One version of many
CSL can sound intimidating. It suggests you need an external community partner, a structured service component, a formal collaboration agreement. And yes, that is one version of it. But at VU Amsterdam we think of it as a spectrum of societally engaged learning, a broad family of approaches that share one underlying ambition: helping students understand their role in the world, and the world's complexity in relation to them.Not every subject needs a partner organization
Not every course needs a partner organisation
Take Diversity and Good Teaching, a master's course within the Educational Sciences program: Educational Innovation in the Faculty of Behavioral and Movement Sciences. At first glance, it looks like a traditional academic course. Students read theory, discuss cases and reflect on concepts such as educational segregation and cultural capital. No outside partner, no fieldwork, no formal service.
Lenses for real life
And yet something unmistakably engaged is happening here. Week after week, students are confronted with topics that do not stay neatly inside the classroom. These are not abstract theories, they are lenses that students start applying to their own lives, their own future classrooms, their own assumptions. The course is rooted in questions that its own teacher, Gerdien Bertram-Troost, has been publicly grappling with for years. In an essay published in Friesch Dagblad, she writes about what it truly means for a school to be a place where everyone is welcome, regardless of background, belief or identity, and how difficult it is to turn that ideal into practice. That same tension runs through the course: the gap between knowing what a fair and inclusive education looks like, and understanding what it actually takes to get there.
When reflection gets a face
Reflection is woven into the fabric of the course, not added at the end as an afterthought. The writing assignment fits naturally into that. Students pick a topic they genuinely care about and write an article that can actually be published in a professional education journal. It gives them a sense of agency. The thinking they have been doing all semester suddenly has a direction and a destination beyond the grade. One student put it this way: "I didn't expect to actually apply anything this year, but this feels like it matters." Another described a shift that went well beyond the assignment: "I always found the whole diversity conversation a bit much. This course made me look at myself much more critically."
That is not something you can engineer through a textbook. It happens when students genuinely feel the connection between what they are studying and the world they are about to step into..
An invitation, not a checklist
What makes learning societally engaged is not whether you have a community partner ticked off on a list. It is whether students experience their learning as relevant, real and consequential. Are they being asked to reflect on their own position in society, not just absorb information about it?
That last part matters more than it might seem. One of the things we value most in CSL is the moment a student stops seeing societal issues as something happening out there, and starts recognising themselves as someone who relates to those issues, is shaped by them, and can potentially act on them. That kind of reflection on one's own role and responsibility in society is not a nice extra. It is at the core of what engaged learning is trying to do.
If your course creates those moments, through discussion, through writing, through a guest speaker that makes something click, you are doing engaged learning. It might be closer to CSL than you ever assumed.
