Creating Space for Reflection in Community-Engaged Courses

“We’re never just here,” a Duke student wrote after a semester reflecting on experiences working alongside community partners. “We’re always somewhere else – a ping, a scroll, a dopamine drip away.”

In a culture shaped by productivity and constant distraction – and one where assignments can be outsourced to AI in seconds - helping students slow down long enough to notice what they are learning—and who they are learning with—has become increasingly intentional work.

At a February mini-symposium on reflection practices in service-learning courses, Duke faculty Katie Hyde, Yan Liu, and Adam Rosenblatt shared approaches that look different on the surface — poetry inspired by children’s photographs, structured civic analysis, and dialogues with chosen ancestors — but reveal a common thread. Effective reflection is a balance between looking back and learning to be present now—to people, places, and the shared work of learning.

Creative Structure That Slows Reflection Down

Katie Hyde | Children’s Self Expression: Literacy Through Photography (DOCST 224S)

In Katie Hyde’s Literacy Through Photography service-learning course, Duke students co-teach photography and writing with elementary students in Durham Public Schools. Over the semester, students learn skills and habits of noticing—through classroom experiences, discussion, and reflection on children’s creative work.

For the final reflection, Hyde replaced the traditional essay with a piece modeled loosely on Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Rather than summarizing the semester, students returned to specific moments and shaped them into reflective works of art.  

Students approached the reflection assignment in different ways. One connected children’s nature photographs with research on climate anxiety and another wrote portrait-poems celebrating each child’s individuality. A third paired discussions of educational inequality with classroom moments—a child missing from the roster, families constantly shifting between schools—revealing both the care teachers bring and the pressures they face.

By limiting students to short, intentional sections, reflection became an act of discernment — not a record of the semester, but a case for what mattered most.

Read a student poem by Isabel Oliver here.

From Abstract to Grounded

Yan Liu | China and the U.S. in the Age of Climate Change (Chinese 451S)

In Yan Liu’s course, students move beyond readings into engagement—visiting Duke Farm and Gardens, interviewing Durham Academy students about sustainability efforts, and dialoguing with students in Taiwan.

Liu guides reflection using the DEAL model — Describe, Examine, and Articulate Learning — a structured reflection framework developed by Patti Clayton and Sarah Ash for community-engaged learning, in which students describe their experience, examine what they learned across personal, civic, and academic dimensions, and articulate how it connects to broader questions. She uses it for both group oral debriefs immediately after field visits and individual written essays.

The structure helps students name tensions they might otherwise miss. When Liu's class interviewed Durham Academy administrators, teachers, and students, they identified a significant gap between the school's institutional sustainability goals and how their students actually experienced them. One Duke student described realizing that sustainable development is not only an environmental issue but also a social and cultural one — the kind of insight Liu had hoped community engagement, rather than lecture, would produce.

Reflection as Relationship

Adam Rosenblatt | Death, Burial, and Justice in the Americas (ICS 283S)

In Adam Rosenblatt’s service-learning course, students select a “chosen ancestor”—someone whose story connects to class themes of memory, justice, or loss. The term “chosen” is deliberate: biological connection is not required, making the practice more accessible to students who experience kinship beyond traditional family relationships. Rosenblatt grounds the concept in Indigenous traditions, disability lineage, and other frameworks that challenge the Western assumption that the dead are simply gone. Throughout the semester, students write reflections addressed to that person, creating an ongoing dialogue rather than a series of assignments.

The centerpiece of this reflective work is the Ancestral Commonplace Notebook, inspired by the historical commonplace book tradition of collecting and reflecting on meaningful texts. Students decorate a physical notebook at the start of the semester and return to it each week, recording quotations from readings and connecting course material to a chosen ancestor’s story. 

Writing to a specific person, Rosenblatt has found, gives emotional weight that writing for a grade rarely produces.

Final projects take many forms — memorial designs, altars, and public storytelling. One student built an altar, painted graffiti in the campus free speech tunnel, and published a Chronicle column about storytelling; another collaborated with her mother on a design for the National AIDS Memorial Quilt, honoring a friend her mother had never had space to mourn publicly. Rather than summarizing readings, students use the work to think through care, legacy, and responsibility. 

Reflection as a Practice of Being

Across all three approaches, reflection works by changing the pace of learning and centering the process over performance. Each creates permission—and sometimes requirement—to pause and notice.  The goal is not simply to produce better reflections — it’s to help students learn how to be here: with themselves, with others, and the communities they encounter. In a culture that rewards speed and efficiency, that kind of presence may be one of the most meaningful forms of learning higher education can offer.