Nope, everything will be conducted online. You will not need to be on-site at any of our community partners or at SCU. Some classes may be working on project-based community based learning synchronously, but if that is an obstacle for you, please reach out to your professors and/or the Arrupe staff!

Our community partners are the local organizations that are willing to take on SCU students for community-based learning placements. They include schools, parishes, and nonprofits located in Mountain View, Santa Clara, and San José.

Depending on your ELSJ class, your professor will work with the Arrupe staff to select from different ways to engage with community partners. You may have a mix of pre-recorded interviews, live-stream conversations, and synchronous activities (mentorship, tutoring, etc.) required for your class.

Check in with your professor on how they would like your time quantified. Some of you may be doing project-based learning with specific community parnters and others may have a more interview/research-based learning experience as you listen to voices of our community partners. Either way, don't stress too much about keeping track of things minute-to-minute. We're all here to work with you and support your engagement with understanding and patience during this time.

We want to do whatever we can to support you through this quarter because it’s challenging in so many ways. Thankfully, we have a team at Arrupe that’s more than willing to chat with you! Please see our contact information to get in touch with us via email and we’ll work from there.

We've done our best to connect your course material to your activities with community partners, but we understand that there are times where they won't line up completely. There are a lot of factors going into working with our community partners, whose operations have been greatly altered by the pandemic, and we are doing our best to respect and support their current needs. Our Arrupe Fellows are here to help you reflect on your community-based learning, so please reach out to one or more of them for assistance in this area!

Arrupe was the 28th Superior General of the Jesuits known for being tasked with guiding the Jesuit order through the Vatican II’s reforms to make the Catholic faith more inclusive, along with that he emphasized the Jesuits’ commitment to the poor. He was not only a priest, but also a doctor who attended to victims of the bombing of Hiroshima. His views shaped the social justice slant of Jesuit education: “To be just, it is not enough to refrain from injustice”

The Arrupe Center for Community-based Learning was founded in 1986 as the Eastside Project by Sonny Manuel, S.J., Steve Privett, S.J., Dan Germann, S.J., and Peter Miron-Conk. Their mission was to establish a mutually beneficial partnership between Santa Clara University and the Eastside neighborhood of San José, California that would ultimately place the concern for justice firmly within the University’s curriculum. Today, we are one of 2 Jesuit universities to make service-learning part of the core curriculum.

There are several possible explanationf for this, but ultimately, it is the core of our Jesuit education; to echo the words of Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J.: ELSJ provides Santa Clara students with opportunities for experiencing the gritty reality of the world, thinking critically about the world, responding to its suffering, and engaging it constructively. The ELSJ gives students an opportunity to experience and explore issues of power, privilege, and oppression; bring knowledge from their discipline into dialogue with knowledge from the community; and experience the realities of the world for the purpose of fashioning a more humane and just society.

1.1 Recognize the importance of life-long responsible citizenship and civic engagement in personal and/or professional activities in ways that benefit underserved populations. (Civic Life, Civic Engagement, and Social Justice)

1.2 Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of the formal and informal knowledge, wisdom, and/or skills that individuals in these communities possess, showing awareness of their own and at least one other perspective/worldview. (Perspective)

1.3 Recognize, analyze, and understand the social reality and injustices in contemporary society, including recognizing the relative privilege or marginalization of their own and other groups. (Social Justice)