Community Engaged Pedagogy

OVERVIEW

The Office of Community Partnerships (OCP) supports faculty in developing and implementing teaching community-engaged courses, assignments, and assessments. Organized around a community of practice (CoP), OCP brings together faculty with varying degrees of expertise and experience multiple times a year to discuss and workshop course and assignment design, as well as other matters related to community-engaged learning, from the theoretical to the practical.

Members are offered professional development opportunities that include reading and discussion sessions, presentations by visiting scholars, networking sessions with existing and potential community partners, round-table discussions with experienced scholars whose work promotes community engagement, and assignment workshops. Members of the workshop also have access to one-on-one support on course, syllabus, and assignment design. The CE CoP accepts interested faculty at all levels, and participation is compensated.

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard has been on the faculty of UMass Amherst’s English Department since 2012. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the program in composition and rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison an MA in English from San Francisco State University and a BA in English from the University of Southern California. Her research is situated at the intersection of literacy studies, multilingual writing, and language ideologies.  

Professor Lorimer Leonard’s current research focuses on the relationship between community-engaged writing and critical language awareness. These interests have guided several literacy projects with the International Language Institute of Massachusetts (ILI), studies of which have been published in Community Literacy Journal, College English, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Composition Studies, and on ILI’s blog. 

Her past scholarship includes research on the transfer of writing knowledge (College Composition and Communication, College English); language identities and institutional surveys (Journal of Language, Identity & Education); and the literate practices of multilingual migrant writers (Mobility Work in Composition, Written Communication, College English, Research in the Teaching of English). Professor Lorimer Leonard’s monograph, Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy, won the 2019 Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. 

Professor Lorimer Leonard teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on language diversity, literacy studies, writing pedagogy, and research methods. She served as UMass Amherst Writing Center Director from 2012-2016 and UMass Amherst Writing Program Director from 2020-2022. In 2017 Professor Lorimer Leonard received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass Amherst.  

                                             View the recording below!

Dr. Linnea Beckett is an anthropologist of education with expertise in decolonial feminisms, informal learning and community-engaged methodologies.  She is currently the assistant adjust professor and director of the Apprenticeship in Community Engaged Research (H)ACER Program at UC Santa Cruz.  She co-designed (H)ACER as an anti-racist, anti-colonial community research and learning program to support specifically first generation, BIPOC, and transfer student success at UC Santa Cruz. 

Dr. Beckett runs community-engaged research projects through the (H)ACER program, forging deep community partnerships and supporting undergraduate research opportunities.  Today, she will share her approach to building ethically-oriented community partnerships and draw from current research with a one-acre immigrant-led community garden and an international groundwater sustainability collaborative to highlight student and community experiences in these collaborative efforts.  She will frame her talk as a provocation for scholars and educators toward envisioning/building/sustaining life affirming community-university relationships.  

                                          View the recording below!

RESOURCES

Vanderbilt University’s step-by-step guide to community engaged teaching

The Craft of Community-engaged Teaching and Learning, by Welch, M. and Plaxton-Moore, S. (2019) [1] 

The Resources page of the Campus Compact website (including syllabi)