Community-Based Learning

Return to: Departments and Programs

Community-Based Learning

Community-based learning is a way for students to actively connect their academic work with direct experience in the community. By combining hands-on work in the community with the academic framework provided by course work across the curriculum, students gain a rich experience of social issues. Students learn about the workings of community, encounter differences related to race, class and privilege, gain a deeper understanding about social justice, and are able to do work that is beneficial to others. They also gain a greater understanding of themselves. Community-based learning emphasizes academic rigor, reflection, and developing ongoing community partnerships. All academic disciplines and divisions (humanities, social sciences, sciences and the arts) can integrate community-based learning practices.

At Goucher, community-based learning is part of a growing number of academic courses. Many of our programs are connected to central Baltimore, the historic home of Goucher College, and new partnerships are being created locally in Baltimore County.

Program Staff

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

Lindsay K. Johnson’05, 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

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.

Return to: Departments and Programs