In your backyard: Community-engaged learning to develop student confidence and collaboration

Abstract

Have you ever wanted to engage your students in applying their scientific knowledge beyond the classroom and laboratory? In this presentation, I will be sharing the pedagogy, learning outcomes, and student experience in my community-engaged learning course. In this course, students work with local community partners and use critical thinking to work on mutually beneficial projects to support the London community. Throughout the course, students are engaged in critical reflection and learn about the complicated intersections of health literacy, socioeconomic status and health, and complex community health issues such as opioid addiction and mental health. In this session, I will share my iterative process to course design and my changes to the course over the years. I will also share student experiences of this course, either through video interviews or with a student co-presenter. Finally, participants will be encouraged to bring their own device to explore students’ digital artifacts from their project work through an online curated collection of student-generated work. Finally, the session will finish with a critical reflection exercise that I use in class. Thus, participants in this session will experience the value of a community-engaged learning course from both an instructor and student perspective.