Community-based learning involves educating students in an academic discipline while also preparing them to be active citizens, positively contributing to society. By becoming involved in community activities students benefit others while benefiting themselves, learning about teamwork, civic responsibility, and the application of intellectual skills to community issues. Community-based learning options in regular classes engage students in communities as a way to gather, test, and apply course-based content and skill in diverse settings. Students perform a designated amount of service, and their learning from that experience is evaluated as part of the course.
A course designed around community-based learning includes in-depth theoretical and practical applications that allow for maximum integration of service and classroom work. Courses provide information, skill building, reflection, generalizing principles, and assessment methods to help students serve and learn more effectively.
Why is Community-Based Learning Important for PSU?
Portland State University’s motto, Let Knowledge Serve the City, guides faculty, staff, administrators, students, and local and international community partners in all that we do. Community-based learning, and associated practices such as community-based research, are effective practices that lead not only to augmented cognitive learning, but also, can significantly enhance other learning outcomes such as communication skills, teamwork, public problem solving, personal and leadership development, and moral reasoning, among others. Community-based learning pedagogies help Portland State University realize its commitment to educating the whole student. Structured community experiences provide meaningful opportunities for students to practice addressing complex issues in a diverse world.
Why is Community-Based Learning Important for Higher Education?
In 1999, fifty-one college and university presidents challenged the nation’s academic leaders to take action against a rising tide of civic disengagement. In a Presidents’ Fourth of July Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education, the presidents addressed a growing concern that cynicism and a lack of trust toward the political process are leading citizens – particularly those of college age – to disengage from civic affairs and abandon the responsibilities of citizenship. They also challenged higher education to become engaged, through actions and teaching, with its communities. Read the Presidents' declaration
Since that time, Portland State University’s president and over 500 university presidents have signed the declaration in the belief that the “challenge of the next millennium is the renewal of our own democratic life and reassertion of social stewardship.” They claim that they can think “of no nobler task than committing ourselves to helping catalyze and lead a national movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and civic mission of higher education…now and through the next century, our institutions must be vital agents and architects of a flourishing democracy.”
Community-based learning and research strategies connect Portland State University to Portland, and to communities world-wide. Portland State University is recognized as a national leader in the renewal of higher education, and continues to creatively experiment and guide scores of institutions across the world in this transformative work.
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