A Companion to Public Philosophy

30The Transformative Power of Community Engaged Teaching

A. TODD FRANKLIN

1 Domains and Dynamics

One way of conceptualizing community engaged teaching is as a mode of teaching that directly foregrounds engaging communities who are experiencing particular social realities that are theorized and discussed in classroom settings. These classroom settings often are detached from the people and places most immediate to the social realities being studied. As such, community engaged teaching fundamentally brings the struggle to critically understand and constructively respond to various socially realities to life. At first blush, one might be tempted to think of community engaged teaching as some sort of refreshing change of pace that simply shifts teaching from a classroom activity to one that takes place somewhere beyond the school grounds. Furthermore, it would be easy to assume that this shift would inherently benefit both the communities engaged and the students. However, for those of us who teach on college campuses, many of which are physically and socially detached from the communities beyond their boundaries and gates, taking our students into these communities for pedagogical purposes can prove deeply problematic if doing so in any way ends up being at the expense of these communities.

On campus, one sees the classroom as a space within which ideas can be shared and discussed: a space where ideally all participants can freely engage one another in an effort to cultivate greater ...