Learning Through Reflective Exercises and Community Experience

Abstract

With the goal of encouraging readers to develop their own classroom- and community-based lessons for experiencing and reflecting on community, this chapter provides a starting point with exercises utilizing a variety of principles and practices. They include a holistic community study, a service-learning exercise that encourages reflection on the value and pitfalls of service and volunteering, reflection on access to social services through small-group visits to organizations that provide the services, a role-playing debate on a community infrastructure project, a lobbying assignment involving an issue of real-world importance to the student lobbyists, and an exercise in community transformation. These exercises allow students to experience communities directly or replicate their experiences. The community becomes a classroom, a learning laboratory, a place of engagement, while the classroom becomes a locus of discussion about community and its impact, both on our lives and in the broader policy context.