Loyola University > Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship (CELTS) > About > CELTS Framework

CELTS Framework

Conceptual Framework

Note: This conceptual framework applies to the Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, & Scholarship's overall work. Click here for our conceptual framework of community partnerships specifically.

MISSION STATEMENT: Advancing Loyola’s Jesuit, Catholic mission of “expanding knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice, and faith,” the Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, & Scholarship is an undergraduate curriculum center that collaborates with community, staff, and faculty partners, as co-educators, to coordinate, develop support, and implement academic experiential learning for students.

As a curriculum development center at Loyola University Chicago, the Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, & Scholarship anchors the mission and implementation of initiatives within community-based learning literature and high-impact learning practices (Kuh, 2008). The Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, & Scholarship establishes criteria of practice rooted in the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP), the Council for the Advancement of Standards (CAS), as well as rooted in learning theory, such as Mezirow’s Theory of Transformative Learning (1997, 2001), Kolb’s (1984) model of experiential learning, and Integrated Course Design (Fink, 2013). Fostering both critical service-learning experiences and critical reflection (Dewey, 1908, 1910; Mitchell, 2008; Ash & Clayton, 2009) on those experiences across the curriculum remains a hallmark of Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, & Scholarship. Through interrogating issues with a social justice lens, the Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, & Scholarship vision is to build an education that creates engaged, justice-oriented citizens through integrative learning for community impact.

Goal: Building transformational undergraduate learning experiences at Loyola University Chicago in pursuit of the common good.