Component Evaluation: Unity Housing – Role Play

Timing: 30 Minutes
Delivery: In-class

These teaching resources were co-created by university instructors and “community experts”, people who have used mental health services. Community experts contributed ideas but also made their own components. The Unity Housing: A Better Way video is one of these components. Community expert Alex Verkade spoke to project worker Christie Wall about how and why he joined the project, download and read the text of that conversation here.

It isn’t always easy to draw community partners into projects like creating these teaching resources, but Alex Verkade and the Unity Housing video demonstrate a successful model of academic-community partnership where the whole is more than the sum of both parts.   Have 2 students take on the roles of Alex Verkade and Christie Wall and read the text of their interview for the class.  Then bring the whole class into the exercise, encouraging shared ideas about how to facilitate service user engagement in initiatives that impact their lives.  It might be useful to have the two readers continue to take the roles of Verkade and Wall in the larger discussion to encourage awareness of different perspectives on community engagement.  What did your students learn from Alex’s testimony that might not have occurred to them otherwise?

Learners working independently online should read the text of the Verkade-Wall conversation. Then write a 1-page reflection on how this conversation increased your awareness of different perspectives on community engagement and how to facilitate service user engagement in initiatives that impact their lives.  What did you learn from Alex’s testimony that might not have occurred to you otherwise?