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Faculty Initiatives and Opportunities

Interested in community engaged teaching or hosting a community engaged event? Let us be a resource to you! Here are some other ways to get involved:

Consider adding a community engagement component to your existing course or a course you're developing. Contact us at claoce@temple.edu for planning support.

  • Check out our faculty resources for community engagement.
  •  Consider applying for the CLA Engaged Teaching Fellowship!

Let us know about exciting work you and/or your students are doing in the community through the TU Community Engagement Portal.

Nominate your colleagues for the annual CLA Faculty Award for Excellence in Community Engagement.

Request a class visit from community engagement! Our offerings include:

  • 20-Minute Introduction to North Philadelphia & OCE Overview: Provides context on North Philadelphia and an overview of services and programs offered by the CLA Office of Community Engagement.
  • 60-Minute Introduction to Community Engagement: Offers context on North Philadelphia and presents frameworks for understanding our role as community members.
  • 60-90 Minute Community Engagement Preparatory Training: Delivers context on North Philadelphia and equips participants with tools for community-based interactions, best practices for asset-based community engagement, and/or research.

What is Community Engaged Learning?

Community Engaged Learning can:

  • Support student engagement and retention of content through real world applications.
  • Support career readiness by helping students explore potential career paths, build social capital, and/or gain transferrable skills.
  • Reinvest university resources and human capital into surrounding communities impacted by long-term disinvestment.
  • Strengthen reciprocal community connections.

Community engaged learning courses:

  • Meaningfully engage one or more external partners in the execution of course learning objectives, while providing tangible benefit to the partner(s).
  • Provide structured reflection for students on their learning goals.
  • Enhance student retention of academic content and cultivation of writing, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.
  • Build stronger relationships between students, faculty, and community members.

Class Formats:

  • Individual: Students pick from a list of organizations to complete an internship-style placement or regular volunteer activity.
  • Field Experience: A class takes one or multiple visits to an org to learn more about their work and engage in a related activity benefiting the org.
  • Class Visits: Individuals from the organization or its constituents come in during class time to participate in a class discussion or activity.
  • Class Project: Students apply course learning to develop a project or demo for a targeted community and visit that community to share the project.

Faculty Resources