Challenge Eight: Community-Based Learning
What is it:
Welcome to our final challenge! Throughout the previous weeks, we’ve discussed how everyone (educators and learners alike) has their own unique lived experiences and is part of various communities. Our individual lived experiences always overlap with and move in and out of physical and digital spaces. As a result, each of us exists in the intersectionality of various communities (e.g., immigrant, international student, LGBTQ2S+, cultural or linguistic backgrounds).
The Community-Based Learning competency involves creating intentional opportunities for learners to participate in and offer their lived experiences and/or prior knowledge as valuable lessons. It also means being able to effectively adapt digital tools to build and maintain relationships between students and community partners.
Why it is important:
In the Communication and Collaboration competency challenge, ABLE Research Consultants’ 2020 research paper, Removing Barriers to Online Learning Through a Teaching and Learning Lens, identified three areas for thinking about pedagogy in online learning: equity mindedness, cultural affirmation, and social engagement. We promised to circle back to cultural affirmation, which fits in the Community-Based Learning competency.
We recognize the tremendous value of culturally relevant teaching and learner-oriented teaching. As educators creating community-based learning spaces, we validate all learners’ lived experiences and in turn fulfill the diverse needs of our learners.
Examples:
- Read about an excellent example of how OER ties into Indigenous community learning through the TK Labels project
- Read this blog post to learn more about the 6 R’s of Indigenous OER’s: Sovereignty and Tradition: Indigenous Knowledge and Open Educational Resources
Multimedia Activity
The following is an example of a quiz you can give to students to assess their understanding of community-based learning. It is adapted from the Community-Based Learning Lesson Plan from the B.C. Digital Literacy Hub. Try it for yourself!
Learning Activities
1. Learn it for yourself
- Review page 16 of the ABLE research paper, Removing Barriers to Online Learning Through a Teaching and Learning Lens, where barriers to online learning are outlined, along with strategies to help create cultural affirmation in online learning. During your review, consider some of the digital tools you have tried out or incorporated so far and how they may help you overcome these barriers.
- Review the Community-Based Learning Lesson Plan. Choose one of the four options in the lesson plan to spark conversations at your next class, meeting, or presentation. Try out the activity in a space where it’s safe to fail, and see if it works.
- Check out additional digital tools listed on the B.C. Digital Literacy repository’s Community-Based Learning page that you would consider testing or adapting.
2. Incorporate it into your teaching practice
The intention of this week’s challenge is for you to offer back to your institution/educational community what you have learned so far in this challenge series, then bring back to us what you have learned. While our teaching communities share similarities, each one is also unique. We want to embrace the true spirit of community-based learning in this week’s challenge as we ask you to share what you applied in your community, and bring your learnings back to us as we wrap up this challenge series.
We invite you to use the same format with which each challenge has been presented to you, by explaining to us:
- What it is: Identify which community-based learning activity or option you decided to incorporate.
- Why it’s important (for you as an educator and for students): How did you contextualize this community-based learning activity, and how does it fit in your teaching practice?
- An example: By this time in the challenge series, you should have a solid toolkit of digital tools at your disposal. Which digital tool did you decide to incorporate and why? And how did it work out? Did the activity help spark a conversation on what community means for everyone in your class or group? Did the activity help students/participants create a sense of community? Share your final takeaways with us in the discussion forum.
3. Teach it to students
- Find a local community expert to connect your students with, or ask them to connect with leaders in their own community.
- Look into existing community-based learning programs in your institution, such as work-integrated learning (WIL), co-op programs, and so on.
Further Reading
- Watch In It Together: Building Community and Enacting Care in Online Learning (recorded webinar, 55 minutes) for ideas on how to create and build community in online learning environments.
- Check out The Handbook of Experiential Pedagogies, a collaborative resource developed by the students and instructor of an experiential pedagogies course at UBC in 2023.