If students register for a community-engaged course and they are already involved in community work that aligns with course learning goals, they may be able to use their pre-existing engagements in lieu of a volunteer opportunity facilitated by the CELE Center. We refer to this as a self-placement. When discussing self-placements with students, these are the criteria our team communicates:
1-Have a PRE-EXISTING community engagement (self-placements typically only work out when students have already onboarded and been engaged in the commitment they intend to use for CEC purposes)
2-The nature of your community-engagement work aligns with the learning goals of your course
3-Have instructor and site supervisor approval of self-placement to be used for your community-engaged learning requirement
Criteria for what is an acceptable self-placement also depends on the instructor's discretion and boundaries. Things you may want to consider include: paid work, religious-centered work, family work. If you would like a thought partner in determining your own set of criteria, please reach out to our team: engage@uw.edu.
We suggest that instructors ask themselves these questions when considering which self-placements to approve:
Does this option make this community-engaged course more accessible to the student?
Does the content and time commitment of their current engagement work for the reflection assignments and learning goals of this course?
Will the student be engaging with populations or issues through this commitment that will support their learning in the course?
Processing self-placements: Students submit self-placement requests via a form that we link on the student webpage under FAQs.
Submissions will first need instructor approval through the Expo platform (more on that in Module 4), and once they are approved by instructors, the CEC team can process the placement to be reflected in the database. Instructors and CEC team members can also "send back" these requests to students if they do not approve of the placement, or if more information is needed.