Undergraduate Education Initiatives
The UCLA Center for Community Learning has a new name.
As of November 10, the Center will be known as the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, reflecting the Center’s continued goal to connect UCLA students with community partners to provide both a learning experience for students and a benefit to the communities, locally and globally.
UCLA undergraduates will soon have the opportunity to gather primary source documents about California Indian dance, interview migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, study emerging online platforms for community organizing, and other community research-based subjects.
The screen shows the familiar grid of small faces but everyone’s focused on the guest speaker, a student joining the class from his home in Wuhan, China, eager for their chances to ask questions.
The community engagement and social change minor changed its name this fall from the civic engagement minor.
The change intends to better reflect the component of the curriculum that involves field-learning through community involvement, said Douglas Barrera, the associate director at UCLA Center for Community Learning, the department under which the minor is housed.
As the 10 dancers moved across the studio floor in Kaufman Hall, their instructor closely watched how each dancer’s body movements transitioned from one to the next.
Victoria Marks, associate dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and professor of choreography, offered encouragement and challenged the dancers to pay closer attention to the way they could shape space both individually and in pairs.
Judy Mark was observing her students working in their four-person groups in her Autism Media Lab when she noticed one group quietly working on their laptops. No one was talking with each other.
The inaugural Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Research, which is supported by the Chancellor’s office and the UCLA Center for Community Learning, has allocated six $10,000 research grants to develop new undergraduate research courses.
