Community-based learning programs

Community-Based Learning Website Tour - August The Program for Community-Based Learning offers support for: Service-Learning: Service-Learning is a high impact practice that engages students with course material, while also developing civic responsibility.

Community-Based Research: Community-Based research collects data that is used to improve services and programs offered to the community through the process of collecting and analyzing data, while allowing students to practice research and problem-solving skills. Community-Based Learning Fellows Program: A year-long faculty development program designed to explore best practices in community-based learning and to revise an existing course to develop a service-learning or community-based research component.

Parents and community members may express unease because the new approach looks significantly different than the more familiar concept of school they are accustomed to. Logistical issues and complications, as well as safety concerns, may also arise, since students may leave the school grounds for certain activities, they may have to use public transportation, and they may be supervised or taught by adults who are not teachers.

Educators may also express skepticism or resistance because community-based learning can complicate school schedules and require more planning and creativity, thereby increasing teacher workloads, or because they are not being given the planning time, training, or resources they need to learn and use community-based approaches effectively. In its more developed forms, community-based learning can also require a lot of coordination between the school and outside organizations and individuals, which can have both financial and human-resource implications.

In some cases, schools recruit parents or community volunteers to coordinate programs to reduce costs or burdens on school personnel. Advocates would argue that community-based learning needs to be skillfully designed and deployed in schools—doing too much, too quickly, without a strong plan and sufficient training for teachers can greatly increase the likelihood that problems will arise.

They may also argue that even though community-based learning can require more from schools and teachers—more funding, more planning, more work, more professional development —the benefits are well worth the investment: students will be more excited about learning, they will learn more, and they will be more able to apply what they have learned in real-life settings.

While the methods and forms of community-based learning are both sophisticated and numerous, the concept is perhaps most readily described in terms of four general approaches all of which might be pursued independently or combined with other approaches : Instructional connections: In this form of community-based learning, teachers would make explicit and purposeful connections between the material being taught in the classroom and local issues, contexts, and concepts.

For example, the workings of a democratic political system may be described in terms of a local political process; statistics and probability may be taught using stats from a local sports team; a scientific concept may be explained using an example taken from a local habitat or ecosystem; or the Civil War may be taught using examples and stories drawn from local history. International Undergraduate Students. Graduate Students. International Graduate Students.

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