CESI’s Community Engaged Teaching and Learning (CETL) program supports many undergraduate and graduate courses-based partnerships each semester involving hundreds of students and several community partners. These courses provide meaningful collaboration opportunities for all involved, and high impact educational experiences for students in learning basic and advanced theory, principles, and practices of critical community engaged scholarship.
Impact is at the core of the partnership between the Guelph Black Heritage Society (GBHS) and the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI). What started out as a targeted collaboration for an on-campus project spread like wildfire, initiating a web of activities and relationships that are sparking social change.
Melissa Tanti, Coordinator of Community Engaged Learning with CESI, recently published Creating a contact zone: Negotiating the boundaries of an urban classroom. In this co-authored journal article, she reflects on her experience teaching a community engaged learning course in humanities at Ryerson. She raises critical questions about the role of instructors, and describes her efforts to foster students' self-development by anchoring their learning in community engagement.