A Critical Mapping of Community Engaged Learning (CEL) in Canadian Public Universities

Community engaged learning (community engagement or service learning) is known to be an effective pedagogy to develop social responsibility and many engineering graduate attributes (outcomes). However, as community engaged learning is a pedagogy still establishing itself in engineering education the scope and boundaries are stillbeing defined.Studies that report on implementation of community engaged learning have sometimes been characterized as anecdotal and isolated. Before we increase focus on work that measures impact and suggests strategic use ofcommunity engaged learning pedagogy – we must begin to tie down the scope, terminology and types of community engaged learning to ensure that a cohesive body of knowledge is formed.This paper is largely a literature review of community engaged learning and how categorizing has been approached. The purpose of this paper is to call attention for the need of more systemized reporting of community engaged learning. In our review, we find that there are two general strategies for distinguishing one type of community engaged learning type from another. In a collaborative spirit, we use the merits of both pproaches to categorizing community engaged learning to conduct a thought- experiment towards finding a middle ground for conventions when reporting community engaged learning experiences.

Enhancing undergraduates’ engagement in a learning community by including their voices in the technological and instructional design

Programs aimed at community engagement efforts at X University have been offered since the early 2000's, which aimed at providing engineering students opportunities to use their technical skills with international engagement. While immensely popular with students and marketing pamphlets, a recent concentrated effort within the community-engaged engineering courses has been undertaken to shift away from models that solely focus on delivery of technological solutions. Which often failed to integrate complex contextual elements into the pedagogical course design and resultant student centric design process. Our course design shifted towards holistic and ethical engagement highlighting the programmatic shift from "service learning" to "community engaged learning" and challenging students to reflect on their motivations and positionality as individuals and engineers. This shift aimed to forge international and local partnerships that focus on community engagement and student learning through intensive planning, the establishment of trust, and values-centered relationships. Through utilization of human centered design theory and establishment of long-term partnerships that reposition student centric engagement courses have shifted to partnership structure that acknowledges strengths and limitations and centered value to each stakeholder. While models like this exist across the community development landscape there are challenges on how to integrate this into engineering course dynamics. Numerous researchers and academic folks have identified these challenges, but a critical gap still exists with the application of said "best practices". This paper aims to highlights the success and challenges seen throughout this transition when these concepts are put into practice to build effective partnerships at the local and international level. The overarching aim of this work is to share a proposed process of engagement for others interested in offering community engaged learning opportunities.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to seek to investigate Etienne Wenger's theory of social learning in a community of practice by modeling two simultaneous aspects of teachers’ collaborative learning: their engagement in close-knit internal groupings and engagement with colleagues that work externally to the core group. These two learning processes are related to two social-cognitive outcomes: teachers’ organizational commitment and their sense of impact.Design/methodology/approach– The study investigated a field sample of 246 individual teachers from ten Finnish primary schools. Hypotheses were developed and tested by using multiple regression and structural equation modeling.Findings– The results indicate that local engagement supports teachers’ organizational commitment. However, this form of collaborative learning behavior didnotsupport their sense of impact. Moreover, external engagement with trusted colleagues supported sense of impact butnotorganizational commitment.Research limitations/implications– The study reinforces the importance of teachers’ engagement in communities of practice. Specifically, the results suggest two specific social-cognitive outcomes related to two different learning processes situated in teachers’ community of practice. It would be highly valuable to replicate this study in various multi-level settings.Practical implications– The study highlights teachers’ engagement in communities of practice as a source of their motivational basis and their commitment. Findings recommend school leaders to facilitate internal and external learning communities.Originality/value– The study provides empirical evidence regarding the partial relationships between teachers’ local and external learning engagement and the social-cognitive outcomes of these forms of learning behaviors.

Objectives This study investigated the effects of university students’ participation in learning communities as extracurricular programs on their academic self-efficacy, resilience, institutional commitment, and academic achievement. Methods A total of 72 undergraduate students attending a 4-year university in Korea participated in the study. They all have participated in learning community programs for one semester and were tested for their academic self-efficacy, resilience, institutional commitment, and academic achievement before and after their learning community experiences. Pre- and post-test data for these dependent variables were analyzed using SPSS 28.0 through paired sample t-tests. Results The analysis found that the participating students’ overall academic self-efficacy and all of its three sub-factors showed a statistically significant increase. Similarly, the resilience area also showed a significant increase in pre-post comparison, and significant increases were confirmed in the control and sociability sub-factors. The participating students’ level of university engagement in total and in two of the three sub-factors showed a significant increase. No significant difference was found in academic achievement between pre-test and post-test results. Conclusions The results of this study confirm that learning community programs in universities can have a positive impact on important areas for university students such as academic self-efficacy, resilience, and university engagement. This suggests that various learning community programs be facilitated in many universities to promote improvement in these areas.

IntroductionThis study examines the integration of community engagement and community-engaged scholarship at all accredited US and Canadian medical schools in order to better understand and assess their current state of engagement.MethodsA 32-question data abstraction instrument measured the role of community engagement and community-engaged scholarship as represented on the Web sites of all accredited US and Canadian medical schools. The instrument targeted a medical school’s mission and vision statements, institutional structure, student and faculty awards and honors, and faculty tenure and promotion guidelines.ResultsMedical school Web sites demonstrate little evidence that schools incorporate community engagement in their mission or vision statements or their promotion and tenure guidelines. The majority of medical schools do not include community service terms and/or descriptive language in their mission statements, and only 8.5% of medical schools incorporate community service and engagement as a primary or major criterion in promotion and tenure guidelines.DiscussionThis research highlights significant gaps in the integration of community engagement or community-engaged scholarship into medical school mission and vision statements, promotion and tenure guidelines, and service administrative structures.

Community Engaged Learning (CEL) is an increasingly popular and celebrated pedagogy in post-secondary education. Research indicates that CEL supports students’ academic engagement, strengthens their professional skills, and provides them with an enhanced sense of civic responsibility. CEL is labour-intensive, though, and many instructors seek light-touch options as a way of integrating CEL in particularly challenging environments—for example in first-year, multidisciplinary, or large-class settings. This article presents a flexible model of CEL developed in such a challenging setting: we share results from our effort to bring CEL to a multi-course, multi-disciplinary program for first-year students. Our experience shows an adaptable way forward for CEL that could be applied in varied educational settings; we share insights into what we learned, including where we can improve, in our efforts to develop large-scale CEL.

This article contributes to the current conversation surrounding the definition of community-engaged scholarship (CES) by providing critical insights from a linguist’s journey towards establishing a CES partnership with a middle school. I argue that a prescribed CES definition for all disciplines is neither possible nor desirable. CES has gained appeal in recent years because of the mutual benefits promised by the scholar–community partner collaboration. At the same time, the conversation around defining CES is ongoing, highlighting the difficulties in establishing a single definition of CES for all disciplines. In response, individual institutions have adopted their own definition in an effort to help their faculty members navigate CES and assist their efforts towards satisfying requirements for promotion and tenure. While designed to ensure rigorous scholarship and true community involvement, institutional-specific definitions can unintentionally limit a scholar’s CES options, particularly given the expectations of the tenure and promotion process. As a result, scholars in disciplines which are not well understood outside academia, such as linguistics, find themselves ill-positioned to engage in CES. And as the general public is unfamiliar with the discipline and its benefits, developing mutually beneficial partnerships with community organisations requires an extensive amount of time – more than is usually required of other disciplines engaged in CES. Furthermore, tenure and promotion timeline expectations may be incompatible with CES work for some disciplines. Two solutions are proposed to address these challenges. First, scholars in disciplines such as linguistics must utilise multiple approaches to developing partnerships, such as volunteerism, community outreach and cross-disciplinary collaboration, and be intentional in college classrooms in engaging undergraduates in activities that make the discipline relevant outside academia. Second, they must challenge current CES definitions and interpretations and advocate for policy changes to the tenure and promotion process on their individual campuses.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted food and educational systems, laying bare institutional inadequacies and structural inequalities. While there has been ample discussion on impacts to the food system and higher education institutions separately, there has been little written through the perspective of people who navigate both. Farmers, researchers, graduate students, chefs, and many stakeholders contribute to community engaged scholarship (CES) in food systems, facing novel obstacles and opportunities with the spread of the pandemic. In this article, I utilize institutional ethnography to center the experiences of the people who participated in or led CES projects during the spring and summer of 2020. The goal of this study is to understand how discourse and texts in the academic institution constrain the reality of CES partnerships and identify areas for change. My findings show that tenure and promotion guidelines and funding opportunities constrain CES partnerships, reducing opportunities for relationship building and discouraging innovative models of participation. Quantified evaluation metrics on grant rubrics and tenure and promotion guidelines privilege individual academic researchers growing large programs, writing lucrative grants for the university, and publishing profusely. However, community-led and decentralized projects were able to adapt to community priorities and sustain research projects during the pandemic. COVID-19 created obstacles to community engagement and allowed for creative approaches to community participation. By restructuring academic evaluation and funding processes to support problem-solving models of CES led by community partners, CES projects can support both academic and community priorities in times of disruption and relative stability.

Community engaged learning (CEL) is a teaching methodology which aims to bridge the gap between academia and society by collaborating on community-based projects. Inspired by theories of experiential learning and social constructivism, CEL celebrates learning by doing and is a rather novel teaching methodology within the predominantly theoretical bachelor medical curriculum. Despite CEL’s potential benefits, its implementation faces significant challenges. Here, we investigated how students, accustomed to traditional academic teaching, learn during CEL-infused courses, specifically studying student perception of their learning and identifying the various facilitators and barriers to learning during CEL. The study conducted at Utrecht University’s Faculty of Medicine included second-year medical students participating in a newly introduced CEL course. Using thematic analysis, the study analyzed students’ written reflections collected before and after completion of the course. CEL contributed to developing valuable competencies like empathy, leadership, and communication skills, which go beyond the realm of textbook and classroom-based knowledge. The study further identified key barriers and facilitators, both at personal and organizational levels influencing learning outcome of students. Based on these data, several recommendations have been formulated for all involved parties (students, academic institutions, community partners) which could contribute towards a sustainable embedding of CEL.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic prompted instructors of many community-engaged learning (CEL) courses to utilize virtual CEL as a replacement for in-person CEL. Few assessments indicate whether in-person CEL student learning outcomes (SLOs) can be achieved through virtual CEL. Purpose: This study assesses whether an in-person CEL cohort and a virtual CEL cohort achieved the SLOs for a CEL course. Methodology/Approach: The sample for the study is students in the 2019 in-person CEL cohort (n = 13) and the 2020 virtual CEL cohort (n = 13) of a CEL course. Students’ reflective writing is analyzed using focused coding to evaluate the extent to which students achieved the SLOs. Findings/Conclusions: Findings indicate that both cohorts achieved the SLO about career exploration. The virtual CEL cohort did not as thoroughly achieve SLOs on cultural differences, community leadership, and working with others for local impact. The groups utilized reflective practices differently. In this case, virtual CEL was less effective than in-person CEL. Implications: Virtual CEL is not an exact substitute for in-person CEL. Effectiveness in achieving civic-oriented SLOs is likely to improve through further modification of pedagogical approaches and supplemental content and interactions.

The University of Saskatchewan conducted an institutional self-assessment survey in the fall of 2013 and winter of 2014 to measure its capacity for community-engaged scholarship. This effort is part of a national initiative of eight Canadian universities (Community-Engaged Scholarship Partnership), working to change institutional policies and practices around community-engaged scholarship. This paper reports on the results of the University of Saskatchewan’s self-assessment survey completed by 159 participants across campus that include administrators, faculty, and professional staff. The participants report that there are strong practices of community-engaged scholarship throughout the University. However, there are also many opportunities to strengthen the support and capacity for community-engaged scholarship. Institutional leadership and support, for example, that is consistent and effective is required at multiple levels (department, college or school, university) in order for community-engaged scholarship to be recognized and rewarded in all academic processes. The University’s Community Engagement and Outreach Office at Station 20 West is one notable exemplar of community-engaged scholarship and practice; it is a good example of how students, faculty, and community are effectively supported in these activities.

Over the past 25 years, community engaged scholarship has grown in popularity, practice, and scholarship. A review of the literature suggests that a wide range of personal, professional, institutional, and communal factors (Demb & Wade, 2012) interact in ways that shape faculty members' perspectives on, conceptualizations of, and means of conducting community engaged work. To make sense of the potential number of factor combinations and inform more customized support for community engaged faculty, the authors discuss the merits and utility of faculty typologies. Q Methodology offers a way to create a typology that is capable of not only managing the complexity of faculty engagement, but also providing rich descriptions of varied points of view that do not oversimplify the phenomenon. The techniques and foundational assumptions of Q Methodology are described, making the case for Q as a good fit for developing a typology of community engaged faculty that more fully reflects multiple points of view. For America's colleges and universities to remain vital[,] a new vision of scholarship is required. What we are faced with, today, is the need to clarify campus missions and relate the work of the academy more directly to the realities of contemporary life. We need especially to ask how institutional diversity can be strengthened and how the rich array of faculty talent in our college and universities might be more effectively used and continuously renewed. We proceed with the conviction that if the nation's higher learning institutions are to meet today's urgent academic and social mandates, their missions must be carefully redefined and the meaning of scholarship creatively reconsidered. (Boyer, 1990, p. 13) Recognizing the criticism that higher education was growing more disconnected from and irrelevant to society by no longer addressing the heart of the nation's work (Delve, Mintz, & Stewart, 1990; Newman, 1985), Boyer (1990) issued a clarion call to institutions of higher education to remember their missions and to reconsider how scholarship is conceptualized. Colleges and universities around the country began heeding this call to broaden their notions of scholarship and to take seriously their responsibility to serve their wider communities (Fitzgerald, Bruns, Sonka, Furco, & Swanson, 2016; Kezar, Chambers, & Burkhardt, 2005). These efforts entailed critically reflecting on the role of community involvement in their institutions, especially with regard to the nature of faculty work (Bringle, Hatcher, & Holland, 2007; Saltmarsh, 2011; Stanton, 2008; Zlotkowski, 2011), and sparked the growth of the scholarship of engagement (SOE) movement. Since Boyer's landmark work, the scholarship on the scholarship of engagement has blossomed. Research on faculty engagement has focused on defining engagement (Boyer, 1990, 1996; Giles, 2008; O'Meara, 2002), examining dimensions of faculty life (Demb & Wade, 2012; O'Meara, 2008; Wade & Demb, 2009), exploring the impact of engagement on faculty (Rice, 2002; Rice, Sorcinelli, & Austin, 2000) and identifying activities that comprise faculty engagement (Glass, Doberneck, & Schweitzer, 2011; O'Meara, Sandmann, Saltmarsh, & Giles, 2010). Due to the range of engagement activities in which faculty and staff members participate, scholars have faced the challenge of determining which activities to emphasize (O'Meara et al., 2010), and how to ensure quality work (Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997) is made visible (Driscoll & Lynton, 1999). Expanding the scope of research from faculty to institutions, scholars have also examined the institutional context (Demb & Wade, 2012; Holland, 1997; O'Meara, 2005; Stanton, 2008; Wade & Demb, 2009), identified ways to integrate institutional research and learning within the broader context of their communities (Boyte & Hollander, 1996; Buzinski et al., 2013), and established key components to advance and institutionalize engagement efforts (Fitzgerald et al. …

This chapter presents selected findings from a qualitative research study on community engagement in Canadian higher education. Focusing on participants’ understanding of community engagement as a way to bring meaning to scholarly work and their positioning of community-engaged scholarship as a rejection of academic privilege, the author argues that participants’ understanding of engagement is mediated by neoliberalism and the discourse of new public management. The chapter also draws attention to the relationship between surveillance and privilege, questioning the ways in which inclusion of community in scholarly work might disrupt the neoliberalization of higher education.

Community-engaged learning or service learning has grown pedagogy in higher education and within engineering and related fields. The pedagogy integrates academic learning with service activities and partnerships with local or global communities. It provides a learning environment that is very well-matched with ABET across programatic outcomes as students can learn strong technical skills while developing teamwork, communication and leaderships skills. The community and human context provides rich learning experiences for contemporary social, global and ethical issues. . Evidence suggests that community-engaged learning also has the potential to increase participation among underrepresented populations within engineering, technology and computing. Evidence also shows that participants increase motivation to stay in engineering offering exciting opportunties for first-year programs. There are however many challenges integrating real community engagement into the classroom including meeting learning outcomes and partner needs. This interactive workshop will provide an introduction to community engaged leanring and use a recently developed model to explore approaches that seek to balance value to students and communities as well as resources that are needed from each. Resources, partnerships, benefits and potential barriers will be discussed to provide strategies for successful implementation at the participants' own institutions. The presenter is experienced in the field and has conducted more than 100 faculty workshops on the subject area.