Community Engaged Teaching and Research
Each semester, the London Center supports undergraduate and graduate courses in disciplines as varied as physical therapy and management which connect students to the Boston area community through projects and direct service.
In the London Center, we believe that at its best community-engaged learning is a high-impact pedagogy which can enhance student learning while providing tangible benefits to communities. For community-engaged learning to be effective in this manner, we emphasize the following practices:
- Course Integration: Service should be fully integrated with course learning objectives.
- Community Relationships: Partnerships should be beneficial to the partners as well as the students. Communities should be approached from an asset-based rather than a need-based perspective.
- Quality Reflection: Students should have an opportunity for quality reflection on their service experience and how that service connects to the course concepts.
The London Center also envisions community-engaged learning as having the potential to support the principles of social justice through increasing equity and inclusion in our city and beyond. We work with instructors interested in community-engaged learning as a tool for social justice to realize this potential.
The Director of the London Center supports community engaged teaching and research at Simmons, working with faculty to build community connections and ensure high quality, high impact learning opportunities for students and mutually beneficial, meaningful participatory research; these opportunities, in turn, provide services and bring additional resources to the communities in which we are embedded.