The teaching strategies you use throughout your CEL initiatives will vary depending on the focus of your collaboration. It can be hard to know where to start. We pull out a few popular tools that you could consider adapting for your course.

We reached out to discover where teaching staff get their ideas and inspiration for embedding civic and community engagement in their curriculum, and what supports are most valuable and most needed. The told us that hearing from peers about working examples of civic and communuity engagement in practice was central. 

The University's Civic and Community Engagement Plan establishes the underpinning values which guide community enaggement in UCC. We dig a little deeper into what they mean in practice. 

If you want to integrate Community Engaged Learning into your teaching the best way to do this is with a community partner. Culivating 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. 

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. 

It may seem obvious that facilitation skills matter for Community Engaged Learning, but the value of giving this some dedicated focus shoudln'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. 

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.

The Place Standard Tool is a teaching strategy or tool used for a specific disciplinary context to facilitate student learning of module content.

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