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The following criteria are the core, essential aspects of community-engaged learning pedagogy.

• The course incorporates an experience, assignment, or project that interacts with, and benefits, communities beyond the campus. The most well-known form, service-learning, integrates community service into the classroom experience, but there are several ways to teach for community impact! Some other models that work on the block include: capacity-building projects, community-engaged research, consulting for the public good, learning from and with community, place-based engagement and co-creative expression and storytelling.
• Community-engaged work is an integrated learning component of the course, enhancing and enhanced by knowledge from the curriculum. The course provides structured opportunities for students to learn from the experience, and academic assessment incorporates learning from community experience.  This does not mean that the community-engaged component needs to be graded separately, but that it informs students' learning on which they will ultimately be assessed.

Still not sure if the class you teach is community-engaged learning? Ask yourself the questions below.  Please note that the spirit of the tag is capturing and sharing courses taught with a community-engaged orientation to teaching and learning.  It is about identifying examples and stories of efforts to ensure higher education has a public purpose, prepares students to be engaged citizens, and bridges academic theory and real-world practice. It is not about gate-keeping courses based on the ticking off of checkboxes.  

√ Do students in my course engage with communities beyond the campus?  This can be direct interaction (e.g. leaving campus and interacting with community members in-person) or indirect engagement (e.g. completing a project for a community organization).  This does not need to be a local community, though we encourage local engagement.  This can be other geographic communities domestic or international, as well as communities of identity, shared experience or concern, and online communities. 

√ Who benefits from the community experience, assignment, or project?  The intent of community-engaged learning it not only to study the real-world (community as an "object" of study) but to benefit communities beyond the campus through investing academic pursuits in community-driven, societal priorities and challenges.  Given the condensed nature of the block, sometimes this community benefit is also deferred and happens after the block.  For example, this might be bringing in community leaders and activists to share with students how they might get involved in an issue, or visiting a place with the intent to inspire students to respond to a societal concern in an ongoing way.  

√ Did students learn course-related disciplinary knowledge or skills from the community experience, assignment, or project?  Community-engaged learning is an evidence-based pedagogy that has been demonstrated to enrich students' learning, and should have explicit learning goals related to course content.  Engaging in community experiences or projects unrelated to the subject matter toward other goals (student bonding, for fun, etc.) is a worthy pursuit, but would not be considered community-engaged learning.