University of California, Los Angeles
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

The UCLA Center for Community Engagement supports individual faculty members and academic units with all stages of community-engaged course development and implementation, and can help connect instructors with community organizations that are interested in partnering on courses and research projects.

Students learn from the expertise residing in local communities and become able to bring rigorous research to address community-driven questions. UCLA’s approach to community-engaged teaching and learning draws heavily on the Carnegie Foundation’s definition of community engagement as “teaching, learning, and scholarship that engages faculty, students, and community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration.

In April 2020, the Academic Senate’s Undergraduate Council approved a new, flexible and expansive framework for community-engaged courses, replacing the 2008 narrowly-defined “service-learning course” framework. The new framework lays out four principles that should guide community-engaged teaching and learning at UCLA:
- The community-engaged work creates reciprocal value for the students as learners and for community partners
- The community-engaged work is sustained across the quarter
- The community-engaged work is integrated into the course design, including assessment of student learning
- Students have the opportunity to actively connect the community-based experience with their academic learning through critical reflection.

Community-engaged teaching can take many different forms depending on the learning goals for a particular course, the departmental context, and the aims of the community partnership. (https://communityengagement.ucla.edu/faculty/course-development/)

Sample courses:

Rachel Lee, professor of English and gender studies and a faculty member at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. developed a course to examine the UCLA Center for the Study of Women’s collection of oral histories of women who have experienced illness as a result of chemical and environmental toxins. They Students prepare analytical materials, working with community organizations that are addressing these environmental issues. (https://communityengagement.ucla.edu/2020/08/07/5-professors-receive-chancellors-award-for-community-engaged-research/)

Pamela Yeh, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, developed the course “Urban Ecology and Evolution.” The class will allow students to explore cities as ecosystems and to study how plants and animals have survived — and in some cases thrived — in urban areas. They will work together with nonprofits in low-income communities of color to create opportunities for long-term avian population monitoring and scientific research. (https://communityengagement.ucla.edu/2021/07/30/5-professors-receive-2021-chancellors-award-for-community-engaged-research-2/)

The Center’s staff may consult with instructors to explore models of community-engaged teaching that best suit learning goals for courses at all levels of the curriculum, from introductory classes to advanced electives and capstones across the disciplines. The Center also offers pedagogy workshops and manages the Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars, and can help connect faculty with national and international networks that advance community-engaged teaching and public scholarship in higher education.

The Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars (https://communityengagement.ucla.edu/faculty/chancellors-award-for-community-engaged-scholars/) offers five $10,000 awards to support a cohort of UCLA ladder faculty to advance their community-engaged scholarly activity and develop a new undergraduate community-engaged research course. Course development grants of $8,000 - to be transferred to the awardee’s research account - are also available to develop new graduate courses to teach in the areas of critical data studies, data & society and digital humanities, using social justice frameworks (https://communityengagement.ucla.edu/faculty/mellon-data-social-justice-curriculum/).