Course Designation
Definition
Community Engaged Learning (CEL) is an educational approach that involves experiential learning and has several key components:
- Engages with community to address a social problem or unmet societal need
- Produces mutual benefits for community and students
- Integrates community engaged work and academic learning objectives
- Prepares students for engagement, including critical analysis of the structures leading to the community need and best practices for ethical engagement
- Provides reflection opportunities to critically examine the course's community work, related public issues, and/or one's civic role.
Benefits of CEL Designations
University of Utah faculty may apply to have their courses designated as community engaged learning (CEL) in the schedule of classes. Identifying courses in this way is beneficial for you and your students. Among other things, the CEL designation:
- Helps students see that they are enrolling in a CEL course when they register.
- Earns funding to support course community engagement efforts
- Brings greater visibility to the practice of community engaged learning at the University of Utah.
- Provides data to track these courses and identify the faculty and students who engage in this meaningful practice.
- Enables the CEL Team to document the benefits of this pedagogy for students, communities, and faculty, and report those benefits to administrators, community partners, donors, and others.
Fostering Civic-Minded Graduates
Taking CEL designated courses helps students become civic-minded graduates. The CEL Team assess learning outcomes - or civic competencies - across the CEL curriculum. These competencies include: civic societal awareness, civic personal awareness, civic habits, civic skills, and civic values. Each civic competency has three criteria with outcome scales for evaluation.
Course Designation Process
The Community Engaged Learning (CEL) Curriculum Committee oversees the review process for both new CEL designations and 5-year reviews of CEL designated courses. Applications are reviewed according to criteria described in the rubric below. In addition to meaningful community-based learning, the CEL Committee is looking for robust CEL-related learning outcomes, evidence of reciprocal dialogue among faculty and potential community partners, and consistent reflection opportunities to contemplate broader societal issues related to the discipline.
New CEL Course Designation
Community Engaged Learning (CEL) designated courses apply academic concepts in real world settings to address unmet societal needs. To get the official CEL designation on a course, please submit an application.
Renew CEL Course Designation
Like Gen Ed Designations, CEL Designations are reviewed every 5 years. This process is necessary to ensure our University of Utah CEL database is accurate and that CEL best practices are utilized campus-wide. It also allows for a better understanding of the variety of community partners that UofU faculty are working with, and for the collection of student artifacts for CEL Learning Outcomes assessment. The CEL Curriculum Committee will share detailed instructions via email to the current instructors and academic leaders of CEL classes that need to undergo a 5-year review.
Deadlines
Materials must be submitted online by the following dates for consideration:
New Designation Applications
Fall classes: March 1
Spring classes: October 1
Summer classes: February 1
Existing CEL Course Designations
The review process is done every fall and spring semester
September 1 & February 1 respectively.