Eight Community Engaged Learning projects provided with funding

Using dialogue sessions centered around an artwork, this project aims to make the most of Citylab Overvecht’s community engagement by bringing students from the university, hogeschool and ROC together with societal partners and organisations and having meaningful conversations about individual and societal challenges.

How to link the scientific curiosity of a bachelor thesis to societal challenges and involvement? This project tries to answer this question by building ties with societal organisations and launching a pilot with bachelor theses tied to those partnerships for SGPL-students. Based on this pilot, an approach to a Community Engaged Bachelor thesis can be developed for broader use in the future.

Building a bridge between linguistic bachelor educations and high school education, students of French will be cooperating with high school teachers to develop didactic materials for language education, based on the latests insights and knowledge, and implement this with small groups of pupils. This gives students valuable experience in the world of teaching, while teachers can reap the latest scientific insights into didactics.

How can today's law students contribute to restoring trust in the rule of law in the future? Through interactive masterclasses, students will engage in discussions with actors from eight different institutions, including the Dutch Parliament and the Province of Utrecht with whom this project works closely together. Moreover, based on input from a citizens' panel, the students themselves will develop and present innovations that could improve the position of citizens within these institutions.

This project invites students to experience the effects of ‘ shared reading’: reading literary texts together, out-loud, with the groups in the library, asylum seeker centres or other communities. By organizing, participating, and evaluating such shared reading sessions, students can connect with each other, different communities, and explore the possibilities such sessions offer.

Screens are nothing new, yet they can have different impact and norms for different generations. This project tries to bridge the generational gap on screens by having students engage in dialogue with seniors regarding screen culture and what this has meant for people over the years.

Open-source investigations offer tools to tackle issues of global justice, from human rights violations to civilian harm in conflict zones. In this project, students will be taught by experts in open-source investigations such as Bellingcat, learning the knowledge and skills required, and contribute directly to the work of the societal partners in this project.

In terms of reaching out to communities, this project is showing what is possible from the local to the international level. Focusing on the stories of the Queer community world wide, UCR students will cooperate with their counterparts in the USA to research Queer archives and interview members of the Queer community. The results will be shared in different forms on a website that both groups of students build in tandem. Furthermore, the project will also facilitate the creation of an art work which will be both physically displayed and digitized for online use.