If you want to integrate Community Engaged Learning into your teaching the best way to do this is with a community partner. Cultivating the relationship with your community partner is an essential ingredient to supporting positive learning experiences and outcomes for all involved. In practice this means incorporating time for planning with your community partner to establish clear expectations, mutually beneficial activities, and a shared understanding of what's involved for staff, students and community partners. Here's some top tips for setting up partnerships for community engaged learning initiatives.  

At all levels of community engaged learning, an emphasis should be placed on reflection. Students require the space and opportunity to reflect on the intersection between their disciplinary content, the wider world, and their interactions (where applicable) with the community organisation. Introducing civic engagement into your teaching approaches, especially when there are planned interactions with community organisations, could challenge students’ predisposing ideology or shine a light on social inequalities in which society’s or their discipline’s actions have been complicit in cementing. 

It may seem obvious that facilitation skills matter for Community Engaged Learning, but the value of giving this some dedicated focus shouldn’t be underestimated. Good teachers are already facilitators of learning, so the chances are you already have a good foundation, even if you haven't recognised this as a core skill. Equally whilst facilitation skills come more naturally to some than others, all facilitators can and should work on knowing and enhancing their facilitation style.  

Connecting your curriculum with societal challenges is an opportunity to expose students to real world scenarios and contexts. You can start small by integrating community voices and bringing lived experience to life for your students. 

In-class games can be a wonderful way to get students talking and to connect to societal issues. Your students may not be the chattiest bunch, especially if they are new to each other or are in large class groups. It takes a lot of confidence to be the one student to respond to a lecturer’s questions or prompts about a particular phenomenon and students may feel more confident participating in class if provided with some structure. Discussion and debate games or exercises help create a comfortable atmosphere for students to exchange perspectives and reach an understanding on a particular topic.

Community-engaged learning approaches provide fertile ground for students to learn through inquiry and to explore their content in a completely novel way. Having these opportunities throughout their educational experiences equips students to cope with complex issues more effectively in their personal and professional lives, supporting them as future leaders and socially responsible global citizens.  

Best practice civic and community engagement means thinking critically about the various categories of stakeholders that exist. Ensure you are not limited by your experience, have a look at the diagram below created by The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) in the UK. 

Dr Eoin Lettice, Lecturer in Plant Science in the School of Biological Earth and Environmental Sciences, wanted to provide his students with a unique assessment opportunity. Conscious of final year students’ heavy workload, a workload which includes many written assignments including the Final Year Project, Eoin sought to depart from more traditional forms of assessment and provide his students with a more dynamic assessment experience.

This Practice Insight provides an overview of the curriculum options you have for integrating civic engagement into your teaching. The focus you select depends on several factors, such as whether you are in a position to make significant programmatic or module changes and your personal preference for engagement initiatives; some initiatives may not require significant adaptations. 

This Practice Insight focuses on Community Engaged Learning (CEL) approaches where the lecturer plays an active role alongside her/his student and community participants throughout the CEL process. The lecturer designs the module in such a way that they are present to organise and participate in activities so that students meet their learning outcomes and both parties can reach mutually beneficial outcomes.

The article focuses attention on the process of preparing students for their CEL experience so that they can maximize the experience but also understand the purpose of such initiatives and consequently what is expected of them. Here we delve into an example of how a UCC lecturer in prepares her students for their CEL experience. 

Providing social work services during COVID19 is a major challenge. For example, how to transition to remote service provision to children and families at risk, safeguarding older adults, services to homeless families, and child to parent domestic violence group-work. This article looks at the experience of the Online Social Work Practice initiative that was developed in response to the pandemic, working together with service providers and practitioners. 

This article provides a critique of civic engagement in the curriculum and attempts to articulate what we mean by high quality and sustainable civic engagement practices.  Community engaged learning initiatives do not act as a silver bullet for resolving community challenges or making the most of opportunities available. Students and academics cannot parachute into a community with the attitude of waving a magic wand before disappearing back to campus.

There are disciplines where students need to learn a specific set of skills and competencies to prepare them for their professional careers. Community engaged learning experiences that are  well planned can offer a valuable opportunity for lecturers to develop these attributes and values in their students as well as providing unique learning experiences for students to grapple with the complexities of the world. 

Community engaged learning and research projects by their very nature are typically carried out in person. The personable relationships established by working side-by-side over several weeks and months is a unique characteristic of engaged learning and research and is an essential component for success. However, owing to changes created by COVID19, it’s worth considering how to undertake CEL in an online environment. It might not always be as effective, but the outcomes might just surprise you (in a good way).  

A Community Engaged Learning short course by Campus Engage and the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (NFETL) is an ideal way to continue your professional development if reasonably new to Community Engaged Learning. 

A Conversation with Dr Samantha Williams on the Traveller Equality and Justice Project.