CPP Fellowship

June 6, 2019

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Matthew Walton who has been selected for a CPP (Centre for Community Partnerships) Community-Engaged Teaching Faculty Fellowship for the 2019 – 2020 academic year. The aim of this pilot program is to support innovative instructors across the University of Toronto to develop new, or enhance existing Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) or Community-Engaged Research (CER) courses.

To that end, Professor Walton, along with his colleague Professor Melissa Williams has already secured an ATLAS (Advancing Teaching & Learning in Arts & Science) grant as well as departmental support to teach his new, year-long 400 level community-engaged research course Political Thought from the Global to the Local, to be taught in 2020 – 21.

According to Professor Walton this new course “will encourage students to find spaces of interaction and tension between currents of political thought from outside of the ‘Western’ tradition and their development within local communities of belief and practice, helping to situate diverse groups in Toronto in relation to global traditions of political thinking. It will include local community members as co-producers of knowledge, situating this teaching and research as practices of knowledge mobilization. It will also highlight political theory as a rigorous but not necessarily rarefied or exclusive undertaking and will focus attention on translocal traditions within comparative political theory.”

The University of Toronto’s Centre for Community Partnerships was founded in February 2005 in response to community safety needs in various neighbourhoods of the City of Toronto, with the goal of enhancing student learning and the student experience. It connects students with opportunities to take action and learn from intentional community-based experiences outside the classroom, while building sustainable partnerships with community organizations across the GTA and Peel regions. These mutually beneficial partnerships help students on all three University of Toronto campuses deepen their understanding of the social, cultural, ethical and political dimensions of civic life through hands-on experiences working with Toronto’s social sector.