S3 E20: Level Up Your Teaching with Community Engagement and Civic Learning 

Rachel: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast, a higher education podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University. I'm your host, Rachel Yoho, and in this episode I'm very excited to be joined by two guests from the Office of Community Engagement and Civic Learning here at George Mason. 

So I'm joined by the Director Kristen Wright and the Associate Director, Dr. Shauna Rigaud. So thank you so much, both of you for joining us. 

Kristen: Thank you for having us. Wonderful to be here. 

Shauna: Thank you so much for having us. 

Rachel: Can you just give us a little bit of a brief overview of the community engagement and civic learning office, or as we'll call it probably throughout the episode, CECiL? 

Kristen: Yes, I'll kick us off. So the CECiL office was formally launched in 2022, and it was a part of our [00:01:00] quality enhancement plan. And really through that plan, George Mason identified a specific focus on expanding the opportunities for students and faculty to do community engaged work during their time at George Mason, whether that's through student programs, curricular experiences, faculty teaching, engaged research. 

And also hoping that through that we would also be able to deepen the community partnerships amount of organizations that we're working with, the ways in which that those partner organizations can interface with George Mason and really deepen the relationships in that space. So we've been, we're, I guess that puts us at about three years now. 

So relatively new office. And we have a handful of signature programs. So our, we have signature student programs. These are all paid kind of internship like experiences, but our students are doing really, really meaningful work with local nonprofit organizations, generally for about eight to 10 hours a week during the academic year. 

And then in our engaged summer program, which is run by Shauna, doing that at a higher level up to 30 hours a week during that time, we also have some faculty development experiences that range from like one time attend this workshop, learn a little bit. Up to cohort-based [00:02:00] experiences where folks are working with us over the course of an entire semester or a few months at a time. 

And then we have a number of events that are really designed to be. Kinda exposure opportunities for folks to get a taste of what does it mean to do sort of civic engagement broadly or community engagement work in the area. So learn about different issues through an event series. 

We do call engage, learn about different organizations through things like our service fair. So trying to make sure that we've got opportunities from, Hey, what is this? Let's get to know you all the way up to really deep, meaningful, engaging opportunities for students and faculty to work with communities. 

Rachel: Yeah, that's great. Thanks Kristen. And for those of us who might be less familiar with the Quality Enhancement Plan or the QEP, it's part of a university's accreditation efforts. So we've had ones in the past at Mason that we're focused on like under. Graduate research and they last generally in the like six to eight year kind of range. So it's really an integral part of, of the university experience. 

Shauna, was there anything you wanted to add for this part? 

Shauna: Yeah, I'll just say that I also really [00:03:00] appreciate that the work of our office is about bringing together all of the other things. Right. That happens at Mason. And so, oftentimes when I explain our office to students as I talk about it, as one of the various ways that students can get involved in community service and acute community engagement. 

So our office works alongside, our faculty works alongside student groups, who are doing community service, working on alongside student researchers. Pulling together our partners. And so we really are about building a coalition of offices and programs that are thinking about how we can really push the needle on social justice in this area through community engaged experiences. 

Rachel: Absolutely. And if I can just add to that, Shana, I just wanna give a shout out to both of you and your office. I, you know, after attending your end of your [00:04:00] event, it's sometimes rare to see students as excited as they are about programming, about academic related or academic adjacent types of things, as I saw at this past year's end of year event. 

So massive congratulations to you for all of the impact and work that you do.  

Shauna: Thank you.  

Rachel: Yeah, as we're talking about this type of impact, if we step that back into the teaching space, it's a lot of work for instructors, for faculty to include a community engaged element or this type of community partnership in their, you know, pedagogical strategies in their teaching. 

 What are some of the benefits of making these rather large investments? 

Shauna: Yeah, I can kick it off here. I think when we think about community engaged teaching, we look at there being benefits for both faculty, students [00:05:00] and community partners on the faculty side, right? Like we're talking about innovation in teaching. Faculty members' work with community based organizations allows them to think differently about how they wanna bring material, how they want to engage students, and how they want to do learning in the classroom. And so that allows them a really interesting lens to now think about their student learning outcomes by incorporating community-based learning into the classes that they teach. 

We can also think about the ways that this kind of scholarship and teaching, right? Because community engagement with faculty is about a pedagogy, so we can also think about the ways that community engaged teaching and research really benefits the faculty members by deepening their connections to the community. And so as they're thinking kind of big picture about what's going on and what [00:06:00] kind of scholarship that they might be able to produce, they're able to look and work with communities to think about the on the ground impact for them. So we think about that for faculty. 

For students, it's also about that engagement, giving them hands-on experiences, professional development skills, and opportunity to think critically about social justice issues. And then for our community partners, they're also now sort of increasing their access to resources from working with the institution, right. As well as being able to build capacity in their own organizations, bringing new ideas, new energy to the work that they're already doing. And so we really think about this as everyone that participates kind of benefits from that in a variety of different ways, depending on what kinds of ways that you're engaging with community in your teaching. 

Kristen: Yeah, I echo everything Shauna said, and I think I appreciate the way she broke down the different audiences and how they're [00:07:00] all benefited by this type of learning. I feel like I say this jokingly in some ways, but like truly mean I think it's a high impact practice that is in some ways sort of a supercharged practice because of its ability to have this benefit that does hit all these different audiences. And when you hit that community impact piece and you're looking at students being able to do work that's like bringing real capacity to the communities that they work in, to the communities that they're living in for this amount of time, but is also bridging that gap between the things that they wanna do, the reason that they're in college. 

There's skills that they get to practice, things they get to try out for the first time. And connect that to like meaning making and what it means to be a member of a community and what it means to be a member of a society, and see themselves as agents of change. 

But if you're gonna do that and you can think about all the ways in which your teaching may be improved, there's some research that suggests that faculty who do community-based learning also just use active learning pedagogies more broadly in their teaching, even if that course isn't community engaged. 

Rachel: Yeah,  

I would think, 

Kristen: So we're, it's like you may  

Shauna: Mmhmm. 

Kristen: Supercharge all of your other courses, yeah, in [00:08:00] the process you may see that happen and students are learning better in that type of environment. We know they're retaining information, practicing it. And then a third group that could include partners but could exist outside of our partners, are employers are then seeing the skills that they wanna see from students too. 

And so I think, to just put a couple other examples to what Shauna already really well said. There's a lot of benefit sort of wrapped around that I think can make the added work and the time worth it. And I will say  

Shauna: Mmhmm. 

Kristen: It's al always more work at the start too. Once you get relationships going, you have a course built and designed with this pedagogy, you have partners that you work with, like it gets easier and you build that muscle memory of what it looks to do this, and then it's just a part of your typical pedagogy. But the benefits really are there to make it  

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. Especially when we're in an age of questioning the importance of higher education, of students questioning the relevance of the time and effort they put into their classes, their activities. We're not trying to sell them on it, but we're showing the skills, showing the relevance, showing that impact, I think is so, so valuable. 

But [00:09:00] let's talk about what are some of the best practices for community engagement? Or perhaps put another way, what are we actually doing when we're talking about community engaged teaching and how do we go about doing it? 

Shauna: There are a couple of things that I think about when I am thinking about the best practices for approaching this work. So I'll say like the first one that comes to mind is this idea about like, seeing the community as knowledgeable, as co-educators in this process. A lot of times when we kind of, the history of service has oftentimes lended this idea that we are working for folks. This idea of kind of like coming into communities and doing things to make them better. And so if we kind of flip that on its head, and understand that communities, folks that are dealing with the issues, folks that are in the trenches on the ground, right? Like they have as much knowledge about a subject as possible. We can flip that [00:10:00] to thinking about this as working with communities, as opposed to for. So I think about that as the first approach that's important in doing this work. 

And with that then leads to this idea that when designing a community engaged course experience, being able to align that work with the needs of the community, listening to community members, community partners, organizations about what do you need help with? What are the gaps? How can we support, right? And then being able to frame your work around that. 

The other thing I wanna add too, before Kristen, well, I know Kristen has some things that she wants to add too, but, the other thing I think about that I think is really important in terms of best practices, is also this idea of making sure that there are reflections for students, right? And so, within community engagement, you want to provide opportunities for [00:11:00] students to think about the work that they're doing, how it's impacted how it connects to the things that they're learning in class or to other issues. Their own ways of being, the kinds of ways that they understand certain things, and so making sure that there's reflection built into your course, your curriculum, those experiences for students. 

Kristen: You set up perfectly. I feel like one of the spots I always like to go with this question, which is making sure that if you're considering adding a community-based learning pedagogy to your course, to your teaching in some way, that it's aligned with the course learning objectives. So Shauna already talked about making sure it actually meets that community need and that we're really thinking about students working with, not for the organizations, the partnerships. 

But there was a long time where a lot of, I feel like the literature in the service learning space would talk about like hitting this magical 20 hours, if you're gonna do it. And I feel like that unfortunately started a trend of people just doing like adding on [00:12:00] hours to a course and it was find service wherever you want and just have students complete hours. And if they do 20 hours in the community, this like magical learning thing will happen, 

Rachel: Magical learning! All right. Our new thing. 

Shauna: Yeah.  

Kristen: Right, this magical. And they'll take away all these great things that we know can happen. But I think the more likely scenario and most of the sort of current research confirms that it needs to be aligned with the student learning outcomes, the course learning outcomes for the course. 

When students were, and this was even from just sort of my own graduate research, when students in interviews were talking about when it was just randomly assigned, they had to do things, there was no connection between the service that they were doing with a partner and what they learned in class. But when you identify specific learning outcomes or just one outcome for your course that is achieved by virtue of doing a service project or doing work with a partner, those are the places where the learning is really maximized, where students are applying those concepts. 

And then to Shauna's point about reflection, you're seeing that in the way that they're writing about it. You'll get better reflections when students understand why those two things are happening in the first place, why they're [00:13:00] doing this experience. And so it oftentimes, instead of thinking of it as an add-on, it truly can be a replacement for either an assignment that was in the course, a text today we're using. An expression that we sometimes use in the field is like "Service as Text." Like that experience is and should be thought of. So you could remove an entire book from a course if you're gonna add service. It shouldn't just be this thing that you're putting on top of. 

But really stepping back and looking at what outcome am I achieving through doing that? And I think one other thing that it's hard in the best practice space, like saying flexibility feels like not saying quite enough, but understanding if your course, your teaching style, whatever this thing is, has enough flexibility that the unpredictability of a community-based learning course. When you open up to experiential learning, you don't exactly know what's gonna happen. You're adding more variables. If you're instruction style, if the course itself isn't flexible enough. You know you're teaching a let's say a core course that has these very specific objectives, then you can't move those and there isn't an obvious way that one of those can be, will absolutely be [00:14:00] achieved and can be achieved in that case, then it's okay to decide like, this specific course isn't a good fit. But knowing if your style, your willingness for uncertainty, all these different things, because it does require a lot of flexibility and the willingness to adapt with students as the semester's going, adapt with partners as the semester is going, and just be willing to step back and say, we need to look at this a little differently and do that. 

Having that approach and involving the partners as early as you can in the design are some of the other things that I think really benefit. 

I dropped like four things there, Shauna. Where is there something I you wanna pick more up on? I feel like there is.  

Shauna: No! Because I think that that was perfect, right? Because I think in, in all of this, in this conversation, when we're talking about best practices, right? We're touching on all of the things that faculty are, and that we've heard from faculty, from students, from our community partners, and that we know from research, as this field has grown and has had more attention. I think that these are, these are spot on. We're, we're doing a good job. 

Rachel: Could you give us maybe a couple of examples? You know, and we talk about, and [00:15:00] especially when your office talks about, when I also, from the Teaching and Learning Center side, talk with faculty, there's different levels for their work with the CECiL office of their programming within their courses. 

So, you know, we go from kind of that baseline overview to a super high level service learning type of course. Can you walk us through what maybe some of the examples of that would be to give some tangible things of where people can think about where they might wanna be in the future? 

Kristen: Yeah, so when we were designing the office and our kind of curriculum, course designation process, we wanted to make it really accessible for faculty who haven't done this work before and are interested to have a place that they can start. And so we have three different course designations essentially from at the ground level exploration and those types of classes, we're looking for faculty to incorporate civic knowledge, civic identity, civic action, those concepts into their course, but it doesn't have to be through a service, a service learning, or community based learning experience. So this is a great way for [00:16:00] that faculty member who wants to get started but isn't quite ready to do work with a partner or needs time to build those relationships with a partner, but realizes that, making sure that, let's say, an engineering student, has the chance to learn about how zoning laws were written and how redlining maybe impacted a community and how there's still some work that's happening in that way to kind of undo some of those effects, how that impacts you as an engineer. Right. It's just like a off the top of my mind example that you could give. 

Incorporating that, don't have to use a partner right away, but what are some texts, what are some interviews? What are some sources that students can look through? And having there be some kind of demonstration of learning through a reflection or a group presentation or something that shows the learning from that course. That's what we're looking at, that introductory level. 

And then moving up to a community-based learning course. Of course, so this is for a faculty member who wants to start involving a partner or partners with their course, having students do something hands-on. The kind of changes during COVID I think have really expanded. And so sometimes I feel like my answers are like, if this isn't good for you, don't do it. Not discouraging, [00:17:00] this is gonna be a more encouraging answer. I think there's a lot more ways, and we've gotten more creative in how service learning can be incorporated in a course. So it doesn't necessarily have to look like students going two to three times a week to a site. We do encourage them to go when possible, but some work can be done virtually. 

So I think there's a lot more courses that can do this kind of work than could before 'cause we got creative during this time in different ways. But anyway, so that, that middle level yeah is looking at students who are doing what we think of as a more community-based learning experience. They're probably working with a partner either individually or as a group on some kind of project that both meets that student learning outcome and meets the community identified need. And we're trying to find that sweet spot. 

And then the highest level are kind of capstone like courses. We call it like a Mason Impact plus civic engagement course. But this is where students are generally doing original work with a partner. They have a research question that they co-designed with that partner. They get to produce something new for the first time. They get to do kind of that higher level. These are generally gonna be, again, smaller classes, major specific opportunities where students get to really, really dig in in [00:18:00] that space. 

And so if you're a faculty member just wanting to try it out, think about redesigning your course with that civic learning component, or if you're, again, operating at a really high level, maybe challenge yourself to think about how you could incorporate communicated research or something like that into the experience.  

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely, and I think it's important to also highlight here, we're often talking about, or almost all the time talking about our local communities. 

So, yeah. But as we talk about this, there are a lot of barriers. You know, we might be thinking about time, you know, the kind of learning curve for faculty to get into that service learning, community engaged learning type of instructional space, funding, all kinds of things. So how might your office be supporting Mason faculty with some of these common or these frequent barriers? 

Kristen: Yes. I'll start us off. So those three that you named, we find time, money, and knowledge about the pedagogy are really the three things that kind of stand in the way and we do the best we can. We've [00:19:00] designed a lot of our faculty benefits programs, experiences with those three things in mind. So from a knowledge perspective, as I alluded to a little bit earlier, but we have kind of a handful of faculty training or faculty development resources, many of which we partner with on the Stearns Center on to help provide that knowledge. 

If it's purely, I don't exactly know what incorporating reflection into my course would even look like, or I'm not sure that I'm connected enough to think of what issues would work with my course or defined partners. We have a lot of different sessions, again, from one time we have some content just living on our website, CECiL.GMU.edu, that has just basic videos that folks can watch right away and get some primers on what is this work, even lessons that they can do in their class that help with facilitating reflections and that sort of thing. 

Up to longer, I'm thinking of redesigning my course. Can you support me step by step through that process? Through our cohort experiences, we have everything in that space to try it again, provide that knowledge, and even some of the community around it. 'cause we can then connect those faculty with others who have done this work before and can give some suggestions, tips, things [00:20:00] they learned, that kind of thing. 

From a money perspective, we have a couple different process in place. One is a thing called Microgrants. For any of the courses that go through our designation process, it's up to $500 for your course. And that can cover things like speaker fees, if there's someone you wanna bring in, money to take students somewhere, if they need to reimburse a few students for travel, if that's a barrier for the students in the course who are taking the course as well. So to be able to provide that kind of resource for folks is something that we have. 

And then there are stipended experiences through things like our cohort. So if it's a little bit of money personally to be able to invest in this kind of professional development, that's something that we can offer as well. 

And then from a time perspective, we are able to assist folks in some of those logistics of the course. So if a course goes through our designation process, we can help with finding partners getting matched even coming in and if there's content you would want someone from our team to be able to facilitate for your class, we can do that. To be able to remove one lesson that you have to plan, say for your course, and we can step in and do that. You know, to remove a little, a couple of those barriers. And so we've really tried to design the [00:21:00] office with thinking of those different things in mind. 

Rachel: Yeah, that's great. So I think here what we're really looking at today with our keystone concept is connection. You know, we have, obviously the connection with community. They're building authentic connections with our communities, our community partners, or even just building those connections into our courses, the relevance. But also, of course as we talk about this, the connections with the CECiL office for support and really that peer element that we were just discussing. Having instructors talk with each other. You know, teaching can be very isolating and especially when you're trying out something new, you know, getting some of those, Hey, I learned this, I tried this. Maybe here's some tips and recommendations can be really valuable. So talking with each other as well. 

So thank you both for joining us. I really appreciate your time and your insights. This was, been a lot of fun, at least for me. Hope it was for you, too.  

Shauna: Yeah. Thank you so much. I had a great time talking about this work. 

Kristen: Yeah. Same. Thank you so much for having us.  

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. [00:22:00] And thank you everyone for listening. Please catch our next episode. We're posting every two weeks during the fall and spring semesters. So I hope we'll have you back in this space in whatever way that you listen, and we'll talk about other keystone concepts in teaching. 

So thank you so much.