Supporting just over 3,800 experiences in 107 courses/sections (14 new), with several new courses already planned for 2024/25, we still see a growing demand for experiences that connect students to community organizations and employers. Through these experiences, students have opportunities to grow both personally and professionally while also making contributions that benefit our partners. Curricular EL options can foster “deep engagement with course content by leveraging a concrete experience to bring ‘real-world’ relevance to the classroom” (Endersby & Maheux-Pelletier, 2020, p.57). Faculty note this enhanced engagement in their feedback about the experience embedding different types of EL in their courses. For all 2023 graduates from undergraduate programs at Laurier, 93.3% had at least one curricular experiential learning opportunity during their studies at Laurier (Provincial SMA Metric).
Numerous student surveys reveal that the main motivation for pursuing post-secondary education is job and career preparation, with secondary reasons including personal and intellectual growth and the desire to make a positive impact on society or their community (Brainstorm Student Interests Report, 2023, Academica University and College Applicant Survey, 2022; Canadian University Survey Consortium, 2022). 2023/24 data from our faculty partners, our community and employer partners, and our students highlight partner-engaged EL in the classroom as both a pathway to employability and a pathway to meaningful community engagement and personal growth for students.
With an ongoing commitment to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Indigenization, we continue to reflect on the ways we collaborate with communities and employers for the purpose of EL. There is potential in CWP experiences for students to ‘unlearn’ through the creativity, connection, and reciprocal nature of ‘student-in-environment’ that is central to the practice and pedagogies (Mackie et al, 2017). Battiste (2013) reminds us to be critical in our approach and engagement and we continue to work individually, as a team, and with our colleagues at Laurier and in the community to understand what this means and looks like. We are working to establish more partnerships with indigenous-led organizations and are having conversations with our community partners about the ways they want to engage with Laurier students. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to reduce barriers to engagement for grassroots organizations through intentional partnership with Social Development Centre’s Civic Hub in Waterloo Region. We have also started to pilot new procedures related to police checks for international students. These are some examples of the work which we understand to be in perpetual progress.
I have worked at Laurier since 2020 (originally in Accessible Learning) and it has been exciting to transition to Community and Workplace partnerships supporting partner-engaged experiential learning (EL) in the classroom.
I have enjoyed working with all our community and employer partners who make the type of work we do possible. I am always pleasantly surprised to see the quality of work that the Laurier students produce, and our partners are equally impressed with what the Laurier students contribute to their organizations.
I value being a part of EL to support students as they gain exposure and experience about industries, so they can prepare their next steps in their education and careers.
We collaborate with external partners to offer meaningful experiential learning opportunities to Laurier students. Our partners offer placements, life case studies, research projects, problem-based learning opportunities and job shadows.
Results were from 101 responses to our partnership survey.
94% had a positive overall experience and would consider offering experiential learning opportunities again in the future.
89% found our students to be prepared and professional.
We had several partners who provided opportunities for multiple students:
Over the past year, Hopespring Cancer Support Centre has hosted six MBA non-profit practicum students and partnered with FR470, Atelier in French. This Spring they also hired a Laurier Co-op student and are partnered with BU452, Marketing Strategy. We asked our contacts to share about these partnerships from their perspective.
I have found the MBA students from Laurier to be of high quality, responsible, knowledgeable, and able to get up to speed quickly, greatly contributing to the quality of HopeSpring's marketing initiatives. Additionally, working with the Marketing Strategy class BU452 has been a pleasure, as the students are fully engaged with the community project and committed to making a meaningful difference for the members and future members of HopeSpring. Their dedication and enthusiasm have had a significant positive impact on our organization.
I have found the placement of MBA students in our organization and within my department to be an incredibly valuable addition to the team. The students are always eager to contribute and quick to learn the processes involved while adding their own expertise and understanding to the project at hand. Many MBA students have continued volunteering past their allocated time per their course requirements which has been a tremendous help and further exemplifies their commitment to community service.
At HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre, engaging students from Laurier University has been an incredibly enriching experience for our organization and the cancer community. Their creativity, dedication, and fresh perspectives have significantly contributed to our mission of providing support and hope to those on their cancer journey.
French Fairy Tales Project: The French students' initiative to create fairy tales, such as Red Riding Hood, Witch/Giant stories, and other magical narratives, has had a profound impact on our community. By weaving themes of strength, positivity, hope, resilience, and courage into these tales, they have offered our members, especially children, a unique and powerful means to understand and cope with their experiences.
From the perspective of the students, spending time with HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre offers a deeply meaningful experience. They gain firsthand insight into the resilience and strength of those affected by cancer, learn the importance of community support, and develop invaluable skills in communication, organization, and leadership. The opportunity to make a tangible difference in the lives of our members fosters a sense of purpose and empathy, which is essential for their personal and professional growth.
In summary, the partnership between Laurier University and HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre is a testament to the transformative power of community engagement. It highlights how students can play a crucial role in supporting those on their cancer journey while simultaneously growing and learning from the experience.
Throughout 2023/24, we have continued to foster the relationship with Laurier faculty to grow partner-engaged experiential learning opportunities for students.
Get to know some of our faculty partners and read about the reasons why they embed experiential learning into their courses.
I have been working in collaboration with CWP staff the last few years. Their input has been empowering me to create dynamic and engaging learning environments and ultimately, I received a Donald F. Morgenson “Excellence in Internationalization” Award this May.
My teaching philosophy translates into practice through my focus on four key elements: promoting cultural diversity and internationalization; creating an inclusive and safe learning environment; encouraging student engagement through experiential learning; and offering real-world perspectives. Engaging with Francophone culture or literature, which are my areas of expertise, represents a significant “cultural shock “for most students as the material places them in unfamiliar terrain. Whereas language courses provide a sense of continuous progress and utility as students develop their linguistic skills, culture and literature courses demand a diverse set of skills beyond language proficiency, including reading and writing capabilities, critical thinking, and empathy. It also takes time for students to grasp that these are transferable skills, not confined to a single course but essential for their broader academic pursuits and future careers. As an instructor, I have also felt challenged when first considering including high impact approaches in my “traditional” syllabi for the first time, almost a decade ago, unsure whether those types of practices would not take away from the quantity of the content supposed to be taught. I soon learned, from the evaluations and students’ reflections that these are the assignments they most engage with and that make them understand the relevance of the material taught in that course. What’s more, each one of those experiences/ projects helps them develop cross-cultural communication skills, adaptability, resilience and be more prepared to meet the challenges of the professional world.
More recently, I have been teaching FR370: Graphic Novels and Animation which I have designed around a survey of Francophone comics and graphic novels, as well as animation movies. I taught the course for the first time on ZOOM in Fall 2021 and I taught it again in class in Fall 2023. In both iterations of this course, I worked closely with Community & Workplace Partnerships. The office found community partners for one assignment I designed. In groups of 4, students connect with a partner, most often a French teacher from the area, and they create a short comic and a pedagogical guide with activities exploiting the comic, for the teacher to use with their students. The themes range from immigration, integration, diversity, exclusion/ racism, to Indigenous history or even learning French as a second language. The response of the first ZOOM cohort was a success, as the experience evaluation report showed: 91% of the students felt that this type of experiential learning provided an opportunity for them to learn more about social/community issues. This course and the students’ work was featured in Laurier’s news spotlights of January 2022.
I have also worked to embed professional inquiry models in FR238 and FR338, my Francophone culture courses, and both my translation courses, FR 330 and FR 331, are now consistently taught with an experiential learning component which has included translating articles for the students’ newspaper or various documents for the Food Bank of Kitchener-Waterloo. The students’ enthusiastic responses are overwhelming each year. By adopting these approaches, I hope to provide my students with a transformative educational experience that extends far beyond language proficiency and prepares them for the complexities of an interconnected world.
I first introduced CSL learning components to my FR470: Creative writing in French course in 2020. Originally designed to give students the opportunity to undertake a placement in local French immersion schools, assisting with literacy work, specifically reading and creative writing in French, the CSL team has subsequently expanded our partnerships to include organisations such as the Canadian Clay and Glass gallery and Laurier's own student group, Laurier Students for Literacy. Students study a wide variety of fairy tales in French and then work to create their own variants tailored to their partner's needs and requirements.
It is clear that students thrive on the practical purposes of their assessments and appreciate their work being used to support community partners. Knowing that their assessments are more than an academic exercise encourages them to stretch and surpass themselves. In doing this, they learn much about their abilities and how to overcome perceived barriers to performance. These creative assessments are unique, reliant on collaboration within groups and with external community partners. Their uniqueness also helps reduce possibilities for academic misconduct, as these assignments cannot simply be generated by conversational AI programs. The pride students demonstrate in their work, which is typically published or supplied to community partners for use, is tangible.
Given the success of our CSL/EL learning experiences in French courses, the Department of Languages and Literatures is working to create an in-degree Certificate in Community and Workplace French. Students completing the certificate will experience a range of Community Service-Learning projects, including Professional Inquiry, Partner engaged projects and workplace simulated projects and CSL placements. All courses for this certificate will be delivered entirely in French and all assignments will be written in French, thus equipping students with enhanced language and communication skills – enduring, life-long skills which increase their marketability in the workplace.
As we arguably stand on the precipice an era of transformation in education with the proliferation of new technologies embracing experiential learning, I believe is critical to engaging students and developing some of the desired skills associated with university graduates. In embracing my own teaching philosophy of ‘think different’ I have also had to think differently about what a classroom should look like, feel like, and what an effective classroom is. In reflecting on measures of a successful class, experiences that supports students’ opportunities to test new ideas; my teaching strategies embrace digging into the nuance of subjects through strategies that highlight yes, or no answers are often inadequate when considering the complex world that we live in. To highlight this nuance, I often integrate opportunities for varied forms of experiential learning that allow students to apply concepts and frameworks but do not lead to a single right or wrong answer. Instead, students need to balance several variables and work to consider the various potential outcomes and explain their decision making. Students then have the opportunity to reflect on the decision that their peers made in contrast to their own, what they might have done differently if faced with a similar experience again, or what potential outcomes may have been if other routes were pursued. Incorporating experiential learning highlights to students that there are several potential answers to situations and the focus is on selecting and applying appropriate frameworks to the issue at hand.
This pedagogy moves students away from simply focusing on getting the right answer but to engaging in the learning process. Incorporating experiential learning that is done in cooperation with community partners provides students with the opportunity to work on a real-world case study, in which students are challenged to consider the concepts and frameworks introduced in class and apply them using their own creativity. This is done within an iterative process where students are required to go back on several occasions to refine their work based on feedback from myself and their experiential learning partner. This teaching strategy challenges students to assess what others have done in similar situations, what worked, what didn’t, and ultimately create their own action plan. These types of partnerships allow students to develop their higher order thinking skills and provides a sense of accomplishment when completing the project and receiving positive feedback from their community partner. Based on both formal and informal feedback from students they speak highly of the experience and learning acquired through experiential learning activities. The feedback provided has reinforced to me the need to continue to seek opportunities to incorporate experiential learning into my classes.
Community partners have also shared how much they enjoy the experience of working with our students and the new ideas and perspectives that our students bring to the scenarios that they are presented with.
As we, as a university community, continue to grapple with the rapidly changing educational environment I am a strong proponent that experiential learning and the rich learning experiences it provides for our students.
100% had a positive overall experience working with CWP.
100% recommended working with CWP to their colleagues.
100% felt that it enhanced the classroom learning environment.
75% felt that it enhanced their teaching practice.
88% felt that it helped them better engage with their students.
100% felt that experiences coordinated by CWP staff were a good fit for the learning goals of their course.
100% felt that CWP staff provided their students with adequate assistance and support.
100% felt that there was adequate communication with CWP staff.
Through the community and workplace partnership experience, we support students as they build connections in the community, and in the programs and initiatives of their community partner organization.
2,493 students completed the evaluation with a 65% response rate
These are the top skills that students felt they have gained or strengthened through this experience.
1: Communication (50%)
2: Functional Knowledge (25%)
3: Teamwork / Collaboration (25%)
4: Time Management / Organization (20%)
5: Technical Skills (20%)
Explore our selection of courses offered that included the CWP experience during the 2023/24 academic year. Courses marked with an * indicates that they are new courses.
In all CWP courses, students can link their experience to the Laurier Competency Framework. Over the course of the 2023/24 year, the top five competencies selected across all types of experiential learning in CWP courses were: communication, collaboration and teamwork, critical thinking, adaptability and resiliency and problem solving.
The bar charts below identifies the number of students who reported they developed the competency through their experiential learning opportunity.
The Virtual Village project funded by the Schlegal-UW Research Institute on Aging wrapped up the 3-year collaboration between Community and Workplace Partnerships at Laurier and Fairview Parkwood Communities.
Now in its third iteration, CWP supports the Master of Environmental Science – Environmental Data Analytics field students to secure paid work experiences as part of their program. Read about two students who secured positions with their internship employers after graduation.
Learn about the four types of CWP experiences that you can recruit students for.
Battiste, M. (2013). Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. Purich Publishing Ltd.
Endersby, L. & Maheux-Pelletier G. (2020). Guiding a Meaningful Experiential Learning Journey by Making it HIP Again. Guiding the Journey: Learner – Teacher – Learner, 13(1), 57-75. https://celt.uwindsor.ca/index.php/CELT/article/view/6018
Mackie, MacLennan, & Shipway (2017). ‘There must be consequences’: The impact of misaligned behaviour management perspectives in remote Indigenous education (pp. 303-314)
