Community Engaged Learning (CEL)

Community Engaged Learning (CEL) at Western partners with local and international organizations to mobilize knowledge and exchange resources in order to address critical societal issues.  By engaging students, staff, and faculty in meaningful experiential learning opportunities, CEL helps meet community defined needs while promoting students’ sense of civic engagement and social responsibility.  These partnerships help extend Western’s reach beyond campus and foster excellence and innovation in teaching and learning.CEL offers a number of valuable benefits to students, including:

  • Meaningful connections to local and international communities
  • Context to apply academic learning outside the classroom
  • Hands-on experience to aid in building a resume
  • Development of critical thinking skills
  • Enhanced understanding of diverse cultures and communities
  • Opportunities to learn/practice transferable skills including communication, teambuilding, and problem-solving
  • Increased sense of civic engagement and social responsibility

For more information, visit the Careers & Experience website.

Community Engaged Learning Opportunities IN Arts & Humanities

Languages and Cultures:  

SPANISH

Prof. Ana Garcia-Allen (Full year 2024-2025)

Three courses are offered with CEL components: 

SPANISH 1030: Spanish for Beginners
SPANISH 2200: Intermediate Spanish
SPANISH 3300: Advanced Spanish Language

The option offered is CEL International in Cuba, in which students enrolled in these courses can go to Holguín (Cuba) during February Reading Week and get involved with the community there.

Previous projects include: Engaging in one-to-one partnerships with Spanish newcomers in a 50/50 conversation program allowed Spanish newcomers to improve English while the Spanish students could apply language learning to real situations; working within the daily operations of a community program that serves Spanish newcomers; helping to facilitate a community art therapy program targeted towards Spanish newcomer children. 

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIONS 2500 F/G: Bridging Classroom and Community – Languages and Cultures in Action [cross-listed with Comparative Literature and Culture/German/Italian]

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIONS 3300F/G/Z: Making a Difference: Portfolio in Intercultural Communication

ITALIAN 1033F: Italian for Beginners and our Italian-Canadian Stories

ITALIAN 2202X: Intermediate Italian in Italy

ITALIAN 2500F: Bridging Classroom and Community: Languages and Cultures in Action


English and Writing Studies:

ARTHUM 3200E: Knowledge Creation Through Performance
Prof. K. Solga

ARTHUM 3200E is a brand-new, pilot course that brings students from across campus together to explore the embodied and interdisciplinary dimensions of learning, discovery, and knowledge creation, in and beyond the university. Through a mix of guest speakers from a wide range of backgrounds; reflection, discussion, and mapping sessions led by your instructor Kim; and community-engaged learning projects to which you’ll be attached in winter term, you’ll emerge from this class with a much broader, and hopefully more exciting!, sense of where your specific disciplinary knowledge and your career ambitions can intersect with other forms of making,
doing, being, and learning – now and in the future.

ENGLISH 2580F/G: Canadian Literature: Creativity and the Local
Prof. M. Jones

This course explores the rich literary cultures of Southwestern Ontario. Through Community Engaged Learning projects, field trips to local cultural sites, and guest speakers, students will learn how creativity grows out of, interacts with and transforms this place, and will draw on their own creativity to support and contribute to local culture. Reaching back to the Regionalist movement in literature, performance, and visual art of the 1970s and extending to the present moment, readings, lectures, and activities will help students think about how local literature (and the institutions and activities that emerge from it) accesses the public and builds communities, relates people to the environment and landscape in which they live, connects the local to national and transnational cultures, retrieves and revalues hidden stories and histories, and represents a diversity of voices and values. 3 hours, 0.5 course

Previous projects include: Create, promote, organize and host a campus poetry slam/open mic event in partnership with the London Poetry Slam organizers; Create a mini-documentary about the slam, helping students integrate with the community and get a sense of what the London Poetry Slam does on and off stage; Compile edited video presentations of historic Eldon House to be used for outreach into the community, internal oral history capture and promotion.

FILM STUDIES 3312F/G: Special Topics in Film Studies

THEATRE STUDIES 2202G: Performance Beyond Theatres

Performance Beyond Theatres is where we explore how theatre does work in the world offstage. We examine the stuff of everyday life as performance: sports (and being a sports fan!), political speech, political protest, land acknowledgements and our relationships to the land, and more. We peek into the world of Applied Theatre, where artist-researchers collaborate with communities of all kinds to help those communities share their stories. And we think, with Indigenous artists and scholars, about how performance can function as a social contract, a way of being human and humane in a dangerous, burning world.

THEATRE STUDIES 4216F/G: Reviewing Performances


Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

GSWS 3305F/G: Gender, Sexuality and Cultural Resistance 

GSWS 3355E: Feminist Activism 

Feminism, across its various places and points of genesis, is fundamentally tied to the concept of protest – with aims for disruption and, ultimately if arguably, structural transformation. In the current global climate, many feminists are articulating more-than-ever an urgent need for active feminist interventions in broad and interconnected areas of everyday life. This course examines a variety of issues and interventions to understand what feminist action can accomplish.

In addition to studying feminist activism in the classroom, students engage in a Community Engagement Learning (CEL) project sustained over the course with a community organization or other partners to encourage students' implementation of their learning beyond the borders of the classroom.


Linguistics

LINGUISTICS 2244A/B: Second Language Acquisiton  


Philosophy:

PHILOSOPHY 3010: Philosophy of Food
Benjamin Hill 
The course aims to present certain philosophical reflections on food and give the students a better understanding of the food system as well as its vast implications for us individually and the world at large. Issues dealt with in the course for example include human rights violations, treatment of animals, moral and political dimensions of genetically modified food, hunger and obligation to the poor, the role of food in gender, personal and national identity, and what role does food play in the good life.

Previous Projects Include: Helping to facilitate workshops for families in our community on how to cook healthy and nutritious meals with limited financial resources; Doing research on the use of food stamps in our community to determine whether this is an effective solution to food security; Developing tools for a county food hub that will outline the benefits of purchasing local foods and supporting local food products.

PHILOSOPHY 4901G: Honours Capstone - Community Engaged Learning


SASAH

Topics in the Arts & Humanities (SASAH)

Experiential Learning in the Arts & Humanities (SASAH)


Visual Arts

SA 3672A: Embroidering with the Guild: A Community Engagement Learning Course

This community engaged studio course aims to give students the opportunity to expand their knowledge of textile arts by learning the skill of embroidery by partnering with the Canadian Embroiderers’ Guild, London. Guild members will be teaching stitches in class and assisting students with learning the stitches. All the stitches taught will be created and archived by each student by producing an individual “Sampler”, which will document their experiences and learning in the course as well act as a visual resource for future artwork. Using all the knowledge gained from the Sampler, students will create an independently driven stitched artwork for the final project. Throughout the course, students will also research a specific embroidery topic, which will be shared to the class as a presentation, to further enhance their understanding of embroidery.