humility in order to solve the problem or in order to make a difference. It's the same thing I'm saying when my guys are going out to do the MBA 661 or the MSC 619. I'm saying to them that the old MBA approach was when you would stay in Montreal and you would make a recommendation to close a plant in Rimouski without having ever visited Rimouski. But a new approach is that, before you just look at the statements, the financial statements and make that decision, you travel out to Rimouski. You see where the plant is, you talk to the people in the plant and you see what the impact of that closure would be on that particular community. Talk to the people in the community. See if there are some solutions that could be had from the people there since they're the ones dealing with it. You’ve never been there, you’ve never visited. So really get a sense of what this means and why this is important to these people. Care for them and get their input. It may still turn out that you have to close the thing, but with the input that you have from them, it might be a little bit more humane and you may be able to come up with some solutions instead of a flat-out closure. You may say, we could close this piece, but we could have this part running. Or we could say we have all these resources here, we could retrain some of these people to do this instead of that. But you’re only going to know that if you really take an intentional approach to doing that and not just hiding in an office hundreds of miles away and just saying we’re going do close things with the stroke of a pen.  So, what Michèle it doing really resonates with me. I like the fact, too, that she is starting out at the undergraduate level because sometimes by the time you get to the graduate level it’s a bit late. But starting at the undergraduate level students start to actually think about this because some of them, depending on where they’re coming from, are not taking things as seriously as they as they should. But this way they say look, you know we have a voice, and we could really think about this and we could really come up with solutions.

Now where I think we need to do a better job is when they come up with some of these solutions, we actually use them. We don’t just throw this thing on the shelf. Like when the MBA or MSC students come up with the practical, implementable solution in their report, we want to see it implemented. We don't want it on a shelf somewhere just gathering dust. For some of them writing their final report we should say that we are going to support this for the next six months to help you with the implementation. They want to see the work go the next level. When you come up with these solutions you want people to say, hey, you know, we've been using this solution.

What do you think of the experience in terms of seeing the students embodying those theoretical principles?

John Bentley:  What do you think of the experience in terms of seeing the students embodying those theoretical principles as part of a more humanistic marketing and management practice. Michèle takes them through the business to business and along all of the models from the micro to the macro as an entire continuum while the students are involved in doing it. So, what do you think of that process and that kind of embodied experience they're doing compared to just doing it on paper?

Dave McKenzie: I think it's essential and it's essential to learning because just doing it on paper, I mean that's like I said, it's the old approach where you just look at this thing and then you just try to regurgitate what you learn. But with this method you get to live it, you’re simulating some of these things, you have to do more than just read the thing and then just regurgitate. You have to go out and find real examples. The fact that you have to create a skit and content around this means that you have to really understand what it is you're doing or what it is you're trying to do. Whereas, the other approach, you just sit there, and you read the thing and then you say, OK, let's see if I could memorize it and then see if they ask me a question, I'll just answer the question. But when you have to do more than that, when you have to understand what this thing is really telling you and then figure out how am I going to apply it, create a situation which is what the whole skit and other associated work is about then you’re creating this vehicle to show that you not only understand but that you are able to apply the thing. That's what learning should be, you know, because when you learn it that way, you don't forget it because you’re incorporating it. It’s like in Ed Tech where they say good instruction has three elements, a clear objective, opportunity for the people to practice, and a feedback mechanism. Michèle has a clear objective as to what it is she wants them to come out with in the end. And by doing the skits and all of that, that's the practicing. And then there’s that feedback loop when they come and they present that thing to the whole class now. They as a team get to ask certain questions, their peers get to ask them questions and you're getting feedback there. So, to me, you’re covering the key elements of good instruction, right. I find that there's so much depth there. And again, it comes back to not just being able to take work from a book and memorizing it, you have to do more. And we need to have more of that in some of these classes because it would add more meaning to the education and it would help to also answer that bigger question students are saying, why do I need to go to university? Why can't I just Google the thing? Why do I need to come to class? You could just send me your notes, and I could review the notes, you know? And if I have to write a paper, I could use AI. But you can't use AI in a skit really. Maybe we might get there one day, but right now, when I go to that class, I see these students in the skit doing and speaking and acting. The last one I went to, one of the students actually did the skit on Michèle. They had all her antics and everything, how she manages her class down pat. I mean you have to be paying attention to be able to do that. You couldn’t read that in a textbook and perform the way that they performed because you would have missed all the nuances. They had all her sayings and all the things that she was throwing them, off the cuff and everything. They had it all down pat.

Building a space to help faculty discover and practice humanisitic, service design approaches to teaching and learning?

John Bentley: Thank you for all of that because that really corroborates what I've been observing in Michèle's class. Concordia used to have the tagline, real education for the real world and this is what she's really revisiting and making intentional in her course. What would your thoughts be on this notion of setting up some kind of a space to somehow help faculty discover and practice some of these approaches. Yes, you could just talk to Michèle but could there be more to it than that in terms of creating a unique space at Concordia, maybe starting in JMSB. Mayve a place where we could share these teaching and learning ideas, where we could see them, we could talk about them, share them and put them into action. It could be a coaching circle but more intentional. We could be researching it, investigating it, bringing partners into it, kind of like the work that you're doing?

Dave McKenzie: It’s one of the reasons why I've been meeting with Michèle. I feel that the Community Service Initiative should have a space where we could encourage things like that, where the community could come in and we could have that mutual exchange. We’d have a space where folks could come in and on any given day you could be in that room with community, students, faculty, people just in there sharing. And it doesn't have to always be structured because sometimes you get some of your best things when you just run into a person over a coffee or lunch and you start talking and you start sharing. And I know at times that is hard to sell because sometimes administration feels like you go to a meeting, and they have to have an agenda. What's the agenda? What is supposed to happen? What's supposed to come out of this? And if they don't have that, they didn't feel like you accomplished anything. But sometimes, as my community partners tell me, sometimes you need an “unmeeting” where there was no real agenda. There was nothing. People just got together and spoke. And I'm also part of this community campus engaged network and it's the same thing. Asking questions like, why do you need these folks to be looking at this through that lens, where we ask, how can we get the community more involved and not from the point of view that they need something or resources. Sometimes you just need dialogue and sometimes after that dialogue you get certain solutions, it's one of the things that I'm doing right now. I call it my CSI community roundtable and we’ve been doing it since 2015. I created an opportunity for 25 to 30 executive directors of local area nonprofits and we have five to six meetings a year. We come into the school, we have lunch networking and then we have a little structured part where we're looking at trying to solve certain issues. Nonprofits are notorious for not talking to each other because of how funding is set up and things like that, they don't speak to each other. So just to see folks in the room and sharing their knowledge and finding solutions over lunch, that in itself is a win. And then we will break out to form more structured groups, now we're looking at doing different things.

For example, the meeting today we're looking at doing a not-for-profit showcase in the fall where we are going to maybe invite about 18 not-for-profits, set them up tradeshow style in the atrium of the EV and they'll be able to promote themselves to students, faculty, staff, and general public. We will have a whole day of events where we look at doing different workshops on funding and things like that. Then another committee is going to be looking at creating some sort of vehicle or some mechanism geared towards our young people because they feel that we need to start empowering and preparing our young people for a more resilient future. So, what should that look like? So, we started to look at things like that. And when you look at some of the talent in the room, I mean, these are all people with degrees and with a wide range of experiences. And they are coming together around problem solving, how can we come up with a solution for this, you know? And I think it's a model that we should be using more and one of the things that I wanted to see is to have a space where you come into JMSB and maybe it's a centre or something. I know now they say they don't want to fund those things, but you have that space where at any given moment there are students there, there are faculty, there's community there discussing matters around how could we make things better, how can we just talk hope, how can we just improve dialogue? A Ph.D. student who is looking for community to do something comes down to that space and he or she says, listen, I'm working on XYZ and I'm looking for someone to help with data collection. Or maybe an MBA student is looking to do something with an undergraduate student. At any given moment you could come in there and we could even bring in the technology where you can have some people available virtually to say here's this opportunity for that, right. But we don't really have that. It's more than just the dialogue that’s important, you could get access to concrete materials, for example when you're doing certain research on certain things. You could go there and find materials that you normally wouldn't even find in the library, and you may even find people to speak to, stuff that hasn't been created or recorded yet. Maybe one time you go there, and Michèle is sitting there and you get to have a chat with Michèle. Or maybe I'm sitting there, or I have some of my community folk who are just sitting there, and you get to talk to them about stuff. And again, the emphasis is on having students, faculty and community. You still really have to manage the experience, you can't just have a free-for-all. They will never accept that right, especially in this climate. But it could be about managing it in a different way because we're not looking to drive events and that, we’re looking more to driving dialogue you know and we could see how that feeds into our research, how that feeds into our community. It would be encouraging to have all these different voices coming in for dialogue at any that given time, I think there's room for that.

John Bentley: Thanks very much Dave for sharing your ideas and insights. I look forward to following the work you’re doing with Michèle and the Community Service Initiative. Take care.

Dave McKenzie: Thanks John, good to talk with you about this.