INTEGRATION WITH LEARNING AND RESEARCH

How might we build the capacity of our faculty and students to meaningfully integrate community-based work into teaching, learning, and scholarship?

 


To purposefully impact our community or students, we believe community engagement must be integrated with the core intellectual pursuits of higher learning. To impact community, CC must leverage our greatest public asset - knowledge learned in, and alongside, the classroom and created through research. To impact students' development into lifelong citizens, students must have the opportunity to learn and grow from their engaged experiences in intentional, structured ways.

To enable community-engaged pursuits within the classroom and research agendas, the CCE will work to expand the capacity of interested faculty by providing intellectual and practitioner support in each stage - knowing what to do and how to do it, making it happen, making it better, and sharing it with others. In particular, we will work to "Build on the Block" by seeking to better understand, adapt to, extend, and leverage a condensed, immersive course format for community impact. This work should and will be done in deep partnership with our resident experts on how to best integrate public work into the block - CC faculty. Lastly, recognizing some of the inherent limitations of the block in sustaining community work, we have a rich opportunity to integrate community-based learning and research into co-curricular spaces, as well as meaningfully connect students' curricular and co-curricular experiences.

Goals

  1. Enhance knowledge of community-engaged pedagogies and methodologies.
  2. To support learning goals and research agendas, connect faculty and students to community-based organizations and needs in Colorado Springs and the Pikes Peak Region.
  3. Develop and offer resources to support community-engaged teaching, learning, and research.
  4. Cultivate communities of praxis - groups that support one another in integrating theory and practice.
  5. In partnership with faculty, integrate community-based work and teaching, learning, and research in and alongside the classroom.

Strategic Initiatives

Faculty Conversations

In this blockly lunch-and-learn, a faculty presenter or small panel shares their engaged teaching or research with interested faculty from across the college. This series is intended to support faculty who would like to learn more about community-engaged teaching and research on the block format, meet like-minded colleagues, and discover faculty projects with which they can get involved. These lunches are intentionally informal to enable faculty to ask questions and dialogue with one another, explore how to implement engaged models, and discuss possible collaborations. Critically, these lunches also provide a space to share and celebrate the engaged work of faculty.

facultyconversations
In a 2018 Faculty Conversation, faculty from diverse disciplines discuss the Fountain Valley Water Project

Publicly Engaged, Actionable Knowledge (PEAK) Project 

The PEAK Project bridges campus knowledge to community impact by connecting CC educators to nonprofit partners for community-engaged learning classroom project. The PEAK Project is a match-making service, facilitated through paired rounds of Calls for Interest from faculty for courses (one semester in advance) and from 100+ community partners for CEL course project ideas. To each audience, we share opportunities – courses seeking partners, partners seeking academic partnerships. When we receive proposals, the CCE engages in broad and targeted recruitment in an effort to “match” courses with partners.

Incorporated Strategies

  • Leverage faculty experienced in community-engaged work
  • Offer integrative experiences that fuse learning, research, and engaged action
  • Heighten awareness of community-identified needs, organizations
  • Build working knowledge of faculty research and teaching interests
  • Centralize information to enable and promote partnerships
Report an issue - Last updated: 10/22/2024