Curriculum Innovation through Research with Communities
The TU Dublin programme for Students Learning with Communities recently represented TU Dublin and the Erasmus+ Strategic partnership CIRCLET action research project (Curriculum Innovation through Research with Communities: Learning circles of Educators and Technology) alongside colleagues from the Corvinus University of Budapest Science Shop at the International Conference for Advances in Higher Education (H’ead) in Valencia in Spain.
Together they presented on ‘Adapting Learning Circle approaches to equip academic staff for Community Engaged Research and Learning (CERL) practices’, a paper they happily co-authored with ten Learning Circle facilitators across the CIRCLET project. Their paper and presentation explored how the facilitators of Learning Circles within Higher Education create safe places for lecturers to self–reflect and engage in peer learning in order to re-design and change modules they teach to include Community Engaged Research and Learning. Over two years (2020/21 and 2021/22) the CIRCLET project offered the Learning Circle as a yearlong programme for lecturers to learn about and deepen their CERL practices. The CIRCLET project also offered an online professional development 5-credit module for lecturers to engage with CERL.
Across the Learning Circle and Professional Development module offered across the five partner universities, the CIRCLET project strengthened the capacity of 104 lecturers for CERL with 53 modules redesigned to include CERL, improved the learning outcomes of over 3,000 students for CERL, and worked in partnership with over 165 community organisations.
The CIRCLET project is a collaboration between Queens University Belfast, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, VriJe Universiteit Brussel, and the programme for Students Learning with Communities in TU Dublin.