Community Engaged Learning (CEL)

SASAH’s experiential-learning course asks students to work individually or in groups for an organization (either local or international) committed to building a resilient community through arts and culture or with an eye to understanding the impact of arts and culture on other fields of knowledge and practice. A key focus of the course is personal resilience in relation to the resilience of both natural systems or environments and social organizations. Specifically, we will explore and implement the idea and experience of cultural resilience as the inspiration for creativity, change, and renewal across systems, environments, and organizations. Students will work both individually and/or in small groups on a set of assigned tasks for a community organization decided in advance between the organization, Western’s Student Experience CEL team, and the SASAH Experiential Learning Coordinator. Together they will establish the overarching proposal and goals for the placement, with an eye toward a final outcome of benefit to the broader community.

Dr. Ana Garcia-Allen

Full Year

The CEL option includes a trip to Holguin, Cuba, to collaborate with this community during Reading Week in February.

Dr. Ana Garcia-Allen

Full Year

Combining grammar and communication, this course prepares students to discuss, read and write about a variety of topics and to explore ideas about Hispanic culture in relation to their own. The CEL option includes a trip to Holguin, Cuba, to collaborate with this community during Reading Week in February.

Previous projects include: Engaging in one-to-one partnerships with Spanish newcomers in a 50/50 conversation program allowed Spanish newcomers to improve English while the Spanish students could apply language learning to real situations; working within the daily operations of a community program that serves Spanish newcomers; helping to facilitate a community art therapy program targeted towards Spanish newcomer children.

Dr. Ana Garcia-Allen

Full Year

Further development of oral and written skills with systematic acquisition of vocabulary and selective grammar review. Based on a multimedia and communicative approach, this course aims to develop fluency. Discussions, readings, and writing will focus on the cultures of Spanish-speaking countries. Includes an optional Community Engaged Learning component. Community placements that seek to place students in one-to-one mentorship partnerships or activities of organizations serving the Spanish community help bring the language learning to life. The CEL option includes a trip to Holguin, Cuba, to collaborate with this community during Reading Week in February.

Previous projects include: Engaging in one-to-one partnerships with Spanish newcomers in a 50/50 conversation program allowed Spanish newcomers to improve English while the Spanish students could apply language learning to real situations; working within the daily operations of a community program that serves Spanish newcomers; helping to facilitate a community art therapy program targeted towards Spanish newcomer children.

Tricia Johnson

This community engaged studio course aims to give students the opportunity to expand their knowledge of textile arts by learning the skill of embroidery by partnering with the Canadian Embroiderers’ Guild, London. Guild members will be teaching stitches in class and assisting students with learning the stitches. All the stitches taught will be created and archived by each student by producing an individual “Sampler”, which will document their experiences and learning in the course as well act as a visual resource for future artwork. Using all the knowledge gained from the Sampler, students will create an independently driven stitched artwork for the final project. Throughout the course, students will also research a specific embroidery topic, which will be shared to the class as a presentation, to further enhance their understanding of embroidery.

Dr. John Makaran, Dr. Dan Langohr, and Dr. Ryan Willing

Full Year

Students will develop and practice engineering design skills by working on a team-based project. Students will experience all phases of the design process, including problem definition, generation and evaluation of concepts, engineering analysis, prototyping, testing, and preparation of design documentation. Project management and communications skills will also be emphasized.

Dr. Tara Mantler

Fall Term

This course will explore the physical, social, psychological, and spiritual determinants of health from the prenatal period to early adulthood. The focus will be on health applications of developmental concepts such as sensorimotor, perceptual, cognitive, language, social and emotional throughout childhood. An emphasis will also be placed on contemporary issues affecting health.

Dr. Denise Grafton

Environmental health has an important role to play in addressing the complex array of environmental threats that are affecting human health and the wellbeing of our planet. Starting from this insight, this course looks at the interface between the fields of environmental health and health promotion to explore the theory and practice of environmental health promotion in its current context. The course introduces students to key concepts and theories used in the practice of environmental health promotion. It explores contemporary strategies to address issues such as epidemiology and toxicology, air pollution, water quality and scarcity, healthy built environments, vector-borne illness, and climate change using the tools of health promotion and health protection. The course employs a range of learning tools, including lectures, facilitated discussion and multimedia resources. Students will also have the opportunity to engage directly with expert practitioners in the field through a community engaged learning project done in collaboration with environmental organizations in London.

Previous projects include: Creating and delivering "laser talks" regarding climate change as a public health issue to London MPs with Citizen’s Climate Lobby, creating a social media campaign and community engagement project plan for the City of London to increase the public’s awareness of the various City of London water system components and programs, literature review and presentation on shade policies for ReForest London, public outreach campaigns (e.g., flash mob, hosting a game of Environmental Feud, social media campaign, and video for YouTube channel) promoting TREA’s mission

Health promotion planning and evaluation is essential when revising or creating programs or services. This practical and hands-on course will develop your conceptual and applied understanding of program planning and evaluation elements necessary for planning, designing, and conducting community health promotion programs. Specifically, this course will focus on different types of program evaluation and the steps involved in program evaluation. Students will gain practical experience through a series of in class exercises and assignments that will help develop skills and strategies for preparing and conducting evaluation activities.

Dr. Carri Hand

Full Year

Through this course students will develop the capabilities required for occupational therapy practice at organization, community and societal levels, oriented toward social and occupational justice, including understanding, analyzing and addressing the social landscape through advocacy that enables occupation and system change. Students will engage in integrated fieldwork activities involving promoting the profession of occupational therapy and working with a community partner to enact change.

Dr. Diane-Laure Arjaliès

Fall Term

Whereas in the past, organizations were only judged on their profitability, the societal impact is becoming increasingly salient to stakeholders/rightsholders. Managers increasingly want to assess the impact of their business on society. Investors are incorporating this evaluation in their valuation of businesses; customers choose to purchase from corporations whose activities benefit society; and employees want to work at firms that use a broad set of metrics to judge their performance.

Despite this growing interest and research support for these broader societal impacts of the firm, managers need help to measure this impact. This type of impact assessment is an emerging field with few best practices – knowledge has not yet been incarnated in easy-to-use frameworks or models.

This course provides students with methods and tools to conduct such assessments in the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors. It is theoretical and applied, incorporating significant fieldwork based on Community Engaged Learning (CEL). Through the fieldwork, students learn to assess the impact of a project/organization in the community, which requires them to evaluate the broader impact of the project/organization on society – whether it be socially, environmentally, or economically.

Jeremy Copeland

Winter Term

Whether you’re a journalist wanting to draw international attention to the Syrian refugee crisis, working for an aid organization asking for donations to help those refugees, or trying to promote your organization for any other reason, video can be a powerful storytelling tool. Used effectively, video allows viewers to deeply connect with people in your stories. In this course you will learn to use moving pictures and audio to make your viewers care about an issue and to inspire them to take action.

Previous Projects Include: Students have produced videos stories for more than 30 local organizations, including the Make A Wish Foundation, Big Brothers and Sisters, the Boys and Girls Club, the Canadian Women’s Sledge Hockey Team, the Preschool of the Arts, Youth Opportunities Unlimited, the Epilepsy Support Centre and CLAP.

Dr. Jan Plug, Dr. Andrew Johnson, Dr. Wolfgang Lehman, Dr. Walter Rushlow, Dr. Ken Yeung

Full Year 

Non-profit organizations in the London community are often faced with “wicked problems” that are very difficult to solve due to their complex, contradictory, changing or cross-cutting nature (Weber & Khademian, 2008). Using an approach that blends theory and practice, Scholars Electives students will work in interdisciplinary groups within organizations over the Fall Term to collaborate with organizations to provide insight and recommendations of how to alleviate a “wicked problem” the organization is facing.

Previous projects include: Adapted content of an online module to appropriately communicate the health information to the target audience; created a report and presentation containing recommendations for effective tourism implementation strategies, based on consultation with Middlesex County community members and a survey of best practices in similar municipalities in Ontario; produced a business plan for the implementation of a local thrift store.

Dr. Laura Curtis

Winter Term

This third year course seeks to place students in real-world community and school educational situations in which students can draw together and apply the concepts they have learned about Music Education in the previous two years of the Music Education program.

Previous projects include: Students participated in a weekly drop-in jam session for those with lived experience of mental illness through Belong to Song; students assisted and empowered youth to experience a free, intensive, innovative and accessible after-school music program with El Sistema - Aeolian Hall.

Dr. Nicole Campbell

Full Year

The community-engaged experiential rotation will provide students with a breadth of exposure to a field in medical science research. Students will complete several tasks associated with this rotation including a needs assessment before they go out on rotation and a summary when they return. This experiential rotation will provide an opportunity for students to connect theory and practice in the program. Each student will be assigned a faculty advisor (one of the core program members) who will oversee and if necessary, facilitate the rotation placements for their group of students. Assessments and assignments related to the rotations will be part of the accompanying program components

Dr. Sarah McLean

Full Year

This course will focus on addressing health care misconceptions with students using scientific inquiry. Online work will focus on the underlying pathophysiology, biochemistry, and epidemiology of relevant healthcare issues. In-class sessions include active learning exercises and discussions with community healthcare members. A community-service learning project is undertaken related to healthcare communication and/or promotion.

Previous projects include: Students have developed a business case for presentation to the South West Local Health Integration Network recommendations based off the initial study findings for a lift assists service to be provided by Middlesex-London Emergency Medical Services, increased awareness, support and funding of mind-body initiatives (yoga and mindfulness) for mental health and addiction recovery, and conducted community mapping of resources available within communities of Ontario that will aid in Teen Challenge graduates’ exit strategies and after-care support.

Dr. Alison Allan

Full Year

This capstone course focuses on the translation of cancer research discoveries into clinical practice, emphasizing interdisciplinary approaches, critical thinking, research design and evaluation of data from the literature.

In addition to the content covered in the course, a CommunityEngaged Learning component integrates students in a small group/team learning context (3-5 students) through coordination with relevant community partners associated with cancer research, support and care. Through these partnerships, students working on a year-long capstone project relevant to the partners’ needs. Past community partners have included the Canadian Cancer Society, the LHSC Cancer Clinical Trials Unit, ChildCan, Kids Kicking Cancer Canada, Health Canada, and the Patient & Family Advisory Council at the London Regional Cancer Program.

Throughout the course, students practice critical ongoing reflection and are engaged both independently and collaboratively in authentic learning experiences and professional/career development practices.

Dr. Lloy Wylie and Dr. Ava John-Baptiste

Winter Term

The Master of Public Health (MPH) Program is designed to fill a novel niche at the intersection of leadership, sustainability and policy within the Canadian Health Care System as well as more globally. It is an interdisciplinary, interfaculty program that seeks to prepare students to address main public health challenges in Canada and abroad, thus opening avenues and opportunities for the students to serve not just in their local communities, but also contribute and lead in national and global public health initiatives as the change agents.

The Community Engaged Learning projects will seek to enhance the learning in the courses by bringing course concepts to life and affording students the opportunity to work in real-world settings where they can apply their acquired knowledge. Projects will inform the classroom and academic experience of MPH students for the following courses:

• Community Health Assessment & Program Evaluation
• Health Economics
• Managing Health Services

During the program, students study a variety of public health topics, including:

• Maternal/Child Health
• Emergency Preparedness/Disaster Response
• Communicable and Chronic Disease
• Mental Health
• Determinants of Health and Health Equity

Dr. Graeme Taylor

Fall and Winter Term

This course is intended for students to further develop the skills necessary to search, understand, synthesize, discuss and present (orally and written) the published literature on topics in biology. This course offers students the opportunity to think broadly about biology, both its results and scientific process. This course gives students the opportunity to practice several different kinds of communication and critical thinking, and it gives students opportunities to mobilize their acquired knowledge through educating others on various topics of biology through community partnerships.

Previous projects include: Information pamphlets for Thames Regional Ecological Association about rain barrels and compost bins and how to use them effectively; packaged and catalogued more than 7000 seeds for the London Seed Library in collaboration with Food Not Lawns; prepared a report indicating the estimated value of ecosystem services in the 15 properties owned by the Thames Talbot Land Trust.

Laura Reid and Bryan Sarlo

Fall and Winter Term

This course explores the use of different types of media (e.g., text, images, sound, animation) to convey ideas and facilitate interaction. Topics include the design and use of a range of software tools for media creation and editing, covering image, sound, animation and video. In this course, students will have the opportunity, using Photoshop, to participate in Community Engaged Learning by creating a poster for a partner organization or for an upcoming event given by an organization. The course is large so the partner can select their favourite poster from almost 800 student designs. Partnering organizations should have a rough idea of the text they would like included on the poster and the general message that the poster should convey.

Previous projects include: Creating a poster about the jewelry created by women at “My Sister’s Place” and Epilepsy Awareness month.

Dr. Christina Booker

Fall Term

This experiential learning course will foster interaction between students and community partners regarding a specific project. Students will mobilize their classroom and laboratory knowledge in order to address questions of relevance to a local company or non-profit organization. Students will be trained to identify, evaluate and construct an evidence-based stance on contentious products, or claims, in the media, or in society, on the basis of the science behind them and communicate these arguments to both scientific, as well as general, audiences. One two-hour lecture and one two-hour tutorial per week.

Previous projects include: Research report regarding the contributing sources of phosphorus/nutrient pollution in Lake Erie to inform the prioritization of City resources to minimize phosphorus/nutrient pollution in Lake Erie; Updated overview of the latest claims by media/marketers causing residents to distrust the safety of their municipal drinking water system to advise the public that it may be unnecessary to purchase their own treatment systems, or to consume water from a commercial source.

Dr. Dan Bousfield

Winter Term

This course traces the colonial lineage of political science and political studies through a decolonial reading of key texts. With an emphasis on the role of the academy in imperialism, racism, settler colonialism and hierarchies of intersectionality, this course examines the subfields of political science and forms of decolonial mobilization. Topics range from the ongoing practices of settler colonialism to the role of affect and race in humanitarianism, as well as strategies and practices of activism, the logics of terrorism and queer approaches to Eurocentric politics.

Dr. Dan Bousfield

Fall Term

This course will help you critically assess the current state of Canadian-American relations through a variety of perspectives, issues and policy debates. We will emphasize the importance of theories and arguments related to North American integration and divergence from local, regional and global perspectives. We will explore economic and political integration as well as forms of divergence where students will analyze developments in the areas of defence, security, environment, culture and labour. Students will also debate and discuss the processes of policy development in comparative terms, with an emphasis on the role of actors in civil society. Students will be given the option to complete Community Engaged Learning placement or projects that will allow these issues to the brought to life to the student, while making an important contribution to a community organization in the London area.

Dr. Dan Bousfield

Winter Term

This course will help you critically assess the political perspectives on contemporary issues in international law. This course will help you explore the theoretical perspectives on international law, as well as key issues, debates and topics. We will address a range of issues in International law including dispute settlement, terrorism, and international impunity, the law of the sea, environmental protection and human rights. Drawing on insights of international relations, this course will explore both theories and issues of international law in the contemporary world.

Previous projects include: Website and blog development; analysis of London Employment Space, Newcomer Settlement Plan & Community Engagement for the African Canadian Federation of London; Literature review and recommendations on best practices of qualities of welcoming communities for the Inclusion and Civic Engagement Sub-council.

Dr. Dan Bousfield

Fall Term

This course examines the intersection of technology with political dynamics, focusing on critical areas such as ethics in AI, algorithmic bias, data manipulation, online activism, big data, gender, race and identity online, digital security, environmental tech, labor in the digital economy, genetics and digital health, privacy vs. surveillance, hybrid warfare, and digital diplomacy. It seeks to understand how these technological aspects impact policy, democracy, and societal norms. Through this lens, the course offers insights into the evolving role of technology in shaping public policy, ethical considerations, and regulatory responses.

Dr. Riley Hinson

Full Year

This course introduces students to major topics in the prevention and treatment of various forms of addictive behavior. The course also involves a structured community service learning component in which students will help addictions-related organizations meet their identified needs. This work will not necessarily involve direct client contact.

Previous projects include: Online training modules for Addictions Services of Thames Valley to assist staff with their understanding of the DSM -5 updates; program review of all Westover Treatment Centre services as they compare with current literature and best practices.

Dr. John White, Ajit Unnithan, and Abbas Alimorad

Full Year

A project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. In traditional organizations, projects represent one-off endeavours that are separate from the everyday operations of the organization (i.e., a change initiative, a particular campaign, developing a new feature). In project-based organizations, all work is organized in the project-based model (i.e., theatre, television, video games, construction and building trades.)

In this course, students will be learning how to manage projects from start to finish through: initiation, planning, execution & control and closure. Students will apply the principles of project management to ensure that the project meets the stated requirements in terms of scope, quality, cost, schedule, resources and risk.

This course will partner students with community organizations who have a project for completion. This will help students see the concepts of project management come to life while helping to advance the mission of partner organizations.

Previous projects include: Execute an event to test and pilot a live-in student placement program to support residents of Plant A Home with developmental disabilities; create recruitment strategies and connections outside current and conventional avenues to enhance and boost recruitment of qualified candidates at Participation House.

Janis Wallace

Winter 2026

Synthesize the various skills you've learned so far in this program by developing and/or implementing a “real world” marketing project in conjunction with a local, “client” organization. Work as a multi-disciplinary team with your classmates, similar to a marketing agency or department. Develop and monitor your own project plan, prepare a marketing plan, do your research, budget and measure ROI.

Previous projects include: Completing a best practice study on newsletters for Pillar Nonprofit Network to increase readership and meet the needs of the new membership structure.