Community Engaged Leadership Core Competencies
Students will make progress through the minor program in these areas of core competency, learning how to engage effectively and ethically with communities beyond the campus in preparation for a life of community engaged leadership.
Civic Literacy – understanding the institutions, structures, ideas, and practices that make up the frameworks for common life in society.
Civic Agency – the ability to act in effective ways to influence and transform the institutions, structures, ideas, and practices that constitute our shared life to increase equity and justice.
Civic Imagination – the ability to envision and articulate new institutions, structures, ideas, and practices to establish a shared life grounded in equity and justice. Core Values We seek to ensure that these values underwrite and are apparent in all of our work.
Community Engaged Leadership Core Learning Objectives
Students should take courses that include as a course objective a prescribed portion of the total number of learning objectives listed below.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – Equity, diversity, and inclusion are central to this course, and the course ideally includes partnerships or voices from organizations or individuals either on and off campus that promote DEI as both essential methods and outcomes for their work.
Place-Based Learning – Understanding and grappling with the unique history and particularities of life in Northern Mississippi, the Mississippi Delta, and the Mid–South are essential to this course, and coursework is attenuated to understanding the complex forces that have shaped and continue to shape this place.
Community Formation – This course has a core element of bringing people together – whether for a workshop, training session, presentation, or for the purpose of shared work that benefits the public good, including a service–learning component – and thus contributes to the health and vitality of individual humans and a shared society.
Designing Community Projects through a Process of Co–Creation – This course combined knowledge and skills of University faculty, staff, and students with community partners in its conception and design, recognizing that communities beyond the campus have knowledge and skills to contribute to learning on campus. this course models a co–creative process of identifying and working on public problems by demonstrating equity in collaboration between faculty and community partners.
Including Community Partners as Co–Educators – This course includes community partners as part of the curriculum, recognizing that community partners have detailed knowledge of the issues they work on day in and day out and that students, faculty and staff gain access to this knowledge by listening to and working with community partners. This course centers community engaged learning – learning with and from communities – as a practice that is as rigorous as knowledge acquired through research and other teaching and learning methods.
An Asset Based Approach – This course instructor views communities beyond the campus as filled with assets that can be directed to address shared challenges, not as academic laboratories with problems that can be solved by faculty, staff and students. Community organizations and individuals are treated as holders of knowledge and skills, and this course views these individuals and groups as people with whom to partner and learn from as community assets are directed towards addressing community needs.
Developmental – This course is designed to provide a developmental growth opportunity for students. This course evaluates the personal growth of a student towards becoming a community engaged leader by including periodic personal reflection that is assessed alongside that student’s impact on a community–based project or problem.
Reflection and Discernment – Students in this course grapple actively with the big questions at the heart of the human experience, and they are afforded routine opportunities to explore what these questions mean for how we act in the world as individuals and as members of social groups.
Capacity Building – this course is centered around co–created projects that students can undertake which build the capacity of an organization to do its work with more people or in a deeper and more effective manner. Capacity building projects are distinct from service–learning projects in that they grow the ability of an organization to carry on their work after the project is complete.
Cohort Based Work – this course builds a cohorts of students to work on a project with a community partner. This course provides opportunities for students to learn with and from one another, co–create programs and initiatives, and collaborate in shared work directed at common goals as a group and with a community partner.
Mutual Partnerships – This course is built around a relationships with a community partner that is mutual, meaning community partners are able to take advantage of resources and opportunities available through multiple venues at the University in addition to providing opportunities for learning and engagement for the students at UM.
International Perspectives – in this deeply interconnected world, this class encourages a global perspective that accounts for the origins, impacts, and implications of major challenges – and solutions – encountered by nations and communities across the planet.
Community Engaged Leadership Learning Methods
Developed by the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University, these methods are broad categories that capture the ways that individuals, classes, and organizations might engage with communities beyond the campus. Courses in the minor should include at least one CEL methodology.
Community Engaged Learning and Research – Connecting coursework and academic research to community–identified concerns to enrich knowledge and inform action on social issues.
Community Organizing and Activism – Involving, educating, and mobilizing individual or collective action to influence or persuade others.
Direct Service – Working to address the immediate needs of individuals or a community, often involving contact with the people or places being served.
Philanthropy – Donating or using private funds or charitable contributions from individuals or institutions to contribute to the public good.
Policy and Governance – Participating in political processes, policymaking, and public governance.
Social Entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility – Using ethical business or private sector approaches to create or expand market–oriented responses to social or environmental problems.