Procedures for Tagging CEL Courses

The deadline for tagging fall semester 2020 CEL courses is April 10, 2020.

What is CEL?

Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) builds on partnerships between institutions of higher education and surrounding communities to identify and work with issues that have both academic and public life dimensions. CEL is an instructional strategy that offers students the opportunity to apply what they learn in a course to a real-world issue, and to reflect in a classroom setting about their community-based experience. CEL is considered a high-impact educational practice for its positive impact in the areas of deep learning, active collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, and personal gains.1

Why is Tagging of CEL Courses Valuable?

With the recent establishment of the Office for Community Partnerships (OCP), Kenyon has made an institutional commitment to promote CEL as a useful instructional strategy to enrich our pedagogical practices. Tagging of CEL courses is valuable to the goal of achieving, for Kenyon, national standing as an institution that supports and promotes Community-Engaged Learning. Tagging CEL courses will benefit student, faculty, and the College in meaningful and significant ways:

1. Student Benefits:

Facilitate integration of learning across courses
Promote engagement with “big questions”
Development of core competencies in civic engagement 2
Facilitate student curricular planning
Provide a credible mechanism to build credentials for post-graduate undertakings

2. Faculty Benefits:

Provide a coherent mechanism to facilitate advising/mentoring of students with interests in community engagement
Facilitate intra-institutional connections to invigorate and enrich pedagogies
Visible mechanism for reward and recognition

3. Institutional Benefits:

Objective recruitment “attractor” for socially aware students
Mechanism to support young faculty recruitment and retention
Benefits to reputation and institutional public image

1 "High Impact Educational Practices, What They are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why they Matter," by George D. Kuh, Washington DC: AAC&U, 2008). For additional resources and research, visit the Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) website at www.aacu.org/leap.

2 These core competencies include: civic knowledge (i.e. knowledge of government processes, citizen’s rights and responsibilities, connections between scholarship and the real world (civic and natural), etc.; civic skills (i.e. critical analysis of causes, democratic decision-making, community organizing, communication and research skills, leadership and management skills, assessing feasibility of change, teamwork); civic practices (community service, project planning, integration of knowledge to inform actions, civility, communication strategies); civic inclination (i.e. respect for human dignity, empathy, open mindedness, tolerance, ethical integrity, tolerance, sense of responsibility, becoming part of the civic life of one’s of broader community). "Insights from Core Competencies in Civic Engagement. A Working Paper in the Center for Engaged Democracy’s Policy Paper Series."