Community-Engaged Field Trips: An Accessible Technique for Community-Based Learning in an Era of Education Austerity

ABSTRACT

Community-based learning (CBL) is an innovative pedagogical approach that allows students to learn through direct engagement with community partners and participate in social change initiatives. Scholars have documented many transformative benefits of CBL: for students, it promotes critical thinking, self-reflection, and community action, while at the institutional level, it advances epistemic justice. Despite these advantages, many instructors balk at the idea of implementing CBL, especially given the current era of austerity in higher education. Within this context, I propose community-engaged field trips as a tool for instructors to achieve the core benefits of CBL by means of a concrete course activity. In the model I propose, students take part in a preexisting event or opportunity made available by a community-based organization. They then write an analytical reflection paper prompting them to think deeply about systemic inequities, examine their preexisting biases, and develop action ideas. To demonstrate how to implement this model of community-engaged field trips, I provide an exemplar from a course on the sociology of race and ethnicity. I describe the field trip logistics, learning objectives, reflection prompts, and assessment criteria and then conclude with suggestions for ways this model can be applied across a variety of course contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-based learning
• service-learning
• public sociology
• critical pedagogy
• inclusive pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ This pedagogical approach is also variably termed service-learning, community-engaged learning, or community service-learning. While each term highlights a slightly different focal aspect of the model, I use the term community-based learning to encompass these various closely related approaches.

² This includes weather-appropriate clothing, walking shoes or any needed mobility supports, and a well-charged streaming device with headphones. Students with mobility limitations are invited to speak with me to arrange accommodations. For students who do not have a streaming device to use, the Jackson Center has extra MP3 players and headphones available for visitors to borrow.

³ Follow-up questions can prompt students to look for impacts both historically and in the present day, or to look for examples across several different contexts. Instructors can also prompt students to include definitions of relevant course concepts, thereby creating an opportunity to assess their ability to explain course concepts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah McGill Brown

Sarah McGill Brown is a doctoral student in the sociology department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Through her research, she strives to understand the mechanisms driving systemic social inequities in U.S. public institutions, including public schools and criminal courts. She enjoys teaching courses that inspire students to see the world through a sociological lens.