Questions?
Connect with our team.
Our team is working remotely and continuing our support of Community Engaged Learning (CEL) projects and placements. As always, feel free to contact us at cel@uwo.ca at any point and let us know how we can help you. Please visit www.uwo.ca/coronavirus for university-wide updates.
There are many opportunities for faculty and staff to engage in C
Collaborate with local and global communities to address community-defined needs and inspire authentic changes, while fostering the university-community relationship. Click here to discover what your colleagues are saying about the benefits of CEL at Western.
Incorporate Community Engaged Learning to:
- Utilize innovative teaching strategies to serve a public good
- Contribute to improved student learning outcomes as students apply course content to societal issues
- Help students build transferable skills to prepare them for post-graduate employment
- Offer students the opportunity to engage in self-directed learning
- Build connections with industry and community partners that can lead to research collaboration and other forms of engaged scholarship
Did You Know?
We supported over 39 CEL courses in 2022-2023. Check out our current CEL courses.
In 2022-2023, students in CEL courses engaged in a total of 55,982 hours to community projects
CEL at Western won the Pillar Innovation Award for Community Impact in 2017
Learning Outcomes From CEL Courses
CEL courses at Western provide unique learning opportunities for students. Below are 14 curricular CEL learning outcomes co-crafted by instructors who teach CEL courses in various Faculties at Western.
| Adaptability: Demonstrate flexibility and a willingness to adapt to changing environments, recognizing that community work is complex, unpredictable, and requires innovative thinking. | Collaboration: Collaborate as an effective team to realize shared visions and outcomes. |
| Communication: Communicate experiences in appropriate language to different audiences, including academic, professional, and the community. | Creativity: Reimagine or envision solutions to challenges provided by the community partner. |
| Creative problem solving: Identify community issues and brainstorm possible community-informed solutions. | Critical thinking: Gather information and identify connections between ideas to make informed decisions. |
| Knowledge translation: Create practical applications and/or distill community learning experiences into tangible, deliverables based on theoretical concepts relevant to the discipline. | Personal development: Engage in the process of improving one’s self through empathy development, professional ethics, and community-oriented action. |
| Planning: Manage group projects from vision to completion by employing goal setting, delegation, prioritization, time management, and organizational strategies. | Professional development: Identify and embody protocols of professional behaviour. |
| Professional scope: Awareness of their own scope of practice, knowledge, and abilities. | Reflection: Examine and articulate what they have learned and relate that learning to their own life experiences. |
| Social responsibility: Seek to understand societal issues, values, and needs specific to the community to which students are partnered and create strategies to act in the best interest of that community. | Value diversity and understand privilege: Acknowledge and understand complexities of privilege and oppression, while valuing the diverse voices of the community. |
Resources for Community Engaged Learning
Community Engaged Learning Community of Practice (CoP)
This group consists of faculty who teach curricular Community Engaged Learning courses. It is led by the Community Engaged Learning Coordinators on the Experiential Learning team, who facilitate lunch and learns with guest speakers and featured topics. For help with any questions, or to join this CoP, contact cel@uwo.ca.
Create a CEL course or opportunity today
Are you considering using CEL as a pedagogy for your course? Our team would be happy to connect with you to provide access and support for embedding CEL as a part of your course. Connect with us today!
More information on Experiential Learning
To learn about embedding other experiential learning opportunities into your work or to access general resources on incorporating EL principles, visit Experiential Learning at Western.
