Community Engaged Learning
Community-engaged learning goes deeper than a traditional service-learning model by structuring learning beyond volunteerism to project work or other meaningful engagement with community partners. Community-engaged learning leverages the resources of higher education, including the intellectual labor of students and faculty, to fulfill community partner needs. Similar to service learning, community-engaged learning connects classroom theory to real world contexts while often building rich professional skills such as project management, professional communication, client engagement, collaboration, research, and more. The pedagogy of community-engaged learning also emphasizes reflection so that students themselves connect the experience to the theory and also to their own experience, assumptions, and evolving understanding of the material and the world.
Several University of Oregon faculty build community-engaged learning into their courses. For example, Devon Grammon, a Spanish professor in the Department of Romance Languages, partnered with the City of Eugene’s office of Human Rights and Neighborhood Involvement for a project where students tracked instances of non-English language signage throughout the Eugene community. This foundational data provided the city with a snapshot of languages used and in various contexts, as well as giving insight into areas where signage is needed and, potentially, in languages other than English and Spanish. In another example, Yekang Ko, Jacques Abelman, and Kory Russell partnered with the local non-profit Opportunity Village (OV) to design modular plant-growing and water-catchment systems so that Eugene residents in OV’s transitional housing could grow plants for food, shade, or retail. The Sustainable Cities Year Program partners annually with a city partner and then sources multiple classes to do work as consultants recommending solutions to the city partner’s unique challenges. In one final example, the UO’s Environmental Leadership Program, led by Peg Boulay and Katie Lynch, partners with local parks, museums, conservation sites, public schools, and more to engage undergraduate students in projects that combine research and public education, scientific engagement, and/or storytelling in support of partner goals and needs. These are only a snapshot of community-engaged learning examples led by UO faculty.
Community-engaged learning requires work on the part of faculty to develop meaningful relationships with one or more community partners in order to ensure that projects serve partner needs and that projects are crafted so that students can succeed within constraints, such as those of a quarter-bound course. Students should be appropriately scaffolded based on course level and the challenges of the project, and may need assignments or guidance that support focused project management (and foster valuable professional skills at the same time). Faculty may also need to scale back more traditional academic assignments and readings to accommodate the community-engaged learning work. Despite these challenges, community-engaged learning is an excellent method for meaningful experiential learning.