Office for Undergraduate Research and Artistry

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About Community Engaged Learning

Community Engaged Learning is an educational pedagogy for equity-focused change on campus and in communities. There are many different approaches and definitions of Community Engaged Learning. We find this definition from the Ginsberg Center at the University of Michigan to be particularly helpful as description and orienting framework. Community Engaged Learning is: “Connecting coursework, academic research, & outside of the classroom experiences to community-identified concerns to enrich knowledge & inform action on social issues.”

It can be further described as:

  • A way that we educate for a more just, participatory, creative and liberatory future.
  • A way that we educate for equity-focused change on campuses and in communities. (Campus Compact, Engaged-Scholars Initiative)
  • A way that universities fulfill their obligations and missions to prepare ethical, effective, engaged, informed, and proactive citizens and community members.

Purpose:

  • To provide students, and the communities they belong to, with the values, skills, motivation, and knowledge to tackle complex shared problems in increasingly collaborative, creative, and liberatory ways.
  • “The partnership of college and university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching, and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.” (The Carnegie Foundation For The Advancement of Teaching)

Key Components: 

  • Rigorous scholarship and academic content linked to impact-focused community engagement.
  • Engagement components meet community-identified priorities (needs or goals identified by or with community partners). Community partners have power to shape or inform projects and processes. (adapted from The Swearer Center, Brown University)
  • Regular & supported critical reflection on engagement experiences that help guide learning in a few areas:
    • Self awareness – understanding oneself in relation to one’s environment, to others, and to broad socio-cultural and political systems.
    • Civic learning – ideas of the public good, democracy, and public and collective dialogue and decision making.
    • Academic content and course learning objectives.
  • Learning happens through engagement with texts, peers, and community partners.

What it looks like: 

Community Engaged Learning includes direct service with community-based organizations, research, teaching, advocacy, creative work, organizing and activism, and other activities taken with or at the request of community partners.

Colorado State University created and uses this Continuum of Engaged Scholarship showing varying levels of involvement, partnership, and co-creation between campus entities and off-campus community partners.

Learn More About Community Engaged Learning
& Service Learning

Key Organizations

IAESLCE Logo

IARSLCE: International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement

IARSLCE is an international organization whose expressed primary purpose is to cultivate, encourage, and present research across all engagement forms and educational levels. The Association promotes high quality trans-disciplinary research across a wide range of approaches and forms and builds the capacity of scholars, practitioners, and community partners to engage in such research.

Campus Compact logo

Campus Compact

Campus Compact is a national nonprofit organization. We are the largest and oldest higher education association dedicated to higher education civic and community engagement. Our members make up a force of thousands of presidents, faculty, researchers, students, and civic and community engagement experts at colleges and universities.

Imagining America

The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues.

By dreaming and building together in public, IA creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures.

Engagement Scholarship Consortium

Our goal is to work collaboratively to build strong university-community partnerships anchored in the rigor of scholarship and designed to help build community capacity. The Engagement Scholarship Consortium (ESC), a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization, is composed of higher education member institutions, a mix of state-public and private institutions.

Carnegie Classifications, Institutions of Higher Education (see Elective Classification for Community Engagement)

The Carnegie Classification® is a framework for recognizing and describing institutional diversity in U.S. higher education. Carnegie Elective Classifications are recognitions earned by institutions that have made extraordinary commitments to their public purpose. Institutions apply for recognition from the Carnegie Foundation through a particular Elective Classification theme and make extraordinary commitments to that theme. There are currently 2 Elective Classifications for which institutions can apply: the Elective Classification for Community Engagement and the Elective Classification for Leadership for Public Purpose.

Upcoming Opportunities

COMPACT24

Now is the Moment
Higher Education Civic & Community Engagement as the Way Forward

Campus Compact’s 2024 National Conference
April 7-10, 2024 in Denver, CO

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Radical Reckoning: Invoking the Elements for Collective Change
October 20-22, 2023 | Providence, Rhode Island

In partnership with College Unbound, AS220, the City of Providence, and a diverse local Steering Committee, Imagining America (IA) invites participants to gather in Providence, Rhode Island for the in-person 2023 IA National Gathering. Invoking the cleansing work of fire, the changing form of water, the steadiness of the earth, and the ethereal nature of air, the 2023 IA National Gathering conjures the elements to guide the radical work of reckoning with the past to create a future of collective liberation. 

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Engagement Scholarship Consortium’s 23rd Annual Conference

October 4-5, 2023
Pre-Conference Sessions: October 2 and 3 

Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

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