CSL 370/550: Topics in Community Issues: Walls to Bridges

How did CSL enrich the teaching and learning experience in your course this year?

What CSL did in this course, especially working in the Edmonton Institution for Women, was upend the usual context of where and how we think learning about community happens. The classroom was already situated within community, so the idea that we could “go out” to find it didn’t quite hold. Instead, the work became noticing what was already present. CSL slowed the pace in a way that mattered, because it made space for the process of creating a community in the room to be the learning itself, not just something that supported it.

What have you noticed about students’ engagement when they bring their experiences and stories from their CSL opportunities back into the classroom?

What becomes noticeable over time is that engagement starts to shift away from participation as contribution and toward participation as presence. When students bring their experiences back into the room, it opens up space for different kinds of knowledge to be recognized, not just academic or polished, but lived, partial, still forming. That shift creates the conditions for a classroom that feels more like a community, where what matters is not just what is said, but how we are learning to be with one another as those experiences are shared.

What advice do you have for the next set of CSL students?

Try not to treat the classroom, the community, and your placement as separate spaces that you move between. What tends to happen instead is that they begin to overlap, and the learning sits in that overlap. The moments that stay with you are rarely contained to one setting; they move, they return, and they change as you revisit them. Paying attention to that movement, rather than trying to keep things neatly divided, is where a lot of the insight comes from.

Images from The Conditional Release Newsletter, created by the CSL 370/550 Walls to Bridges class