To purposefully impact our community or students, we believe community engagement must be integrated with the core intellectual pursuits of higher learning. To impact community, CC must leverage our greatest public asset - knowledge learned in, and alongside, the classroom and created through research. To impact students' development into lifelong citizens, students must have the opportunity to learn and grow from their engaged experiences in intentional, structured ways.

To enable community-engaged pursuits within the classroom and research agendas, the CCE will work to expand the capacity of interested faculty by providing intellectual and practitioner support in each stage - knowing what to do and how to do it, making it happen, making it better, and sharing it with others. In particular, we will work to "Build on the Block" by seeking to better understand, adapt to, extend, and leverage a condensed, immersive course format for community impact. This work should and will be done in deep partnership with our resident experts on how to best integrate public work into the block - CC faculty. Lastly, recognizing some of the inherent limitations of the block in sustaining community work, we have a rich opportunity to integrate community-based learning and research into co-curricular spaces, as well as meaningfully connect students' curricular and co-curricular experiences.

Goals

1. Enhance knowledge of community-engaged pedagogies and methodologies.
2. To support learning goals and research agendas, connect faculty and students to community-based organizations and needs in Colorado Springs and the Pikes Peak Region.
3. Develop and offer resources to support community-engaged teaching, learning, and research.
4. Cultivate communities of praxis - groups that support one another in integrating theory and practice.
5. In partnership with faculty, integrate community-based work and teaching, learning, and research in and alongside the classroom.

Faculty Conversations

In this blockly lunch-and-learn, a faculty presenter or small panel shares their engaged teaching or research with interested faculty from across the college. This series is intended to support faculty who would like to learn more about community-engaged teaching and research on the block format, meet like-minded colleagues, and discover faculty projects with which they can get involved. These lunches are intentionally informal to enable faculty to ask questions and dialogue with one another, explore how to implement engaged models, and discuss possible collaborations. Critically, these lunches also provide a space to share and celebrate the engaged work of faculty.