Welcome to the Collaborative Learning Community (CLC)

Where communities co-create education for a more just and inclusive future.

The Collaborative Learning Community (CLC) is dedicated to creating spaces where educators, practitioners, and community members come together to co-create and expand educational resources through a critical pedagogical lens.

We aim to develop learning practices and openly licensed materials that embrace a diversity of voices and perspectives—enriching our shared understanding of both local and global contexts.

Our Guiding Principles

• Building Community (BC)
  We foster connections across the boundaries of learning experiences—linking viewpoints, classrooms, campuses, communities, and countries to strengthen collaborative learning networks².
• Mediating Agency (MA)
  We challenge traditional top-down education models by promoting richer, more collaborative experiences that center students’ lived experiences and amplify their agency in shaping the learning process.
• Open Access (OA)
  We work to reduce barriers—economic, technical, social, cultural, and political—that limit equitable access to education³.

Our Roots

The CLL builds on work supported by the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education, which is held by Dr. Surita Jhangiani from 2023-2026, with the aim of equipping educators to address epistemic and social injustices. This includes critically examining how educational systems privilege dominant knowledge systems and pedagogies, while marginalizing and questioning the credibility of others.

Land Acknowledgement

The CLC is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. The land it is situated on has always been a place of learning for the Musqueam people, who for millennia have passed on their culture, history, and traditions from one generation to the next on this site.

1. The concept of open pedagogy may be variously understood as “an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education and as a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons, of which they are a part”³. Open pedagogy is the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. It’s a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate understanding through the act of creation. The products of open pedagogy are student created and openly licensed so that they may live outside of the classroom in a way that has an impact on the greater community. 
2. Sinkinson, C., & McAndrew, A. (2020). Approaching open pedagogy in community and collaboration. In K. D. Hoffman & A. Clifton (Eds.), Open pedagogy approaches: Faculty, library, and student collaborations (pp. 1-16). Milne Library Publishing. 
3. Sinkinson, C., & McAndrew, A. (2020). Approaching open pedagogy in community and collaboration. In K. D. Hoffman & A. Clifton (Eds.), Open pedagogy approaches: Faculty, library, and student collaborations (pp. 1-16). Milne Library Publishing.