Community Engagement is optional until it isn’t: Rethinking postgraduate psychology placements

Abstract

Universities want placements filled, students want them completed, and community partners are left to reconcile a mismatch no one asked them to navigate. This practice-informed provocation draws on work-integrated learning (WIL) scholarship and my experience as placement coordinator to argue that community engagement is often raised as a value in psychology placements but insufficiently embedded in placement infrastructure. Community engagement may appear in program rationales and accreditation documents but rarely in the structural design of how placements are resourced and supported. In other words, there is a gap between what we say about community engagement and what we build into our placement systems (Jackson et al., 2017). Based on my experience, I argue that community partners are often positioned as hosts rather than co-designers of professional learning, left carrying substantial, under-recognised responsibility for student learning. Postgraduate psychology placements cannot be ethically scaled through transactional placement models. If universities want community partners to sustain student learning, they must resource relational co-design as core placement infrastructure, rather than treat it as optional engagement work.