Community-Based Learning

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Community-Based Learning

The Office of Community-Based Learning provides shared, community-based experiences and reflective opportunities that serve the entire campus community and all academic departments. Our goal is to strategically support faculty, students and the Baltimore community while focusing resources and expertise toward the continuing development of thoughtful and informed global citizens.

By actively connecting academic coursework with engaged learning in the community, students investigate assumptions about race, class and privilege, and learn how to develop beneficial, sustainable community partnerships. All academic disciplines and divisions (humanities, social sciences, sciences and the arts) incorporate community-based learning practices.

Program Staff

Cass Freedland, Ph.D., France-Merrick Director for Community-Based Learning

Lindsay K. Johnson’05, ‘13, Associate Director, Community-Based Learning and Community Service Programs

Frances Ramos-Fontán, Director, Futuro Latino Learning Center

Amy Roza, Program Director, Goucher Prison Education Partnership

Santa Marie Wallace’11, Assistant, Office of Community-Based Learning

Ellie Brown ‘11, Graduate Assistant

Special Programs

Futuro Latino Learning Center

On weekends, Goucher College is transformed into a bustling international center for the local community. Administered through Goucher College’s Office of Community-Based Learning (CBL) and Professor Frances Ramos-Fontan, the Futuro Latino Learning Center (FLLC) was created in response to a critical need for English as a Second Language (ESL) services for a rapidly growing immigrant population in Baltimore County.

The center offers a wide range of educational programs that respond to the needs and interests of the area immigrant community. Participants gather in the Athenaeum’s Pinkard Community Service Center on Saturdays from 11am-5pm to practice conversation skills and to receive ESL and basic computer-literacy training. For children, there are kids’ play programs from children ages 1 through 18, and a cultural heritage program to keep in touch with their Hispanic heritage while their parents are working to reach their own educational goals. More than 70 Goucher community members, including student leaders, staff the center.

Goucher Prison Education Partnership (GPEP) and Writing Workshops at the Baltimore County Detention Center 

The Goucher Prison Education Partnership (GPEP) is an extension of Goucher College. Our primary goal is to offer an excellent college eduation to men and women incarcerated in Maryland. We operate two on-site higher education programs in state prisons.  While we are a division of Goucher College, all courses at the prisons are funded individual donations and a few private grants. We rely heavily on volunteers from the campus and the surrounding community.

Courses are taught by Goucher faculty and, occasionally, by faculty from surrounding colleges. Goucher faculty and upperclassmen serve as tutors for the Goucher students incarcerated at the prisons. Students from the main campus also engage with the project as research assistants (serving as a bridge between the academic library on the main campus and the students at the prison), program assistants (assisting with programmatic projects and clerical work), teaching assistants, or as peers in co-enrolled courses taught at the prison but serving both incarcerated Goucher students and students from the main campus.

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