Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons^™

Community-Based Learning: A Primer, Zeinab Bedri, Ruairí De Fréin, Geraldine Dowling

Practitioner Research Projects

Employers are increasingly demanding graduates with industry-ready communication, decision-making, problem-solving, leadership, emotional intelligence and social ethics skills. Community-based learning (CBL) has been identified as a pedagogical approach which has tremendous potential to produce graduates with these attributes; its prominent role in the future of Ireland's third level landscape is outlined in the Irish National Strategy for Higher Education (Hunt, 2011). However, for many early-career lecturers, distilling the insights from the teaching and learning literature, and then producing a well-designed CBL module, can be an intimidating task. What is missing is a primer which presents the core ideas of CBL in …