Reshaping educational experience by investing in community

The notion of “community” holds a key to enhancing higher education experiences for learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL), a core discipline of the vocational education and training (VET) sector in New Zealand. This paper contextualises the experiences of advanced EAL learners investing and participating in assessed community placements. Community placements represent a pedagogical intervention effectively giving learners access to communities of practice in a meaningful, authentic, real-world context. Pedagogically, they create learning contexts where instructors can reshape learners’ experiences by preparing students to explore and experience the linguistic and cultural potential of community. In the project, the journalised reflections of migrants and international students participating in a degree in EAL in New Zealand reveal the linguistic, cultural and ontological value of community work. The study uses the concepts of learner investment, communities of practice and imagined communities to theorise the participants’ learning, presents key qualitative findings about the cultural, linguistic, and transformative capital of community placements, and suggests they are valuable pedagogical interventions that can help reconfigure teaching and learning EAL in VET contexts.