Community-Engaged Learning Course Tag
The CCE manages the CC community-engaged learning course tag, which tracks which courses offered at Colorado College use community-engaged learning pedagogy.
What is Community-Engaged Learning (CEL)?
Community-Engaged Learning is experiential education that simultaneously and equitably promotes student learning and addresses community needs. These courses aim to benefit both students and communities through:
- directing education toward the pursuit of co-creating solutions to complex social challenges and in so doing impacting the public good; and
- actively developing engaged citizenship knowledge, skills, and motivation to empower students to build the worlds they imagine.
Tag Your Course
If you teach or plan to teach a community-engaged learning course at CC, please apply for a course tag so that we can tag your course in the course schedule.
The application link below will take you to the CC Summit site. Please use your CC ID to log in. Questions about the tag or application? Email Dr. Jordan Travis Radke, CCE Director, at jradke@coloradocollege.edu.
Frequently Asked Questions
The following criteria are the core, essential aspects of community-engaged learning pedgagy.
- The course incorporates an experience or project that interacts with, and benefits, communities beyond the campus. This community component might include an experience that seeks to address a mutually-defined community need and/or a research project that seeks to co-create solutions to complex social challenges. Please see the "Types of Community Engaged Learning on the Block" for additional ideas.
- Community-engaged work is an integral component of the course, enhancing and enhanced by knowledge from the curriculum. The course provides structured opportunities for students to learn from the experience, and academic assessment incorporates learning from community experience.
Tagging your course enables the CCE to:
- Promote engaged teaching through publicizing CEL courses to students in addition to institutionalizing incentives for students to enroll in CEL courses.
- Honor and celebrate engaged teaching by sharing course models and outcomes through CCE networks as well as campus-wide and off-campus publications.
- Share CEL courses as models to targeted, interested faculty to promote and enhance the use of the CEL pedagogy.
- Enable us to gather data on faculty interests, partnerships, and projects so that we can share opportunities and resources (conferences, articles, awards) as well as make connections (between faculty, staff, students, and partners) in a targeted fashion.
- Gather data on existing partnerships in an effort to inform a strategic process of partnership development - deepening existing partnerships and identifying gaps.
- Gather more input on how we can better support faculty moving forward.
Language can feel like it's ever-changing, we know! We made this change to be consistent with the evolution of the field of civic engagement, which now uses the language of community-"engaged" learning. Why? To "base" learning in community connotes that community can serve as a site for learning (which is true), yet doesn't capture the idea of reciprocal partnership, co-creation, or community impact as nicely as "engage." Additionally, and especially on the block, there are many ways to engage with and impact community that are indirect, project-based, or even virtual - and so many still take place on campus. In general, community-engaged learning better captures the best practices and intended outcomes of this pedagogy, so we made the switch to the newer term!
- Community-engaged experiences are co-created, designed, and implemented by professors and community partners, co-guided by both learning goals and community-driven needs.
- The coursework and experience aim to equip students with engaged citizenship skills, knowledge and identity development to build their capacity to influence the common good - both during their undergraduate experience and throughout their lives.
- If you need a thought partner in designing your course or applied assignment, please reach out to CCE Director Dr. Jordan Travis Radke at jradke@coloradocollege.edu.
- If you need support in brainstorming and connecting to community partners for your course, please reach out to CCE Community Partnerships Coordinator Niki Sosa Gallegos at nsosa@coloradocollege.edu.
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Interested, but not sure how to do it on the block plan?
True, community-engaged learning does look a little different on the block plan. But, luckily we have many resident experts (CC faculty) who have creatively imagined ways to adapt the pedagogy to a condensed-format, immersive curriculum.
Below, you'll find seven forms of community-engaged learning that work on the block!
work with a clear beginning, end, and outcome that builds the capacity (power) of a community partner to fulfill their mission over time, and ideally gives students a chance to apply classroom knowledge.
research for public-problem solving, co-creating applied knowledge for community impact. Ideally, projects engage non-academics as equitable thought partners, and the research leads to or informs action (rather than producing knowledge for the sake of knowledge).
engaging students as thought partners for community partners, enabling students to apply classroom knowledge to real-world issues. Offer disciplinary expertise to community partners who want to draw on academic knowledge to, for example, solve a problem, inform a decision, assess impact, generate ideas, or create or design something new.
bring community into the classroom, and/or the classroom into the community. Inviting community partners and non-academics into the classroom as co-educators honors diverse forms of knowledge, including lived and practitioner experience. Teaching the content of the discipline beyond campus transforms academic knowledge from a private good into a public good.
community learning experiences that "leverage the power of place," often including a field trip or field experience. Provides immersive, transformative learning that mobilizes students to continue to engage in an issue after the course.
efforts to participate in culture change through storytelling and artistic expression that highlights stories of injustice, illuminates social problems, or inspires changemaking. Often aims to address inequities in representation by elevating marginalized voices, narratives, and forms of knowledge.
directly addressing the needs of individuals, communities or community organizations, in a way that both promotes community benefit and provides an experiential learning opportunity to deepen students' understanding of course content.
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Last updated: 09/08/2022