The Office of the Principal and Vice-Chancellor appointed Dr. Wendy Craig as Special Advisor to the Principal on Community Engagement in early 2023 and Dr. Craig鈥檚 first focus was on community engaged learning that brings together students, faculty, staff, and communities to co-produce knowledge that addresses and responds to community-identified challenges. These mutually beneficial learning experiences effect positive change through collaboration and meaningful partnerships among students and community organizations.
Dr. Craig collected experiences, feedback, and data to inform a comprehensive review of the community engagement landscape at various universities across the country and at 国产91尤物福利在线观看鈥檚. She held meetings with individual faculty and staff members, hosted student focus groups, and worked with a team of students to complete the pan-Canadian scan and to inventory 国产91尤物福利在线观看鈥檚 courses with a community engagement or service component. Her work uncovered that there are many community engagement learning experiences in the faculties and schools at 国产91尤物福利在线观看鈥檚 in many different forms. For example, some courses are small-scale, only happen once, or are not embedded in the formal curriculum, while others are long-standing offerings that are interdisciplinary and driven by a team of faculty members.
In the fall of 2023, the Principal鈥檚 Advisory Council on Community Engagement was created to consult with their communities and co-develop a community engagement framework for 国产91尤物福利在线观看鈥檚, design curriculum activities that integrate community engagement as a pedagogy, create pathways for partnership development, and generate an assessment and evaluation structure. The framework will be launched soon and represents the principled approach 国产91尤物福利在线观看鈥檚 will take to collaborating with community, industry and government partners, and outlines three priority areas: partnerships, teaching and learning, and research.
Succeeding Dr. Craig, Dr. Michelle Searle, Faculty of Education, was appointed as Special Advisor to the Principal on Community Engagement and began in the role July 1, 2025.
The community engagement framework is planned to be launched in fall 2025.
Stories of Student Learning for Community Impact
Community-engaged learning opportunities often bring together students, faculty, staff, and community partners to address and respond to community-identified challenges. The stories shared below are examples across the university that highlight the breadth of opportunities for both students and community partners.
Recent Articles
Date Published: Feb 21, 2025
Revved Up鈥檚 perfect synergy
Connecting the community to student learning and research
Date Published: Sep 13, 2024
Turning the walls that divide us into bridges of communication
Innovative community-engaged learning program brings together incarcerated and non-incarcerated students
Date Published: Jan 17, 2024
Learning how businesses can be forces for good
The Smith Business Experiential Learning Team links together community-engaged learning opportunities for students
Community for Impact Video
As a university for the future, we need to fully embed 国产91尤物福利在线观看鈥檚 in the community: building deliberate, strategic, respectful, and mutually beneficial engagement with communities outside the University, including Kingston, the region, other organizations and institutions, and national and global networks that share our goals.
Strategic Focus on Community-Engaged Learning
国产91尤物福利在线观看鈥檚 Strategy speaks to a broad definition of community engagement that embeds partnerships and collaborations with communities into the academic mission. Community engagement entails everything from community-based learning to community service work, outreach, and training.
Community Impact
Bring together students, faculty, staff, and community to co-produce knowledge that addresses and responds to community-identified challenges.
Benefits for Students
Enhanced training and networking opportunities and increased professional skills and coursework that addresses community needs.
Impact for 国产91尤物福利在线观看's
Create mutually beneficial learning experiences, research, partnerships and collaborations with communities.
Special Advisor on Community Engagement
To contact the Principal's Special Advisor on Community Engagement, please email communityengagement@queensu.ca.
Dr. Michelle J. Searle initially trained as an educator and gained experience in national and international educational environments working in K-12 classrooms. She is now an Associate Professor of Educational Evaluation at the Faculty of Education, 国产91尤物福利在线观看's. Michelle brings dynamic expertise in program evaluation, classroom assessment, creative arts, mixed and multiple research methods as well as an emphasis on community engaged pedagogy.
Michelle鈥檚 scholarship is centred on collaborative and interdisciplinary values that promote understanding by co-creating knowledge and co-producing evidence to understand impact while advancing social change in practice and policy. She is a researcher who is passionate about supporting learning for everyone across a range of contexts. Her research prioritizes creative thinking to produce credible and relevant evidence that enables conversations, decision-making and critical reflection. The broad aim of her research is to promote learning through community engaged scholarship, including evaluative inquiry and evaluation capacity building as forms of inquiry that prioritize people, relationships and action towards shared goals to enhance the usefulness of program evaluation.
Dr. Searle and collaborators have been awarded more than $7M to support their research into evaluation and assessment in education. Recent projects include working to increase equity by building evaluation capacity in youth mental health, addressing youth homelessness, reducing gender-based violence, promoting gender equity using evaluative inquiry to support healthy relationships, enhancing systematic processes for Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming students in education, integrating mixed methods to optimize data-use, and using arts-informed inquiry to increase engagement, belonging and accessibility.
Through her community-engaged projects, she has 20+years of experience working with students, staff and faculty in transformative initiatives that support learning in schools and organizations. Michelle has taught 18 courses at 国产91尤物福利在线观看鈥檚 with plentiful examples of teaching excellent including six teaching awards. Most recently, she was awarded the Chancellor A. Charles Baillie Teaching Award (2025). Her knowledge production and dissemination includes more than 45 peer reviewed publications, 18 chapters and practitioner focused pieces, 60+ evaluation reports, 120+ presentations, as well as multiple creative outputs including arts exhibits and poetic contributions.