Living. Learning. Serving. Reflecting.
Community-Based Learning
By combining service, group discussion, and readings, this course helps to expand and challenge the meaning of service.
"I’m certain the service alone would have been a satisfying experience, but it was our service learning class that clarified its meaning.”
--Billy Hansen
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“No explanation of this course can fully describe what it is until you experience a year at a placement. Your placement becomes a second family. They teach you how to respect and learn about others that you may not be familiar with.”
--Ashlee Ernst
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3333 Regis Boulevard | Denver, CO 80221
Your “Service/Community-Based Learning” course houses a 3-4 hour per week commitment at a single service-learning placement site for the academic year, plus a weekly discussion section devoted to placement experience.
Because you will be at your service placement both semesters, you are expected to transition over the course of the year from a more task-oriented understanding of your role and activities to one including established relationships and more open engagement with the work and mission of the agency.
Your time at your placements might resemble previous community service you have done, and you are certainly expected to be useful at your placement. Nevertheless, you will find that your placement work is much more than community service: your placement is, in fact, an additional “classroom”. What and how you learn there will be essential for the work in all your En/Route courses.
In “Service/Community-Based Learning,” you are evaluated both semesters by your placement supervisors on the basis of a Learning-Work Agreement and by your professors on the quality of your contributions to discussions involving shared reflection, deliberation and discernment.
The En/Route program introduces students to a distinct type of service.
Some of you may enter the program having a variety of experience with service during your time in high school and throughout your life. Maybe this service consisted in tutoring fellow students, or participating in a school-wide volunteer day, or taking service-focused trips. Maybe your experience with service (and your understanding of the idea) looks nothing like this. And maybe En/Route is your first interaction with service on a regular basis or altogether. Whatever your previous experience, yours is a most welcome contribution to our community.
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What distinguishes En/Route from these other types of service is your commitment - for a full academic year - to being in community with members of the partner organizations you'll be working with, and members of your En/Route cohort. These communities offer you an opportunity to connect to larger socio-economic issues; these connections are facilitated by working directly at your community partner, and in class through various readings, discussions, and forms of writing.
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See Regis University's mission to find out more about the Jesuit values that ground our approach to education and service.
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Thank you for choosing to participate with En/Route this year!
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