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HOW THE PROGRAM WORKS

The Lightstand Project designed the Community-Engaged Scholars Program (CESP) as a structured, cohort-based learning experience that supports you in developing your own community-engaged work over a 12-week period. The program supports the development of your thinking, your project, and how you position your community-engaged work through a combination of independent work, guided reflection, and collaborative learning. You return to your work each week with a clear focus, building momentum through consistency, engagement, and reflection rather than moving through disconnected tasks. Your ideas develop as your thinking becomes more focused and connected through this process. You are not expected to begin the program with immediate clarity or a fully developed project, as your thinking develops through reflection, discussion, and application.

The Community-Engaged Scholars Program is a hybrid learning experience that combines asynchronous learning (self-paced and on your own time) with structured live sessions (we participate as a group on Zoom at a scheduled time). Most of your work takes place on your own schedule through weekly modules, reflection, and discussion, allowing you to engage deeply with your ideas. You also participate in live sessions at key points in the program that support transitions in your thinking and development. The live sessions help you refine your direction and articulate how your ideas are taking shape. The hybrid design allows you to work independently while remaining consistently engaged with your ideas, the cohort, and facilitator throughout the program.

Your Weekly Experience

Each week follows a consistent rhythm so that you can focus on developing your work rather than trying to figure out what to do next.

During each week, you will do the following:

  • engage with a focused learning module that introduces key concepts and frameworks
  • reflect on how these ideas connect to your own work, project, or experience
  • participate in a Thinking in Progress discussion, where you share ideas, questions, or developing writing
  • continue developing your project by applying what you are learning

How Your Work Develops Over the 12-Week Cohort

The Community-Engaged Scholars Program is organized into phases that support the development of your thinking, your project, and how you position your community-engaged work. In the early weeks, you focus on exploring your interests, experiences, and the context of your work, including identifying what is drawing you to your topic and how your topic connects to community and context. As the program progresses, you begin refining your focus and developing a clearer sense of what you are trying to do, working toward a more defined direction and considering how your ideas are taking shape in practice. In the final phase, you bring your ideas together, articulate your perspective, and reflect on how your thinking has developed, including how you are positioning your work and more clearly articulating your community-engaged work and research through writing and discussion. The 12-week progression, followed by one year of access to guided trainings and resources, supports sustained development by allowing you to continue developing your work through structured, self-paced learning beyond the program.

Thinking in Progress & Writing as Part of the Process

As part of this weekly and phased structure, a central component of the Community-Engaged Scholars Program is the Thinking in Progress discussion, which provides a space for you to share ideas, questions, or writing as you are developing them rather than after you are finished. You may contribute to the discussions from an idea you are developing or from a current or past community-engaged experience, allowing you to engage meaningfully from where you are in your work. The goal is not to present completed work, but to make your thinking visible so that you can develop your thinking further through reflection and interaction.

We ground the Thinking in Progress approach in research showing that writing and discussion are key tools for developing understanding, not just demonstrating understanding (Booth et al., 2016; Emig, 1977). This process helps you clarify your ideas and strengthen how you articulate your work.

Writing may also be part of your work in the Community-Engaged Scholars Program, but it is not treated as a separate or isolated task that exists outside of your thinking. Instead, we use writing as a way to clarify and develop your ideas through notes, outlines, or draft sections that evolve over time. You will share writing in a structured workshop format at key points in the program where feedback focuses on meaning, clarity, and development rather than correction. This format allows writing to function as a tool for thinking rather than as a final product that must be completed before it can be shared. In this way, writing becomes integrated into your learning process rather than something you do only at the end of your process.

Live Sessions

The Community-Engaged Scholars Program includes four live sessions, each designed to support a key stage in the development of your thinking and your work. These sessions are not lectures or presentations. Instead, they are structured discussions with your cohort and facilitator where you reflect on your work, discuss your ideas, and work through questions that emerge as you develop your project.

The program includes:

  • Week 1 — Orientation + Identity
    You begin by articulating your starting point, including your interests, ideas, experiences, and what is drawing you to your work. You also begin connecting these ideas to the broader context of community-engaged scholarship and to other peers in the cohort.
  • Week 5 — Problem Definition + Design Check
    You refine your direction by clarifying what you are trying to do in your work, identifying the focus of your project, and naming what is still unclear or unresolved. This session helps you move from exploration to a more defined and workable direction.
  • Week 9 — Integration + Positioning
    You begin bringing your ideas together by connecting your thinking, your project, and the context in which your work is situated. You focus on how you are positioning your community-engaged work and more clearly articulating your community-engaged work and research through writing and discussion.
  • Week 12 — Final Show & Tell (optional)
    You reflect on how your thinking and work have developed over the course of the 12-week program and share where you are now. The focus is on articulating your progress, what has changed in your thinking, and how you are moving forward, rather than presenting a finished product.

These sessions create structured points for reflection and discussion that help you move your work forward at key moments in the program (Freire, 1970; Mezirow, 1991).

Learning Through Reflection, Experience, & Community

You enter the program from a starting point that is meaningful to you, whether you are developing an idea or actively engaged in community-based work. You may be shaping an emerging idea, continuing an existing project, or bringing current or past community-engaged work into the program. If you are working from experience, you use the program to analyze and reflect on that work. If you are developing an idea, you use the program to explore and shape that idea. In both cases, your learning is grounded in the relationship between your thinking, your experience, and your ongoing reflection. This approach reflects research on reflective practice, which emphasizes learning through sustained engagement with one’s work (Schön, 1983).

You participate alongside a small group of learners who are each working on their own projects, creating a shared learning environment where you can engage with different perspectives while continuing to develop your own work. You learn by observing how different participants approach their ideas and by engaging with multiple ways of thinking, rather than comparing your work to others. This shared environment helps you see your work in new ways while reinforcing that development does not follow a single path or pace.

A facilitator guides the learning process by helping you think more deeply about your work rather than telling you what your project should be or what direction you should take. Your facilitator asks questions that extend your thinking, help you identify patterns in your ideas, and support connections between concepts, experience, and writing. Their role is to create a structured environment that supports your development while allowing you to maintain ownership of your work. This reflects a developmental approach to learning, where progress is shaped by how you engage with your work over time rather than by external evaluation. Facilitators do not evaluate your work or determine your direction.

How This Experience Supports Your Work

The Lightstand Project designed the Community-Engaged Scholars Program to support sustained development rather than quick outcomes, allowing your work to evolve through consistent engagement with your ideas, your writing, and your discussions with your cohort and facilitator. You are not working toward a single completed product within the 12-week program. Instead, you are working toward developing a clearer understanding of what you are trying to do in your work, strengthening how you think about your ideas, and identifying a more defined direction for continuing your work beyond the program. In this way, the program supports not just what you produce, but how you develop as a thinker and scholar.

Your progress is reflected in how your ideas develop, how you are able to organize and connect your thinking to your project and the context in which it is situated, and how clearly you can articulate your community-engaged work through writing and discussion. As you move through the program, you begin to see patterns in your ideas, which helps you refine your focus and make more intentional decisions about the direction of your work. This process helps you build a foundation for continuing your work beyond the program.

By the end of the experience, you should have a clearer sense of what you are trying to do in your work, how you are thinking about your ideas, and what steps you need to take next. You then continue developing your work through one year of access to guided trainings and resources at no cost, where you can engage in structured, self-paced learning as your work evolves. In this way, the program functions not as an endpoint, but as a transition into the next stage of your development.

References

Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., & Williams, J. M. (2016). The craft of research.

Emig, J. (1977). Writing as a mode of learning.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed.

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative learning.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner.