Students see Value in Community Engaged Learning

 by Margaret Groarke

In 2019-20, we added a question about community engaged learning to the course and teacher evaluation survey for classes that were defined as community engaged learning. As you can see in the attached brief report, the great majority of students responded positively to CEL, saying it helped them learn the course material, gave them real world experience, changed their perspective, and otherwise was a valuable experience. 

In Fall 2019, 73% of the responses were positive. The most common categories of positive responses were: 

• Helped me understand course content (37 responses)

• Gave me real world experience (16 responses)

• Helped me understand importance of community engagement (14)

• Learned about issues and/or community (13)

• I enjoyed it (13)

• Chance to give back (10)

• Changed my perspective (10)

Many students said, in many different ways, that their community experiences made them think about things differently. One example: “Volunteering with homeless women changed my perspective on life in general because it made a huge impact on me and allowed me to realize how fortunate I am. I am very grateful for the experience.” 

In upper-level classes, students were more likely to be utilizing advanced skills they had developed, and connected their community service to their future careers. A COMM major reported: “I found this particularly rewarding to work for an actual client and complete a pitch simulation. Not only did it give our group an incentive to work extra hard, but we also were able to see what a future career in PR could potentially look like. I loved this aspect of the course.”

Kudos to the faculty who worked so hard to make these extraordinary learning experiences possible for our students. Anyone interested in developing a community engaged learning course can reach out to Dr. Margaret Groarke or Kathleen Von Euw for more information.  

The 2019-20 Report