CCEL Course Criteria

Course Requirements

Do you plan to teach a Community Engaged Learning course? Please fill out this form so that we can ensure the SL:Community Engaged Learning attribute is added to your course, and so that the Center can connect you with partnership opportunities, resources, and more. 

• Engagement - Each community engaged learning course must incorporate an element of engaged learning. This may be a partnership with a local school or organization, a pairing with a public official or nonprofit, or an integrated research experience that allows students to employ their knowledge via experiential pedagogy. This portion of the course should be a time investment of at least 20 hours; these may be a combination of service or engagement hours and research or lab hours. It is the prerogative of the faculty member to require more engagement hours.
• Writing Across the Curriculum - Each community engaged learning course must incorporate at least two written assignments that ask students to demonstrate a working knowledge of discipline-specific expression in their field.
• Reflection - Each community engaged learning course must incorporate a reflective classroom practice. Reflection has been shown to aid retention, and is a hallmark of the Jesuit educational paradigm.

Syllabus Guidelines

This is a community engaged writing course. This means that each member of our cohort, together with your faculty member, will engage in a community engagement project as an integral part of the academic project we pursue in this course. I invite you to consider your colleagues in this course as members of a community of practice, with whom you will deepen your academic, professional, and personal development in relation to the communities and neighborhoods in and around our Fordham campuses. In our work together, we will work to move our institution toward a place-based model of community engagement.