Community-Based Learning and Research

CBLR provides American University students and faculty the opportunity to respond to significant needs of the DC metropolitan area. Students practice, re-examine, and deepen their classroom learning through a project in a nonprofit setting where their work benefits others as well as their own intellectual development.

The Center for Community Engagement and Service Provides Support for:

• The Community-Service Learning Program (CSLP), a community-based learning option in which students attach an additional credit to a course by combining classroom study with active civic participation.
• The Incorporation of Community-Based Learning into Courses: Faculty and students can seek assistance with community placements, finding community-based learning resources, and receive logistical support to more effectively integrate community-based learning into their courses.

Community Voice Project

What if a journalist, a creative writer, and an anthropologist were asked to tell the same story—in a medium of their choice?

That was the question that drove a School of Communication (SOC)-based project, in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), to tear down boundaries and redefine storytelling. After all, what better time than now, when traditional journalism itself is being redefined?

The Community Voice Project started as the vision of SOC dean Larry Kirkman, from a focus on undercovered communities in the D.C. area.  It is a way to leverage students' coursework to also help give voice to people, organizations, and issues that increasingly were not being covered adequately as mainstream journalism struggled.  Community Voice is about more than class projects. It “fills a vacuum” in the public debate, and it creates new models for reporting, public communication, and public policy making.

Visit the Community Voice Project website and see the short documentaries online here: http://communityvoiceproject.org

See the May, 26th 2011 article to learn more about Spring 2011 classes profiling D.C. area organizations like A Wider Circle, CARECEN, and the Community Council for the Homeless at Friendship Place.