Language Matters: Community Engaged Learning at the Shriver Center
In Summer 2024, the Shriver Center, UMBC’s hub for community engagement and public service, concluded a year-long process of reflection and exploration of our terminology resulting in changes to our curricular and co-curricular program framing language and staff titles from “Service-Learning and Community Engagement” (SLCE) to “Community Engaged Learning” (CEL). This update reflects alignment with community engagement terminology in the discourse on program values and language usage in our field and among counterpart institutions of higher education. It also aligns our work with the Carnegie Community Engaged Campus definitions and best practices.
What is Community Engaged Learning?
The community in CEL gives explicit reference to campus-community partnerships and collaborations that extend beyond the classroom and create bridges beyond the borders of the campus itself.
The engagement in CEL involves ethical relationships that bridge in both directions, leading to mutually beneficial and impactful processes and outcomes.
The learning in CEL further specifies that our community engagement centers around educational activities with integrated curricular and broader co-curricular and lifelong learning goals.
Community engaged learning in our usage thus overlaps and complements other forms of community engagement on and off campus including, for example, community engaged scholarship, community engaged teaching, and community engaged research, creating natural bridges and connections between community engagement activities in Shriver Center’s direct student programming and scholarly activities of our faculty and staff, and community engagement activities across our UMBC colleges and peer Centers. CEL at Shriver Center also reflects and affirms the values and practices embedded in Shriver Center’s Mission and Vision, Partnership framework and Truth Racial Healing and Transformation statement.