Getting Started with Service-Learning and Community Engagement (SLCE) and Place-Based Learning

A Checklist for Getting Started

In the opening chapter to Ecopedagogies: Practical Approaches to Experiential Learning (2023), Ellen Bayer and Judson Byrd Finley provide a preparatory checklist for taking students beyond the classroom walls to engage with the natural world and local communities (bolded phrases are quoted from their book chapter): 

✅ Define the field loosely: Think expansively about what you define as the field. You can begin in the small creek that runs through a corner of your college’s campus, at a local public school, or with a hike an hour outside of town. Outings big and small brim with possibilities.

✅ Make the field mandatory: For students to take place-based assignments seriously, they must be part of a formal assignment and should be assessed like any other work for a class.

✅ Introduce it early: Respect your students’ other commitments by letting them know at the beginning of the semester when outings outside of normal class hours will take place.

✅ Give students options: Students might have jobs or families that interfere with their ability to participate. Plan for alternatives.

✅ Recognize the limitations: Plan for transportation, gear, and technology. You might need to identify grant money to support all students’ attendance.

✅ Cultivate diversity, equity, and inclusion: Consider how students’ diverse backgrounds might influence their experience and be flexible to accommodate students’ needs. For example, if you are planning a trip that involves getting into a body of water, keep in mind that not all students know how to swim. To be ethical practitioners of experiential learning, faculty need a strong understanding of implicit bias and of how their own privilege conditions their understanding of and participation in local communities. IIf you are a white faculty member, be especially conscious of how concepts of danger and safety are very relative to identity. A neighborhood where white students feel safe might be precisely the place where students of color feel unsafe. 

✅ Plan for accessibility: As early as possible, communicate site accessibility to your students, allowing students sufficient time to request accommodations. You may need to identify alternative sites or assignments in order to include all students.

✅ Keep it simple: Start small, perhaps right outside your classroom door. Grow from there.

✅ Keep it safe: Plan for safety for all participants. Safety considerations might include bug spray, life preservers, a first-aid kit, sufficient food and bottled water, or other supplies, depending on what you have planned. On a faculty-led study abroad to Mexico, one pair of instructors packed smoke detectors to be used in students’ homestays when they discovered smoke detectors were uncommon in local homes.