Community-Engaged Learning
Strategy • Background • Next Steps • Available Resources
Strategy
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The Bonner Foundation has always upheld a goal of building and sustaining a campus-wide culture and practice of community engagement. Building on our work to seed and spread experiential learning, in 2018 the Bonner Foundation renewed an ambitious initiative to transform how colleges integrate community engagement across their curricula. This work builds on previous strategic initiatives, including efforts to seed community-based research, promote the development of minors and certificates, link high-impact teaching and learning with community engagement, and integrate students' culminating capstones with community engaged projects.
Since the launching of the Community-Engaged Learning Initiative, more than 40 colleges and universities in the national network have participated in a national learning community with a two-fold focus: (1) engaging faculty (as well as student leaders and partners) in linking courses with community engagement; (2) working on change initiatives to foster institutional and community infrastructure and culture that will support and sustain this work.
Moving past models that seed single service-learning courses, each campus has articulated a strategy that seeks to do one or more of the following:
Support faculty, staff, and students to create integrated, community-engaged issue or theme-based academic pathways that link or scaffold community-engaged learning courses and experiences which lead to a capstone-level, community engagement project. These pathways can be organized around an issue (e.g., food security), or theme (e.g., civic innovation). This work on creating an community-engaged academic pathway may focus on both individual course development and on formal academic programs (e.g., minors, concentrations, or certificates) that are linked to a departmental / interdisciplinary structure and sustained community-engagement partnerships managed by the campus-wide center.
Support faculty or a team of faculty members to create skill-based, community-engaged learning courses connected to a "consulting corps" internship or fellowship program (e.g., a marketing course that prepares select students to intern in a student-run "communications firm" that develops PR campaigns for non-profit clients; or a state and local government course that prepares select students to serve as fellows in a community policy institute that produces issue briefs and other policy research for local and regional organizations and government agencies); and,
Support faculty in creating or modifying individual courses to include community-engagement components, with an emphasis on courses that engage students in community-based research, capacity-building, and/or social action projects.
Additionally, led by a staff and faculty partner, each campus has identified important priorities for institutional and cultural change. Examples of change projects include:
Build relationships for campus-wide faculty engagement — help foster connections across departments and other units (e.g., Centers for Teaching and Learning) to recruit, train, and mentor faculty in community-engaged pedagogies.
Build the center and infrastructure for campus-wide faculty engagement — for instance by clarifying conceptualizations, working to approve new academic programs, manage cohorts of engaged faculty, etc.
Enhance community partnerships and projects that provide capacity building— especially those that allow partners to have their requests for research and academic work met through sustained connections with faculty and departments.
Track and promote quality of campus-wide faculty engagement — such as through community-engaged course inventories, course tracking or designators (e.g., GivePulse, Banner, etc.), work on the Carnegie Community Engagement Application process, etc.
Address institutional barriers to community-engaged learning, such as tenure and promotion change – as well as financial incentives and rewards for faculty, students and partners; interrelationship with institutional priorities (e.g., faculty diversity and hiring), etc.
Build community infrastructure to engage partners in reciprocal, co-educator roles – such as through collecting requests, working with collaboratives or collective impact models.
Engage students as colleagues with faculty and partners – and also work to foster sustained connections between faculty with the Bonner Program and other co-curricular programs.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Our current work builds on a series of prior initiatives designed to integrate civic education and community-engaged learning experiences into curriculum in ways that reach students campus-wide.
In 2004, the Bonner Foundation began work with 15 campuses to create models for civic engagement minors, concentrations, and academic programs, with support from the U.S. Department of Education and its Fund for Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE). Click to download.
Beginning in 1997, the Bonner Foundation led an effort to introduce and spread community-based research as a form of service learning. With nine years of federal funding from the Corporation for National & Community Service’s Learn & Serve America Program, we were able to provide sub-grants to participating campuses, hold annual gatherings for training and resource sharing, and publish a series of books and journals on community-based research.
In 2004, we worked with a group of fifteen campuses to develop civic engagement minors, concentrations or certificates. This three year effort was funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, and produced several publications, including “Civic Engagement at the Center” with the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
In 2011, we leveraged scholarship and momentum to mobilize teams of faculty, staff, students, and community partners to integrate community-engagement into high impact practices (HIPs). This effort brought those teams together each summer for a five day retreat for planning, training, and networking. Foundation staff worked closely with each campus to help design and implement their efforts, many of which included the development of service-learning courses.
In 2015, we launched a learning community focused on integrating community-engaged Signature Work into students’ experiences. With the progress of fifteen schools on this effort, we adopted the goal that all the schools in our network to integrate community-engaged capstone projects as an expectation for all Bonner Scholars, and expressed the goal that 20-25% of all graduating students would complete a community-engaged capstone project. In collaboration with the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), we co-edited a special edition of their Diversity & Democracy Digest on the theme of “Community-Engaged Signature Work.” We also held a gathering involving provosts and academic deans from twenty five institutions, along with their center directors, to deepen approaches for curriculum and institutional change.
More recently, we began to work with faculty to develop courses that teach social action with the intent of student teams designing and implementing a social action campaign as part of the course. This effort is being developed in partnership with Dr. Scott Myers-Lipton, a professor of sociology at San Jose State University and author of “Change! A Student Guide to Social Action.” At the University of Toronto, for example, 25 students in the course Community Engaged Learning: Critical and Creative Perspectives on the Non-Profit Sector partner with social justice organizations like tenant unions, community agriculture organizations, and worker cooperatives. Students engage in community problem-based learning, conducting campus research and designing advocacy projects. Recent initiatives include expanding community garden access, supporting campus food co-ops, and creating educational materials about meal plan options and food bank resources. As one faculty members involved in the Teaching Social Action Institute remarked, “Being around faculty that are interested in community-engaged learning is refreshing.”
In 2018, the Bonner Community-Engaged Learning Initiative began providing additional funding and support for campuses to advance curriculum, culture, and institutional change. > Since that time, 41 colleges and universities leveraged over $900K in grants to embed community-based research, social action, policy research, and problem-based learning into 150+ courses. More than 400 faculty members have been engaged in teaching, learning, and research efforts, including as faculty fellows working with their centers to catalyze and guide the wider involvement of their peers. Additionally, many institutions have worked to build out campus-wide infrastructure, such as course designators, tracking systems, and inventories. You can read more about their campus- and community-based work here.
Philosophy
We believe the next phase of community-engaged learning will need to build on a recognition that “teaching and learning are foreseen to be flexible, collaborative, project or challenge-based and cross-disciplinary.” We see the Bonner Program’s four-year developmental design as fitting this shift in the teaching and learning paradigm.We have seen increasing interest in how the Bonner Program model might be adapted for how schools seeking to integrate curricular and co-curricular education, training, and reflection with real-world engagement and problem solving.
The campus community-engagement movement face opportunities to expand community-engaged learning opportunities for their students but are not always sure how to effectively scale up their efforts. Every campus in the Bonner Network has faculty who have successfully designed and led individual community-engaged learning courses and who have embraced project-based learning with real-world partner organizations and communities. Every center in our network has staff with experience in leading this work but often not at the scale that this opportunity demands. As institutions face the challenge and opportunity to move past disjointed co-curricular community engagement to ones that are more integrative, developmental, and scalable, we are seeking to identify and develop models that are effective for students, faculty, campus, and community partners alike.
To guide and connect our work, in 2015 we adopted a network-wide aspirational goal of having 100% of Bonners complete a community-engaged capstone-level project in their junior and/or senior year. As of 2020, already 40% of programs were implementing this aspiration, with assessment efforts pointing to the positive impact of these project-based experiences. In 2026, data from the network-wide Student Impact Survey will further illustrate current practice. In addition, working towards the aspiration that 20-25% of each graduating class colleges and universities in the network complete a community-engaged capstone-level project, teams of faculty and staff continue to build out engaged coursework and pathways.
BUILDING OUR COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
At each institution – and across the national network – the Bonner Foundation seeks to support the development and flourishing of vibrant Communities of Practice. Thus far, over 150 faculty members have been involved in the campus cohorts. This year, we have also created a related national fellowship and webinar series, open to people from schools in and beyond the CEL Initiative. Participants, including experienced faculty and administrators, engage with higher level theory, models, and practice through cohort-based meetings. Learn more about the Advancing Community-Engaged Learning National Fellowship and Webinar Series here.
Additionally, the Bonner Foundation is supporting this work through a number of mechanisms including:
Building tracks at the Fall Directors Meeting and Summer Leadership Institute that will involve faculty and staff allies. These sessions will build a community of practice across the institutions, as well as support campus-based efforts.
Developing curriculum and training for faculty (and cohort members) in community-engaged teaching, learning, and scholarship. You can find facilitated session plans to use with your cohorts on the Bonner Wiki here.
Utilizing an online platform, called the Bonner Learning Community (a Mighty Networks site), where faculty, administrators, and others can share resources, ideas, models, analysis, and more with the staff and faculty principle investigators (PIs) and leaders for each campus.
Within the Bonner Wiki and Bonner Learning Community, we have also authored and shared web-based curriculum to support both in-person and remote community-engaged learning. On the Wiki, you can find twelve literature-rich instructional guides, designed especially for faculty (or students as colleague roles) to understand and implement community-engaged learning pedagogies and projects in their own courses and programs.
Community-Engaged Learning in Higher Education
Community-Based Research
Community-Engaged Scholarship
Community-Engaged Learning As High-Impact Practice
Developing Sustained Relationships and Projects with Community Partners
High-Impact Community Engagement Practices for Course Projects
Course Development for Community-Engaged Learning
Critical Perspectives and Inclusive Voices (explores issues of diversity, inclusion, equity, and pitfalls of CEL)
Engaging Students as Colleagues
Roles of Centers in Promoting Institutional Engagement
Leveraging Community Engaged Learning for Partners & Publications
Remote or Online Community-Engaged Learning Courses and Projects
Activities and Resources for (Remote) Community-Engaged Learning
ADDITIONAL Resources
On the Bonner Wiki, find a wide range of open source resources that Foundation and Network staff and faculty have developed and curated related to support this work. Visit these pages to find more: