Community Engaged Courses
- educators to teach content within more meaningful contexts.
- students to have an immediate tangible purpose for their learning.
- community partners to utilize students and faculty to support their work.
- all of us to be a part of a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts.
“[T]he linkage of academic work with community-based engagement within a framework of respect, reciprocity, relevance, and reflection.” (Butin, 2007)
Respect—valuing of and admiration for the abilities, knowledge, insights, achievements, etc. of what others are bringing to the collaboration.
Reciprocity—everyone is involved as a teacher and a learner. Everyone is contributing to the project and everyone is benefiting from the project. This requires meaningful community voice, impact, participation, and control from project planning stages, to implementation, evaluation, and public dissemination of work. We’re looking to create interdependent goals.
Relevance—the academic learning and the community learning must be integrated through the project activities, readings, assignments, learning assessments/feedback.
Reflection—Experience is never transparent. Reflection is necessary for students to make the connections between the academic learning and community engagement learning.
A Word on Nomenclature: Historically, this form of teaching has been known as “service-learning” and is sometimes called community based learning. We use the term Community Engaged to recognize the reciprocal benefits of this work between students, faculty, and community partners. However, you will encounter these other terms in some of the linked resources.
This page has paths:
- What: Culturally Responsive Teaching in Higher Education Emily Stenberg