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Community Engaged Learning Letter of Understanding for Faculty

Dear Faculty:

On behalf of the Bethel Frogtown/ Summit-University Partnership, we would like to thank you for entering into a partnership to provide a rich educational opportunity for our students. In order to become involved with Bethel’s Community Engaged Learning program, we kindly request that you review the following information to ensure that this is a good experience for yourself, students, and community partners.

Community Engaged Learning is the combination of academic coursework with carefully planned, meaningful service that provides direct benefits to the community. Each student will spend 25 hours (there are a few exceptions) throughout the semester working with a community organization.

The goals of Community Engaged Learning are:

To enhance classroom learning
To provide direct service that benefits the community
To promote civic responsibility and social justice

As a professor teaching a Community Engaged Learning course, you will ensure the following:

You will emphasize the importance of meeting the expectations laid out in the Bethel Student Letter of Understanding.
You will inform students that they must work for 25 hours for the duration of the semester. Students are required to start working with their community partner within the first 4 weeks of the semester and work with that site until the last week of class.
Let students know that if they don’t follow through with those expectations it will negatively impact their course grade.
By the second class period you will make sure that every student has signed up to work with a community partner.
You will have conversations with students who are not meeting their commitments.
Provide students with reflection assignments and activities that help them process their experiences.
All presentations that you give on these Community Engaged Learning projects will be done in collaboration with the Bethel FSU community partnership.

In order to provide a quality experience for both the community organization and students, the Bethel Center for Community Engaged Learning commits to do the following:

Provide a clear letter of understanding to each student who is taking a community engaged learning course. This letter will clearly outline the professors’, students’, and community organizations’ roles.
Will provide students with the evaluation form that each site supervisor will use during the semester to evaluate their performance. Here is a copy of the Community Engaged Learning Student Evaluation form.
Provide a clear letter of understanding to each community organization who is taking a community engaged learning course. This letter will clearly outline the professors’, students’, and community organizations’ roles, and can be accessed via the following link: Community Organization Letter of Understanding.
At the end of the first week of classes, the professor teaching a course/or administrator of a department/program will email the community organization that is contributing to the community engaged component of a course initiative with a list of students who will be contacting them about volunteering that semester.
We will provide students with specific orientation and application information from the community organization that they will be working with.
We will check in with each site supervisor several times throughout the semester to make sure that everything is going fine.
We will provide each site supervisor a student evaluation form during the semester. This form will allow supervisors to give specific feedback on each student’s involvement.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Center for Community Engaged Learning at fsu@bethel.edu.

Thanks,

Claudia May, Ph.D.
Executive Director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning