The Carnegie Classification for Institutions of Higher Education defines community engagement as a high-impact practice characterized by the meaningful exchange of knowledge and resources between institutions of higher education and their communities for their mutual benefit.
Aligned with the vision of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual curiosity and provides the tools to offer answers to major problems, community-engaged learning (CEL) is a potent instrument for individual and collective growth.
More and more Sewanee colleagues have embarked on this adventure in recent years, designing CEL courses that have moved faculty and students across campus to expand their participation on and beyond the Domain. Six decades ago, working in the shanty towns of Brazil, social activist and pedagogue Paulo Freire understood the power of education to contest what, in the context of Nazi persecution, Vasily Grossman had identified as humanity’s major evil: not our lack of indisputable inherent goodness, but our passive compliance with unjust systems. Precisely, Freire emphasized the importance of education as a set of processes for oppressed groups to understand and act against the limiting mechanisms created by oppressive structures. Within the framework of his critical pedagogy, he underscored a distinctive trait of this learning process that can also describe community engagement: knowledge roots in experience, which means that everyone possesses something valuable to contribute to the collective. Learning occurs, thus, at any human exchange, not just as a formal unidirectional top-down dynamic. Ultimately, Freire reminds us that we become in the enriching process of human interaction. What a thoughtful conceptualization at the service of taming any temptation of academic superiority.
Beyond conceptual considerations, approaching the practicalities of CEL courses can be a daunting task, from the more general concerns about how a given field of study can imagine a CEL course, to the specifics of how to organize the lessons, assess, or make the course count towards promotion and tenure. Our colleagues in the Office for Civic Engagement and Community-Engaged Learning Faculty Fellows past and present would like to minimize all these common and valid anxieties. Through these newsletters, we wish to contribute to this goal by showcasing Sewaneeʼs CEL work and other initiatives that can be a source of inspiration. We are beginning with two initiatives to promote the arts and musical education from both global and local contexts.
Initiative #1- “The System”: Started as a music project in 1970s Venezuela led by pedagogue José Antonio Abreu, “The System” has provided musical training to underserved communities. Enrique Dudamel—Los Angeles Philharmonic Conductor who is scheduled to become the Music and Artistic Director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026—is one of its success stories. “The System” has inspired similar initiatives in other parts of the world, such as the Orchestrated Neighborhoods (Barrios Orquestados) project in Spain.
Initiative #2- Our energetic colleagues in the Music Department have been opening their doors to the community in multiple ways, by offering open voice master classes, or by creating a community choir at Monteagle Elementary, to name just a few exemplars. With this impetus, it won’t be hard to envision more future CEL initiatives and collaborations within and beyond the gates.
