community engagement
The Carnegie Foundation has described community engagement as “the exchange of knowledge and resources between higher education institutions and their larger communities for mutual benefit, in a context of partnership and reciprocity.” This definition captures very well the common purpose that all of these courses share, which is to provide students with the opportunity to engage in service and social action as an integral part of their learning within an academic discipline.
The kind of teaching and learning that distinguishes this group of courses has been described by a variety of terms: service learning, academic-based social action and community-based learning. Regardless of the language, your participation in one of these courses as a student will offer you the exciting opportunity to address real problems in our society and to understand the larger context of those problems through the lens of a particular academic discipline. In the process, you will also learn more about yourself and your deepest values.
Jan Term lends itself particularly well to community engagement. The focus on a single course and the flexibility of class scheduling make it easier to incorporate a social action component into the curriculum. As a participant in a community engagement course, you will be contributing a minimum of 30 and up to 150 hours of service at a local, national or international nonprofit organization, as well as attending the normal classroom hours of a traditional course. (See the individual course descriptions for specific requirements.)
The following is a small sample of the kinds of social action opportunities that might be part of your learning: discovering what life on the streets is really like while serving as a friend and mentor to homeless youth at a shelter in Berkeley; learning about issues of racial discrimination while providing legal advocacy and English translation for undocumented immigrants; learning about the challenges of growing up in the inner city while working as a teacher’s assistant and student mentor in a school in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood; finding out about poverty in the developing world through teaching and planning activities for children at an orphanage in the Dominican Republic; and learning how the issue of affordable housing has an impact on the poor as you take part in a Habitat for Humanity build in rural Contra Costa County with your classmates and professor.
Although the use of the language of community engagement in higher education is relatively recent, the ties between this approach to teaching and learning and the Catholic, Lasallian and liberal arts traditions of Saint Mary’s College are obvious. The long history of Catholic social teaching on the common good, the Lasallian emphasis upon education as a force for service to the poor and social change, and the liberal arts’ goal of educating active and informed citizens all point toward the kinds of courses that the theme of community engagement intends to promote.
