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Faculty Initiatives and Opportunities

Interested in community engaged teaching or hosting a community engaged event? Let us be a resource to you! Here are some other ways to get involved:

Consider adding a community engagement component to your existing course or a course you're developing. Contact us at claoce@temple.edu for planning support.

  • Check out our faculty resources for community engagement.
  •  Consider applying for the CLA Engaged Teaching Fellowship!

Let us know about exciting work you and/or your students are doing in the community through the TU Community Engagement Portal.

Nominate your colleagues for the annual CLA Faculty Award for Excellence in Community Engagement.

Request a class visit from community engagement! Our offerings include:

  • 20-Minute Introduction to North Philadelphia & OCE Overview: Provides context on North Philadelphia and an overview of services and programs offered by the CLA Office of Community Engagement.
  • 60-Minute Introduction to Community Engagement: Offers context on North Philadelphia and presents frameworks for understanding our role as community members.
  • 60-90 Minute Community Engagement Preparatory Training: Delivers context on North Philadelphia and equips participants with tools for community-based interactions, best practices for asset-based community engagement, and/or research.

What is Community Engaged Learning?

Community Engaged Learning can:

  • Support student engagement and retention of content through real world applications.
  • Support career readiness by helping students explore potential career paths, build social capital, and/or gain transferrable skills.
  • Reinvest university resources and human capital into surrounding communities impacted by long-term disinvestment.
  • Strengthen reciprocal community connections.

Community engaged learning courses:

  • Meaningfully engage one or more external partners in the execution of course learning objectives, while providing tangible benefit to the partner(s).
  • Provide structured reflection for students on their learning goals.
  • Enhance student retention of academic content and cultivation of writing, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.
  • Build stronger relationships between students, faculty, and community members.

Class Formats:

  • Individual: Students pick from a list of organizations to complete an internship-style placement or regular volunteer activity.
  • Field Experience: A class takes one or multiple visits to an org to learn more about their work and engage in a related activity benefiting the org.
  • Class Visits: Individuals from the organization or its constituents come in during class time to participate in a class discussion or activity.
  • Class Project: Students apply course learning to develop a project or demo for a targeted community and visit that community to share the project.

Faculty Resources

  • Cress, C. M., Collier, P. J., & Reitenauer, V. L. (2013). Learning Through Serving: A Student Guidebook for Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Across Academic Disciplines and Cultural Communities.
  • Donahue, D., Plaxton-Moore, S. (2018). The Student Companion to Community-Engaged Learning: What You Need to Know for Transformative Learning and Real Social Change. http://libproxy.temple.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=1848003&site=ehost-live&scope=site&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_cover
  • Gelmon, S. B., Holland, B. A., & Spring, A. (2018). Assessing Service-Learning and Civic Engagement: Principles and Techniques, Campus Compact, 2018. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5508400.
  • Stoecker, R. (2003). Community-Based Research: From Practice to Theory and Back Again.
  • Welch, M., Plaxton-Moore, S. (2019). The Craft of Community-Engaged Teaching and Learning: A Guide to Faculty Development. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5892329.
  • Zlotkowski, E., & Saltmarsh, J. (2011). Pedagogy and Engagement. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt5qz.13
  • Zlotkowski, E., & Saltmarsh, J. (2011). Service-Learning and the Introductory Course: Lessons from across the Disciplines. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt5qz.17