Project Investigators: Erin Goheen, Lecturer, Coordinated Arts Program and Moberley Luger, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of English Language and Literatures
Project Description
In the Coordinated Arts Program (CAP)—an interdisciplinary first-year cohort program—we have been developing Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) curriculum tailored specifically for first-year with support from CCEL, a TLEF, and WorkLearn positions. CEL is a pedagogical approach in which students learn through partnership with community organizations, enhancing academic learning and capacity for understanding complex social issues. CEL curriculum is time-intensive for faculty, and at the program level, we seek to understand what supports would make CEL sustainable in CAP going forward. This project uses focus groups with faculty and students to assess CEL projects across four CAP streams in 2021-22. We seek qualitative data on the value of CEL for student learning and, specifically, on the supports needed to design and enact class activities.
Research Questions
Students: What do first year students perceive to be the learning outcomes of CEL in ASTU courses? What is their sense of the value-added to
traditional coursework by CEL and Experiential Learning (EL)? What was helpful for them in understanding the practice of CEL or EL? What additional supports would have been helpful for their projects?
Faculty: What did faculty find most helpful, considering all the support work of the CEL Fellows? What delegate-able areas of CEL design are most time-consuming? Which would be more effective: a centralized cross-stream CEL support position in CAP, or five separate stream-specific CEL support positions? What do sessional faculty need to make CEL possible, given their unique time frame for course design? What is needed in the form of permanent support to make CEL a sustainable program-wide feature?
Impact on teaching and learning at UBC
CAP has partnered with the Centre for Community-Engaged Learning over the past three years to design and facilitate CEL in a variety of formats. The current undergraduate CEL Fellow has been hired to experiment with a program-wide support position, and this project will help them to assess the efficacy and value of this model. This SoTL project would support the PI, Erin Goheen, and CEL Fellows, Marianne El-Mikati and Valeria Perez, in gathering feedback to inform CAP’s future hiring and to enhance our program design. The results could be shared through a CCEL or CTLT workshop for UBC faculty and a conference presentation.