Community Engaged Learning in Higher Education:Critical perspectives for recognising and realising its transformative potential

There is an abundance of empirical research on the benefits of CEL (including in SoTL literature), outlining the many positive outcomes of this praxis-oriented pedagogy for the personal and social development of students and communities. Advocates of CEL claim that it is a transformative pedagogy. However, there is a dearth of critical, nuanced, and comparative scholarship informed by empirical research about the challenges of engaging in CEL and the possibility of not only unexpected, but also undesired outcomes. Critical perspectives are most evident in theoretical accounts of CEL which highlights how CEL can serve to reinforce neoliberal narratives and hegemony and empirical accounts. By contrast, the challenges addressed in empirical research tend to focus on relatively modest and pragmatic issues, such as timeframes of Higher Education Institutions and the duration of CEL projects. Therefore, in this workshop, we aim to create a more holistic account that embraces the spectrum of potential issues and experiences to provide a more nuanced understanding of CEL endeavours. By jointly sharing and uncovering our different experiences and outcomes, as well as key themes in the field, we aim to advance this broader ethos for considerations of CEL. Having established a contextual base, through a mini world café activity, we will facilitate the sharing of experiences, wise practices, and suggestions from participants regarding how we might collectively engage more ethically with this increasingly important form of teaching and learning.