CIRCLET Guide for Facilitators: Learning Circles for Community Engaged Research and Learning

This facilitators’ guide contains rich resources that readers can use to organize Learning Circles to support lecturers to build community engaged research and learning (CERL) into their teaching. In this guide we introduce how consortium partners in the CIRCLET project designed and facilitated their local Learning Circles for Community Engaged Research and Learning (CERL) as well as International Learning Circles across the five partner universities. Learning Circles aim to support educators to reflect on and reimagine their courses and modules to embed CERL through peer learning and with the contribution of experts, stakeholders. In this guide we provide resources to support those in higher education who would like to embed community engagement into research and learning. These are designed primarily for Science Shop and community engagement co-ordinators, lecturers, and educational professionals. In this guide we share our approach to designing the sessions, and how we ran them, providing detailed workshop plans, featured exercises and activities, reading lists and other resources, as well as information and reflection prompts to send to participants. We describe how we adapted the collaboratively developed processes to our local contexts, thus revealing interesting variations that others can learn from and build on.