The Practice of PACE : lessons learned and imagined futures

PACE has been the work of many people – students, university staff, industry and community partners foremost amongst them. The challenge for the future development of PACE is, given what we have learned from our past and current activity, how do we use the learnings, insights and unintended outcomes to shape and optimize imagined futures for the program? There will be many challenges to confront in the years ahead as the program continues to ‘engage and serve the community’ and ‘improve and refine a curriculum that has personal transformation at its very core’ (Sachs, J, Preface. In: Sachs J, Clark L (eds) Learning through community engagement: vision and practice in higher education. Springer, Dordrect, 2016). How best can we meet these challenges, key amongst them being to ensure that PACE continues to deliver quality experiences and impact for its key constituencies as the number and diversity of students, partners and activities grows? Befitting the centrality of reflective practice to PACE (Harvey M, Baker M, Semple AL, Lloyd K, McLachlan K, Walkerden G, Fredericks V, Reflection for learning: a holistic approach to disrupting the text. In: Sachs J, Clark L (eds) Learning through community engagement: vision and practice in higher education. Springer, Dordrecht, 2016, Chap. 11), this chapter looks both back and forward to offer reflections on this and related questions. This chapter contains another two separate sections: 'Co-creating support curriculum with PACE international community partners', contributed by Rebecca Bilous, Eryn Coffey, Greg Downey, Laura Hammersley, Kate Lloyd and Felicity Rawlings-Sanaei; 'A programmatic and thematic approach as a new direction', contributed by Anna Powell and Frank Siciliano.23 page(s