Community-Based Learning Class Connects Hopkins Undergraduates with Passionate Writers in Baltimore City High Schools
Yasmine Bolden has a self-imposed rule to take one class each year at Hopkins they know they will love. For the sophomore double majoring in The Writing Seminars and Africana Studies, this year’s selection is Community-Based Learning (CBL), a course that brings together Johns Hopkins undergraduates with young writers and poets from Baltimore City high schools.
“This is a class that I know I will have a good time in and will be challenged by, but I won’t be sweating over an exam,” Bolden says. “It’s been my safe space on campus for the semester, which has motivated me to have my heart in it without worrying so much about quantitative evaluations.”
Community-Based Learning is open to the entire Hopkins undergraduate student body and engages Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS), a self-selected group of young writers in high school led by community partner Patrice Hutton. Dora Malech, a poet and associate professor in The Writing Seminars, teaches a spring session of CBL that focuses on poetry. She defines CBL — like service learning, a high-impact practice with evidence of significant educational benefits for students, including and especially from demographic groups historically underserved by higher education — as a teaching technique in which the work from a classroom is a collaboration among the professor, the students, and an outside partner. The result is a more collaborative, mutually beneficial community.