Abstract:

Community-engaged pedagogy offers a rich, authentic, and motivating context for learning that stimulates personal and academic growth of both students and instructors. By studying and addressing real-world problems facing communities—whether related to health, the environment, or social justice—student learning is transformed from a passive to an active form of engagement that is not only complex and challenging, but also highly relevant. Such competency-focused learning provides space for impactful service to learners’ communities and rewarding and grounded experiences. This contribution describes the practical decisions involved in planning, designing, and executing community-engaged pedagogy, which differs from service learning given its emphasis on the co-production of knowledge. Different models of community-engaged pedagogy exist, but studies that compare them are virtually non-existent. Moving to close this gap, two distinct models of high-quality, community-engaged pedagogy are explored in terms of their learning outcomes, learning experience, and benefit to the community. A community-based model seeks ad-hoc opportunities for individual classes to collaborate with a community partner on solving a problem that is relevant to that community; this model often builds on existing relationships between individual instructors and community groups to introduce students to problem-based learning opportunities. A partnership-based model, in contrast, builds on institutional infrastructure and an educational vision that promote the system-level integration of community-engaged pedagogy into the learning experience of students by building and maintaining robust, long-term partnerships within communities. The factors and conditions needed to support each of these two models are discussed, along with recommendations regarding the broader application of each model in practice, including areas in need of greater development, testing, and investment.

Keywords:

Higher education, elementary and secondary education, pedagogy, community-engaged, community partnerships, real-world problems.