Faculty Events & Workshops

Featuring conversations between University of Toronto CEL scholar/practitioners and invited scholar/practitioners from outside U of T, this virtual series aims to advance community-engaged learning practice and scholarship through critical reflection and discussion of societal challenges, theoretical questions, and practical pedagogical strategies. These conversations are shaped to put instructors, public scholars and boundary-crossing practitioners in conversation with each other about the state of the practice in Canada, and to recognize the vital role of grassroots, community-anchored lived experience in shaping CEL best practices.

These events are open to all.
If you are external to the University of Toronto, you will need to sign into the EVE platform in order to register.
If you do not already have an account, you can choose to set up an account by linking to your Facebook or Google account. You can also set up a new account using your name and email and choosing a password.
Please reach out to rebs.lee@utoronto.ca if you encounter any issues with registering.

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Critical Conversations in CEL: Bridging Theory and Practice I –
What Kind of University Do We Want? Interrogating Community, Crisis and Hope through CEL

Each of our invited speakers brings deep expertise at the nexus of community engagement, climate crisis, and critical pedagogy. As scholar-practitioners, they will collectively interrogate, reframe, and mobilize three key concepts resonant for our community-engaged learning pedagogy and practice in this moment: “community,” “hope,” and “crisis.” Our guests will be in dialogue with one another and our audience on the following: 

• In what ways might critically unsettling the notion of “community” inform and transform our pedagogical practices in CEL, deepen student engagement with complexity, and reimagine the ethics and praxis of relationship-building? 
  
• What is the role of hope in CEL pedagogies in a context of evidence-oriented helplessness—a condition shaped by the convergence of global and local crises and the stark inequities of their impacts? 
  
• Can hope serve as a generative force in our teaching, and if so, how might it be ethically and critically enacted?
  

To ground and extend this dialogue, our speakers have selected some recommended readings, which we encourage participants to engage with in preparation for our collective conversation.

Register for What Kind of University Do We Want? Interrogating Community, Crisis and Hope through CEL.

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Critical Conversations in CEL: Bridging Theory and Practice II – Turning the Classroom Inside Out:
Insights from Co-Learning and Transformative Justice in CEL

Co-learning is a model of community-engaged learning in which students and non-students learn together in a shared, typically off-campus setting.

Our three guests are co-learning scholar-practitioners whose work bridges community and university spaces with deep commitments to social justice. Each has used co-learning as an aspirational transformative practice that centres incarcerated, criminalized and otherwise marginalized collaborators in ways that upend hierarchies in university teaching, learning and research. Together they will dialogue with each other and the audience about care, accountability and process in CEL as they address the following questions:

• What are the possibilities and limits of co-learning as a model in CEL? What does transformation mean in co-learning pedagogy? How do values and commitments shape process and outcome in co-learning? 
  
• Why do co-learning approaches in CEL often centre transformative justice?  What can co-learning and/as transformative justice offer CEL more broadly? What are the implications of this framing?
  
• What practices can we implement as CEL educators across CEL models more broadly, to advance justice and transformation?
  
  Register for Turning the Classroom Inside Out: Insights from Co-Learning and Transformative Justice in CEL