CEL Faculty Roundtable – Community Places as Classroom Spaces: Reflecting, Disrupting, Re-Imagining

Facilitator: Jennifer Esmail, Director, Centre for Community Partnerships

Panelists:
Aditi Mehta, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Urban Studies Program
Maggie Hutcheson, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream,Faculty of Information
Maria Assif, Professor, Teaching Stream, English, UTSC
Reid Locklin, Associate Professor, Department for the Study of Religion,St. Michael’s College
Suzanne Sicchia, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Health and Society, UTSC

What are the implications of envisioning community places as spaces of student learning? As experiential learning, and more specifically, community-engaged learning expands across the University, partnerships with First Nations, community groups, nonprofit organizations, grassroots initiatives and the public sector are increasingly pursued as strategies for teaching our students across all disciplines. These teaching strategies seek out “community” as an innovative site and partner in teaching and learning. What does imagining community as classroom enable, and what tensions emerge? How might community-based approaches to teaching and learning disrupt–or reify–inequities? If best practice dictates that widely varying models of community-engaged learning (CEL) aspire to “reciprocity” with community-based co-educators and co-learners, how might we move the dial from transactional to transformational engagement, at individual, collective and systemic levels? Seasoned community-engaged professors address these questions through their varied teaching practices, followed by an interactive discussion with panelists and audience.

This session has been rescheduled from the 2024 Teaching & Learning Symposium’s Community as Classroom Stream.