Teachers: Engaged Pedagogy
Learning takes place when the learner is activated, and community-based research activates! Students engage in activities that range from simply acquiring knowledge via relevant literature to interacting and negotiating with societal partners in designing and carrying out research. This results in deep learning, on cognitive, affective, and regulative levels.
The real world setting of CBR forms a rich, authentic and motivating context for learning that stimulates personal and academic growth of students as well as their teacher advisors. Studying and addressing real world issues gives students a sense of relevance, competence and autonomy, and makes CBR an enjoyable, although complex and confronting, learning experience. CBR for the Humanities strives to help students make their research societally relevant even beyond the local context by, for example, connecting it to the UN sustainable development goals.
CBR practice involves re-construction and co-creation of knowledge: students use their pre-existing knowledge, link it to new contexts and generate new findings; students adjust, reorganize or fully reconfigure existing knowledge, breaking down misconceptions and prejudices. Exchange with teachers, peers and research partners from the communities that they are working with strengthens and enriches this process of learning.