Reflection Assignments

Reflection is an important part of learning and growing. Students are expected to complete 6 reflections during their time in the program. 

Some of the reflections have more than one option to complete the assignment. The full assignments can be found in the CESP google drive in CESP Student Resources->CESP Reflection Assignments.

Summary of Themes

1. Ethic of Engagement (EOE): Explores the way an individual approaches community work, including their philosophy, motivations, and understanding of the intended outcome of the work. 

2. Sense of Self (SOS): Explores what lies behind values and aspirations, what forms the core of who you are as a person, both in your own right and in relation to others.

  • Create a Self Portrait
  • Interview a Community Partner
  • Write a “This I Believe Essay”
  • Write a letter to a friend/family member

3. Collaboration and Community Building (C&C): RAP sessions provide the opportunity for students in the program to hear from each others’ diverse perspectives about issues that impact community work while also building community within the program. More than getting to know each other, It means seeing each other as collaborators, resources, and partners with a common goal of having an impact on the broader community around us. RAP session are meant to challenge students to think outside of their own existing frameworks of understanding and take in new and different ways of knowing from peers who are also engaged in the community.

  • Attend a RAP Session

4. Identities, Power, and Privilege (IPP): A chance to delve more into identities, social groups, and the privileges that students’ carry with them in community work. To reflect on these topics is to consider unearned power and advantages that play themselves out in our social, political, economic, and cultural worlds.

  • Attend a RAP Session
  • Critically Analyze Media
  • Curator of Images
  • Develop and Organization Case Study

5. Agency (AG): In the context of community work, agency can be thought of as your ability to effect change on issues you care about. We make judgments about the world around us and take action, especially if we see a gap between how the world is and how we think it should be. One aspect of the Community Engagement Scholars Program is the development as an agent of change and recognition of the intersection between power and service.

  • Analyze Your Community Organization’s Agency
  • Create a Video Documentary
  • Lead a RAP Session
  • Write a Blog Post
  • Write a Letter to a Legislator

6. Integration and Contextualization (I&C): This is an opportunity for scholars to reflect personally on their participation in the Community Engagement Scholars Program, their commitments to community work over time, and how they have come to understand their work in the world, which in some contexts is referred to as vocation. 
Digital Story, completed in CESP 3901 as an assignment