2024-2025 Graduate Community Engaged Teaching (CET) Fellowship

Graduate Community Engaged Teaching (CET) Fellowship 2024-25

Haas Center for Public Service, in partnership with Stanford Summer Session

Description

The Haas Center for Public Service's new Graduate Community Engaged Teaching (CET) Fellowship provides Stanford graduate students with the opportunity to receive support and training to develop, design, and teach a community-engaged learning (CEL) course in their area of expertise or interest that may be offered during the 2025 Stanford Summer Session. 

Often called “service learning,” CEL courses combine learning goals and community engagement to both enhance student learning and contribute to the common good. At Stanford, these are referred to as Cardinal Courses. The aim of the fellowship is to support graduate student to develop a course adhering to a community-engagement learning model that enhances student learning while fostering meaningful partnerships between students and community organizations. CEL courses at Stanford are ones that: 

• Engage with a community to address a social problem or societal need
• Integrate course objectives and community-based experiences
• Produce reciprocal benefits for students and community partners
• Provide opportunities to critically examine public issues
• Embody Stanford's Principles of Ethical and Effective Service

To better understand what such courses might look like, feel free to explore Stanford’s Cardinal Course examples here (this video is also useful). 

Your course proposal should deliberately integrate ideas for a community-engaged learning component that can enhance student learning while delivering tangible benefits to a community partner. This partnership component does not need to be fully fleshed out in your proposal (this is what the fellowship is for!), but it is important for applicants to express how they might go about developing this aspect of the course.

Graduate students selected as CET Fellows will receive support from the Haas Center’s Community Engaged Learning and Research (CELR) team and join an interdisciplinary cohort of graduate student peers to develop and propose a course for Stanford Summer Session 2025. During the spring and summer 2024, fellows will meet monthly to engage in course design and community partnership development activities, with the goal of transforming their idea for a CEL course into a proposal to be submitted to Summer Session in mid-November 2024. Fellows whose courses are approved will continue to work together in the winter and spring 2025 quarters, meeting monthly to fine tune their syllabi in terms of pedagogy, course content, and community partnership activities. Fellows may teach the course during Stanford’s 2025 Summer Session. 

After the teaching experience, Fellows will be encouraged to contribute to the campus and/or broader field of community engaged scholarship through a presentation about their CEL teaching experience. (Fellows may request some level of support to present their experiences at a relevant conference.)

Program Goals: 

• Establish a cohort of graduate students interested in developing a CEL course an area of expertise or interest 

• Provide opportunities for graduate student participants to teach a CEL course during Stanford Summer Session 2025  

• Introduce Fellows to potential community partners for their course

• Provide a space for facilitated discussions, including:

  • CEL course design fundamentals

  • How to prepare undergraduate students for ethical and effective community engagement

  • How to build reciprocal community partner relationships

  • How to develop relevant student learning goals and objectives

  • How to assess student learning and evaluate course outcomes

• Provide individualized mentoring and consultation to participants on an ongoing basis

• Encourage graduate scholarship on community engaged learning and teaching 

Note: Participation in the Fellowship program does not guarantee approval to teach a Summer Session in the fellow's area of interest and expertise. However, the Haas Center and Stanford Summer Session will work together with fellows to explore and identify relevant departments and programs that are offering, or willing to offer, Cardinal Courses taught by graduate students. Should the opportunity to teach during Summer Session not come to fruition, Haas Center will also work with Fellows to identify and explore other potential opportunities to facilitate CEL experiences, including teaching assistantships that may come available during the summer and/or throughout the academic year. All fellows will still leave the Fellowship program with a well-developed course idea and syllabus and enhanced competencies and tools to facilitate community-engaged teaching and learning experiences.