Since 1999, CELO has trained more than 200 faculty members from every school/college in community-engaged learning pedagogy and practice.

Our Faculty Fellows for Community-Engaged Learning program is a mix of facilitated discussions, panel presentations, readings from the field of community engagement, and review of sample syllabi and SL assignments. The schedule consists of one day-long retreat in January, one lunch session each in February, March & April, and a concluding day in May. Throughout, faculty will have opportunities to plan and workshop their own community-engaged course ideas with peers and mentors. Faculty from all units — and at all ranks — are encouraged to apply, including Lecturers; preference is given to applicants who have a specific course in mind for development as community-engaged learning. Applications are due in mid-November of each year.

Faculty Fellows Sample Curriculum

• December Lunch: Project Conceptualization – Identifying Hopes, Goals, Capacity and Constraints
• January Workshop: Project and Partnership Development
• February Lunch: Communicating SL to Students and Partners
• March Lunch: Preparation and Reflection
• April Lunch: Project Management and Communication
• May Workshop: Culminating Reflection and Assessment

We offer workshops for faculty, both beginning and advanced, as well as for departments and other academic units. We are happy to tailor a workshop to a group's needs, and will also gladly do visits and in-course workshops for students once a course is established. (Learn more about these and other in-course supports).

Possible workshop topics include:

• Overview of Community-Engaged Learning
  What is community-engaged teaching & learning? Learn the variety of forms community engagement takes at UVM and how these courses can easily fulfill the Global Citizenship General Education requirement. Examples from units across disciplines will illustrate the value and benefits of community-engaged learning for students and faculty.
• Laying the Foundation for Community-Engaged Teaching
  There are many small steps that faculty can take in current courses to move towards service-learning in future semesters.  Learn about the “spectrum of engagement” and identify easy ways to incorporate a community focus now to build for later.
• Critical Reflection
  An introduction to using critical reflection to support the learning goals of community-engaged courses. Critical reflection involves activities and assignments that support students in observing and analyzing their community-engaged work, help them learn deeply from experiential components of the course, and connect those experiences to course content and to the discipline more broadly.
• Teaching Transferable Skills
  Students often struggle to recognize the applied and integrative skills they are gaining through community-engaged learning.  Learn how to foreground these transferable skills in your community-engaged course, and help students not only understand but also showcase their service-learning experiences in resumes and job interviews.
• Community-Based Research & Engaged Teaching
  Join us to learn about how to conduct research for community partners within academic courses — a significant learning experience for students, and a viable alternative to other forms of service-learning. In this workshop she'll share lessons learned by speakers, how they connected with partners, and how CBR within their courses has dovetailed with their scholarship.
• Service-Learning & Sustainability (SL/SU Courses)
  This workshop addresses the interconnections between sustainability and service-learning, describing their service-learning projects, how they connect to the sustainability learning outcomes, and how their SU experiences were enhanced by service-learning.
• Approaches to Community Engagement
• Building Effective, Reciprocal Community Partnerships

Our work is to support faculty; we can meet individually at your convenience about service-learning project design, partnership development, community-engaged teaching – or just brainstorming possibilities. We will review syllabi, suggest resources, run plausible scenarios, find examples in your discipline – you name it. This is often our favorite activity: we get to help imagine exciting pedagogical opportunities, without having to do the subsequent hard work of nailing it down and then grading the student work.

We convene groups of faculty and staff around specific issue areas to develop new and interrelated opportunities for UVM students to engage with the community as part of their academic experience.

We are also happy to talk with groups of faculty — with shared interests or within a department or program — about our services, collaborations, partnerships, and other opportunities.