Our Community-Engaged Learning Framework
CommunityShare’s Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) Framework is designed to guide rigorous, relevant, real-world learning that emerges from the intersection of curiosity, community, and meaningful contribution.
This approach empowers learners to engage deeply with their communities, build durable skills, and prepare them for success in school and life.
When learning is driven by our students’ curiosities and enriched through relationships with the people and places in our communities, there are infinite possibilities to collaborate, learn, contribute, and thrive.
These elements are not linear. Rather, they ebb and flow throughout learning experiences, serving as anchors and guides in nurturing our students, our communities, and ourselves through meaningful Community-Engaged Learning experiences.
Driven by Curiosity
Community-engaged learning experiences are co-designed with each learner and community partner based on individual curiosities. The term “curiosities” refers to a broad set of motivations and inclinations: wonders, passions, values, needs, dislikes, joys, and aspirations.
Each of us is motivated to learn when learning is relevant to our curiosities. When each learner acts as the protagonist of their own learning journey, they ask the questions, eagerly explore, experiment, reflect, persevere through challenges, and grow. Curiosity-driven learning promotes self-discovery, establishing the foundation of identity upon which we build agency and meaningful lives of our own design.
Indicators:
- Educators, learners, and community partners readily share and explore their curiosities and interests.
- Learners follow their curiosities, making decisions about what, when, where, and/or how they learn
- Learners, educators, and community partners consistently document and reflect on their learning throughout CEL experiences to promote self-discovery and deeper learning
Enriched by Community
Community-engaged learning experiences build relationships between the people and places of our unique communities. Learning is deepened and made far more complex and meaningful when we activate the knowledge, skills, and wisdom of our community members, as well as the cultural, natural, and social aspects of our communities. Community-engaged learning experiences weave together people and places in the spirit of reciprocity, belonging, joy, and meaningful connection because who you know is often more important than what you know, and engaging with people and places outside of our immediate network exposes us to new ideas and ways of being, expanding the possible futures we can imagine for ourselves and our communities.
Indicators:
- Educators and learners utilize a variety of strategies for establishing connections and building relationships with community members whose knowledge, skills, experiences, and interests align with their curiosities and learning goals.
- Educators and learners co-create learning experiences with community partners by establishing a shared vision, clearly communicating expectations, and exploring the mutual benefits of the experience.
- Educators and students connect learning to the specific environmental, cultural, and/or social aspects of the community.
- Students, educators, and community partners understand the significance of social capital and explicitly practice relationship-building skills.
Making Authentic Contributions
Our students, educators, and communities thrive when learning is in service of contributing to something larger than ourselves. Community-engaged learning creates the space for young people to weave their gifts, wisdom and wonders with those of community members in ways that co-create authentic value and learning for all involved. Making authentic contributions also sparks purpose, ownership of one’s learning, empathy, and a lifelong civic mindset.
INDICATORS:
- Students have opportunities to actively listen to the challenges, aspirations and goals of their community
- Students produce work that matters deeply to themselves and others in the broader community.
- Student work takes on formats and real-world expectations that connect with audiences beyond the classroom.
- Students are continuously reflecting and iterating based on regular feedback from the community.
- Student work delivers value to their community through systemic, critical and/or creative thinking.
