Teaching Sociology Through Community-Engaged Learning with a Multinational Student Body: Garnering Sociological Insights from Lived Experiences Across National Contexts

Abstract

Community-engaged learning (CEL) is a popular educational approach for sociology teaching across Canada and globally. Students in sociology courses with this experiential component can opt in to enhance their learning by working with community members and organizations in structured, low-stakes ways that forward community priorities. Evidence shows that CEL in sociology courses supports students in developing a wide variety of skills. However, little is known about how international students in sociology courses engage with this pedagogy. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with international students from Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe who completed CEL programming as part of their sociology course curriculum at a large Canadian university, I show how these students engaged in unique learning practices. The findings indicate that international students draw upon their life experiences from diverse national contexts to navigate and reflect upon their CEL placement in sociological ways. These students’ voices offer rich insights for sociology educators designing course-based CEL opportunities with a multinational student body.

1. Introduction

International students often approach their time studying abroad with several aims in mind, tied to academic, interpersonal, professional, linguistic, and/or identity-related pursuits (Fong 2011; Jones 2013; Montgomery and McDowell 2009; Page 2019; Page and Chahboun 2019). In Canada alone, there are approximately one million international students annually (CBIE 2024). Sociology educators can support these students in pursuing their goals within and beyond their coursework, including through experiential learning opportunities rooted in learning through doing (Dewey 1938; Huisman 2010; Kolb and Kolb 2005; Kolb 1984). Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) is one form of experiential learning that grew out of social justice philosophies forwarded by scholars such as Paulo Freire (Taylor et al. 2015). CEL is a dynamic educational approach in which students pursue learning by engaging in structured community service experiences that are built into their course curriculum. When designed carefully, CEL can place well-prepared and motivated students within real-world projects that seek to forward community interests (McDonnell and Murphy 2019). A key goal is to enhance student learning through applied experience by positioning community members as experts, while enabling students to make small but meaningful contributions to an organization (Taylor et al. 2015, p. 2; Mooney and Edwards 2001, p. 182). Put simply, CEL describes a wide range of short and long-term organized learning projects designed to support students in seeking and sharing knowledge in intentionally selected community forums and organizations (Cashman and Seifer 2008; Taylor et al. 2015; Wright 2000).

In sociology courses, CEL opportunities most often involve pairing undergraduate students (individually or in teams) with non-profit organizations, neighborhood houses, community centers, public schools, and other organizations. A large body of work documents that sociology students may garner numerous potential academic, personal, professional, social, civic, and other benefits from CEL. Specific benefits include the enhancement of students’ sociological imagination (Garoutte 2018), understanding of complex social processes and awareness of community assets and resilience (Shostak et al. 2019), research skills and self-efficacy (Mayer et al. 2018), critical thinking skills and teamwork competencies (Soyer et al. 2022), problem solving abilities, civic responsibility, awareness of structural roots of problems (Mooney and Edwards 2001), and overall academic and personal growth (Greenberg et al. 2020). Influential sociologists (Burawoy 2005) and the American Sociological Association Task Force on Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major (Pike et al. 2017) have called for the incorporation of CEL pedagogy into sociology curricula. Ideally, CEL programming in sociology is mutually advantageous for all parties, with students helping to address a real organizational mandate while garnering potential benefits, including gaining new perspectives, applying course concepts, learning from people in the community, and other academic and social outcomes.

International students could potentially access a variety of unique experiences through CEL in sociology courses, with ample opportunities for them to engage in meaning-making processes. For example, sociology CEL may offer international students the chance to think through diverse perspectives, navigate difficult social issues, interact with a variety of people they may not otherwise come into contact with, experience low-risk immersion in distinct cultural and institutional settings, and come to identify and appreciate the strengths they offer to these settings. International students may also bring global insights and perspectives (Tange and Kastberg 2013) to community members, organizations, and the classroom. However, experiential learning scholarship lacks research into the ways new international students approach and engage with CEL (Taylor et al. 2015). Most CEL literature frames student diversity in relation to gender, race, class, and/or ability and downplays students’ domestic and international student status (see Crossman and Kite 2007 for an exception). International service-learning, often in the form of short-term exchange programs (Bringle et al. 2023), is the primary way in which CEL has been examined in international contexts. This focus overlooks the ways in which international students who are completing a multi-year undergraduate degree experience CEL in the place where they are studying. When CEL has been considered from the perspective of international students, the sample and analysis have not been discipline-specific (Kwenani and Yu 2018).

I ask how international students may find course-based CEL opportunities useful for their learning of sociology. I developed this focus reflexively over a four-year period during which I designed and implemented CEL annually in my teaching of Introduction to Sociology at a large Canadian research university with a substantial emphasis on internationalization. At the time of data collection, 27 percent of the student body consisted of international students (University of British Columbia 2021). I worked with my university’s CEL staff to cultivate projects that would be appropriate in scope and skill level for first-year students and would not be time-intensive for staff members in the community organizations. Students were given the choice of working with an elementary school where they supported children from grades one to six with their classroom learning or working with a seniors’ society where they interacted with elders to create educational media artifacts. Both before and after their CEL experience, students completed reflective writing designed to help them apply the sociological imagination and course concepts related to social construction, social institutions, and social interaction. These reflections were developed in collaboration with CEL staff and in alignment with critical reflection principles (Ash and Clayton 2009). Students could opt into the CEL course component or write a traditional sociology paper. Each year, approximately 30% of students elected to do CEL.

Through a pilot year investigation, I collected anecdotal evidence from my sociology students’ pre- and post-CEL reflection assignments. These assignments suggested a preliminary trend: many international students described engaging in unique learning practices through sociology CEL that could not be disentangled from their status as international students (Lyon et al. 2020). For example, some international students drew on their life experiences in other nations during their CEL placement to identify sociological trends in the local community. This initial evidence led me to formalize the project by systematically recording international students’ CEL practices through two research questions:

• How do new international students perceive that their participation in CEL as part of the sociology curriculum shaped their understanding of sociology?
• How do these international students draw upon their lived experiences as part of their engagement with sociology CEL?

2. Methodology

2.1. Method

This paper takes a narrative approach to qualitative interviewing with first-year international students, with the goal of reconstructing participants’ experiences in their own words. Narrative is fundamental to the ways in which individuals generate meaning from their daily lives (Connelly and Clandinin 1990). The narratives that international student participants shared therefore highlight crucial insights into how they navigate and build meaning through their experiences. I designed the interview protocol based on general, open-ended questions about participants’ CEL practices to create space for students’ retellings of critical moments. Spontaneous probing questions were utilized to delve deeper into how participants interpreted these particular moments and the significance they attached to those moments. Through this methodological approach, I endeavored to forward Page and Chahboun’s practice of “de-muting” international students by eschewing the common trap of presenting international students’ “experience[s] in terms of a predetermined set of expectations” (Page and Chahboun 2019, p. 875). I pursued this project inductively, trying not to draw initially upon specific frameworks for documenting students’ CEL stories. Rather, I attempted to learn about students’ ways of reflecting on their CEL experience in the ways that mattered most to them. Project methodology was also informed by Deuchar’s (2023, p. 209) demand for “anti-deficit” research acknowledging international students as “capable and competent agents” who are dynamically constituting the social world. I received Behavior Research Ethics Board approval for this research.

2.2. Participants

Two research assistants conducted interviews with 20 first-year international students new to Canada who completed CEL as part of Introduction to Sociology (see

Table 1. Interview participant characteristics (N = 20).

Pseudonym	Nationality (Self-Identified)	Gender (Self-Identified)	First Language
Abi	Ecuadorian	Female	Spanish
Ivy	Ukrainian	Female	Russian
Michael	Indonesian	Male	Indonesian
Vivi	Chinese	Female	Mandarin
Johnson	Chinese	Male	Cantonese
Mirkaa	Ecuadorian	Female	Spanish
Vil	Chinese	Male	Chinese
Carrie	Ecuadorian	Female	Spanish
Clyde	Chinese	Male	Chinese
Jaden	Chinese	Male	Chinese
Mirella	Brazilian	Female	Portuguese
Astoria	Chinese	Female	Mandarin
Grace	Chinese	Female	Chinese
Sean	Chinese	Male	Chinese
Vae	Ukrainian	Female	Russian
Yvonne	Chinese	Female	Chinese
Jerry	Chinese	Male	Chinese
Will	Chinese	Male	Chinese
Crystal	Chinese	Female	Chinese
Dany	Ecuadorian	Female	Spanish

). Each participant had been placed in a non-profit organization in the metropolitan area the university is situated in (16/20 at an elementary school and 4/20 at a seniors’ society). Placements varied from one to three months in duration. Participants are all from Asia (13), South America (5), and Eastern Europe (2). They represent a variety of nationalities, with the majority identifying as Chinese, consistent with international student demographics at my university (University of British Columbia 2021). All interviews took place after the course had ended in the late spring of 2018 and 2019.

2.3. Data Analysis

Two research assistants transcribed and anonymized the audio recordings of participant interviews. Thematic analysis (sometimes called Qualitative Content Analysis in Europe) (Kuckartz 2019) was performed to systematically interpret participants’ subjective experiences in an underdeveloped area of research. I conducted three rounds of thematic coding involving a line-by-line reading of the transcripts and unstructured writing of reflexive research memos (Groenewald 2008; Miles et al. 2018). The first round of coding was open and involved the development of data-driven categories with the goal of documenting participants’ meaning-making (Kuckartz 2019, p. 184). The next two rounds of coding were concept-driven as they connected to an emergent review of the relevant literature. All coding was completed using NVIVO 12 qualitative analysis software.

3. Results

International student participants reported several ways in which they engaged with their CEL experience as part of a sociology course by (1) using sociological lenses to interpret and relate to Canadian society, (2) accessing local cultural context to supplement sociology course content, and (3) generating sociological insights from cross-cultural comparisons.

3.1. Using Sociological Lenses to Interpret and Relate to Canadian Society

Previous research documents that CEL can support sociology students in applying course concepts in everyday contexts. For example, Shostak et al. (2019, p. 198) report that CEL helps make concepts “real” for sociology students as they can see actual manifestations of the phenomena in question. The international students in my sample spoke of applying course concepts through CEL, often in ways that informed their shifting perception of and relationship with the nation they were studying in. Ivy, an international student from Ukraine, explains that her sociology CEL experience reduced the distance she felt from Canada and Canadian history:

It can feel sometimes a bit distant ‘cause as an international student I had no idea about, like, all of the Indigenous issues that were going on here, to be honest. Like, I knew that colonization happened but I thought, like, that’s history, that’s over now. ‘Cause Canada is nice [laughs] to people now. But, I had no idea that, like, there is still effects of it leftover. And even if things that happened in the past, like Residential Schools, like the violence that happened there… can move on intergenerationally.—Ivy, first-year international student from Ukraine.

In applying the course concept of “colonialism,” Ivy articulates a shifting perception of Canada as a place where people are “nice” to a place that continues to perpetuate settler colonial violence. Later in the same interview, Ivy reiterates her growing sociological awareness of Canadian society in relation to her status as an international student: “I definitely feel like I’m more aware of things now. Especially since I’m learning here now. So… as an international student it was good to have this course in my first year.”

Michael from Indonesia reflects on the sociology concept and Canadian federal policy of “multiculturalism” through his CEL placement:

I think, even though me and my friends went around [the city], [we] didn’t really talk to people. We didn’t really engage with them. But through this [CEL at an elementary school], I see a lot of different multiculturalism. I can see that because I actually engaged with the teachers there, with the students there. So, I think this brings me a sense of multiculturalism to Vancouver. I can see it real now, [more] than before.—Michael, first-year international student from Indonesia.

Michael describes how his interpretation of multiculturalism shifted from something he did not believe to be “real” to something he could begin to “see.” He attributes this shift to the way CEL altered his relationship with the city and his interactions with people in the community.

3.2. Accessing Local Cultural Context to Supplement Sociology Course Content

The previous finding reaffirms Bucher’s (2012, p. 271) argument in Teaching Sociology that a core goal of community-based learning is to offer students “a hands-on learning experience that will allow the[m] to apply course material to ‘real world’ settings”. However, the international students in my sample also revealed that there is more to the process of applying course concepts than has been articulated in this literature. Abi, an international student from Ecuador, explains:

People underestimate what it means to come into a new community and understand issues about gender, about race, about class and so many things that you learn in sociology… I think it’s really important to talk about it.—Abi, first-year international student from Ecuador.

Here, Abi articulates her observation that the social organization of interlocking systems of oppression looks different in Canada than it does in Ecuador. For her, living in a new place means learning about new dynamics of gender, race, and class. Abi could not fully grasp these systems in the Canadian context from coursework alone. She goes on to explain that a mix of community experiences and classroom learning produced a more robust, contextualized understanding of these social inequalities in Canadian society: “with everything we are learning in the community it’s just… classroom plus that [the community], really makes good results.”

Likewise, Vae, a first-year international student from Ukraine, describes the importance of seeing in community contexts how disability and inclusiveness are perceived in Canadian society. For Vae, her lived experience through CEL was a necessary complement to a course lecture on the sociology of disability:

Seeing about inclusiveness, and like, maybe disabilities? Because, especially in my [CEL placement in an elementary school], there were some children that needed extra help and extra support. So, they had their own supervisors who were working with them all the day. So, yeah it was like the real application of the concepts I have learned, like about inclusiveness and all children deserve a right to be educated…to be in the community… Especially the term ‘inclusiveness’ because in my home country it’s not really spread and popular. Even though we have some laws about that, but there is no culture of including people with disabilities or any other issues… It was very new experience for me.—Vae, first-year international student from Ukraine.

Vae’s experience is an indication that the way disability was taught in a Canadian sociology course is tied to how disability has been constructed in Canadian society. Seeing inclusiveness in practice helped frame the concept of disability for this student in a way that paralleled the way “disability” was presented by her sociology instructor.

Students such as Vae and Abi highlight the significance of CEL in providing structured opportunities to engage with the cultural context informing the approach to concepts in their sociology course. Relying on sociology course lectures and readings alone would have made it difficult for these students to grasp certain sociology concepts because of their limited access to the assumptions underlying the material. Participants mentioned, in particular, their need to gain more context for the way concepts such as race, class, gender, ability, and health were approached in culturally specific ways that may not make sense in other national and cultural contexts.

3.3. Thinking Sociologically Through Cross-Cultural Comparisons

Some international student participants navigated their CEL placements by drawing on previous life experiences in different national contexts. Students often implicitly positioned their own national background and exposure to different cultures and institutions as a resource for observing sociological concepts and patterns in their community placement. For example, the majority of students completed their placements at local elementary schools as support aids for teachers. In this role, they spent time in classrooms interacting with students, guiding them in activities, and giving presentations. Through a series of reflective assignments during and after the CEL placement, students were asked to apply course concepts related to the sociology of education and social inequality. Mirkaa, an international student from Ecuador, explained her own reflection process by drawing on her lived experience as a student in educational settings on multiple continents:

When you’re talking about sociology, you’re talking about those little things that people see as normal…being able to question that. You can question about why do I only see one male [teacher] in the whole [elementary] school, all of them are female. So, you connect that with gender and social construction about what does education mean here, like the Western versus South America versus Asia versus Europe and also the relationships between people, relationships of authority in between the children…Everything can be taken [up] for sociology and you can analyze it.—Mirkaa, first-year international student from Ecuador.

Here, Mirkaa shifts between macro and micro levels by referencing her personal knowledge of the structure of education systems in different regions of the world, as well as the social organization of power she has witnessed amongst educators and students in those systems.

Similarly, Astoria, a first-year international student with Chinese nationality, describes her CEL placement and contrasts it with her lived experience of schools in China:

The class[room] is different…. Students change their classrooms [throughout the day]. But in China the classroom is fixed for the students and the teachers come… and go. [Also] I learnt a different kind of teaching method in Canada and I saw a lot about the different teaching methods from China.—Astoria, first year international student from China

Astoria vocalizes her observations of differences in the physical classroom structures and the scheduled movement of bodies between the schools she has been in in China and Canada. She goes further to reflect on commonly accepted pedagogies for elementary education between the two nations. Astoria not only comments on the new teaching methods she was exposed to in Canadian classrooms, but she goes further to explain that she is now seeing “teaching methods from China” in new ways that she did not have access to before this experience.

4. Discussion and Implications

This research reports on interviews with 20 first-year international students new to Canada who completed CEL as part of Introduction to Sociology. These students dynamically navigated their CEL experience by (1) drawing upon cross-cultural comparisons to generate sociological insights, (2) supplementing sociology course material by seeking out local cultural knowledge, and (3) employing sociological lenses to inform their perception of and relationship with the host society. These findings have implications for sociology educators teaching with an international and/or multinational student body.

First, international students’ practice of making cross-cultural comparisons through CEL reaffirms Singh and Shrestha’s (2008, p. 77) argument that students can act as nodes connecting different knowledge systems, with the instructors’ role being to support students in building links between their multiple ways of knowing. This finding invites sociology educators to explore pedagogical strategies of “double knowing” by fostering a learning environment that transforms international students’ “indigenous knowledge from a possible barrier to the transmission of Eurocentric wisdom into alternative insights that can be identified and harvested in the classroom” (Tange and Kastberg 2013, p. 4). Sociologists could design course-based CEL in ways that amplify the forms of expertise international students bring and that help students—both international and domestic—appreciate this expertise. One way of doing this is to include formative CEL reflection prompts that help tease out students’ lived experiences across national contexts (in ways that do not put international students on the spot or expect them to educate other students). This recommendation also builds on Greenberg et al.’s (2020, p. 14) finding that well-designed community-initiated student-engaged research can help sociology students come to identify and appreciate the strengths that they bring, including their cultural assets (though Greenberg et al. did not include international students in their study design).

Second, CEL in sociology has typically been conceptualized as a one-way process where students “apply course material to ‘real world’ settings” (Bucher 2012, p. 271), yet international student participants described engaging in a bidirectional process. These students not only applied course concepts through their CEL placement, but also acquired clues about the cultural assumptions underlying sociology course concepts through this placement. Most often, participants noted the limited, culturally specific ways in which race, class, gender, ability, and health were approached in their sociology course. In other words, these participants—all from Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe—treated CEL as a resource for supplementing knowledge gaps that may be tied to Euro-Western bias in sociology curricula.

These international students’ voices represent an active sociology “public” rather than just an “audience” (Greenberg et al. 2020). They offer a reminder that sociology continues to operate within the stratified global economy of knowledge production (Connell 2018, 2019, p. 35), tied to the “disconcerting commonality that unites sociology courses, namely their focus on Euro-Western sociology” (Tezli et al. 2025). Given this, sociology educators can consider the culturally-specific foundations of concepts and the ways in which these underlying assumptions may be more accessible to some students than others. Instructors could, for example, teach sociology concepts in ways that make their formative cultural context more visible, including by presenting relevant historical events, policies, and discourses that informed the way a particular sociological idea or process has been approached. Instructors might also draw upon a wider range of thinkers, including those from the global periphery, to ensure that course narratives and concepts are not based solely on the histories and social problems characteristic of wealthy, Western nations. Underlying this is the larger issue of disrupting the unidirectional flow of sociology textbook production and dissemination from the Global North to the Global South.

Future research may further consider the ways in which international students’ practices in sociology courses offer useful insights for instructors in making both curricular and pedagogical choices. This project emphasized CEL, but international students may take up other experiential pedagogies in sociology in unique ways. Further, as I only documented international students’ voices, future research may include the perspectives of instructors and community partners who design and facilitate sociology CEL experiences with international students. Methodologically, I was only able to conduct interviews with participants after their CEL opportunity. Other research designs could include data collection before and after a CEL experience and/or a comparative lens between international students who complete CEL as part of their sociology course and international students who take the course without the CEL component.

Nevertheless, this paper helps forward sociology educators’ understandings of the ways in which international students engage with CEL programming in their courses. It may offer a foundation for future work, intending to position international students as active agents, drawing on their lived experiences to augment their sociology education. This research echoes Lomer and Mittelmeier’s (2021, p. 1243) suggestion that international students are “partners or knowledge agents” in their learning. Sociologists may incorporate awareness of international/domestic student status into experiential teaching practices, and sociological research on experiential learning, in ways that challenge the common deficit lens through which international students have often been approached (Deuchar 2023; Lillyman and Bennett 2014; Lomer and Mittelmeier 2021) and instead see international students as mirrors in which to see the discipline.