Creative Classroom Issue 5: Learning with People, Places, and Communities

What does it actually mean to learn something? And why do we still need universities?

These are big questions, and they do not invite immediate or simple answers. Yet as we reflect on the limitations of many current forms of teaching and learning, especially formal education centered primarily in the classroom, with the teacher often placed under the spotlight, we cannot help but return to these questions as educators and students.

Across many contexts, creative explorations and experiments are already taking place. This collection features three stories about educators who have integrated community-engaged learning into their teaching at New York University Shanghai. Although each educator works with different communities, questions, and challenges, all three stories speak to a shared effort: to connect students with projects, people, places, and problems in the real world, and to create learning experiences that are relatable, meaningful, engaging, and sometimes deeply impactful.

Kiri Tian shares her reflections on interviewing the three featured educators

The three articles were written by Kiri Tian, who interviewed Rodolfo Cossovich, Xingchen Ian Zhang, and Yanyue Yuan. Through these stories, we wanted to explore how educators design learning experiences that move beyond assignments, deliverables, and classroom discussion, and into relationships with people, places, memories, and communities.

Although the three courses differ in subject and form, they are connected by a shared commitment to bringing learning into a wider world beyond the four-walled classroom. In Cossovich’s course, assistive technology becomes less about building a device and more about listening to disabled collaborators and understanding access through lived experience. In Yuan’s course, students engage with aging not as an abstract social issue, but through life stories, family memory, and intergenerational co-creation. In Zhang’s course, students documented Sanlin Old Street before redevelopment, learning from the textures, sounds, and contradictions of a neighborhood undergoing change.

One hope behind this collection is to make the labor behind this kind of teaching more visible. Community-engaged learning can sometimes look, from the outside, like a course activity, a field trip, or a student project. But behind each encounter are months or years of relationship-building, thoughtful course design, negotiation, care, and reflection. These learning experiences require careful design, long-term trust, institutional support, and a great deal of often invisible labor from teachers and community partners. Their value may not always be immediately measurable. It often unfolds slowly, through small moments: a conversation that changes how a student sees aging, a visit that matters more than a device, or a recorded sound that preserves the memory of a disappearing street.

These three articles are necessarily brief. They offer only partial glimpses into much larger teaching practices and longer stories. But we hope they can open a conversation about what meaningful learning requires, especially at a time when education is being reshaped by artificial intelligence. If more educators across disciplines are interested in asking these questions together, this collection can become not only a record of three courses, but also a starting point for further dialogue.

As we were working on the articles, we hosted a launch event on May 15, 2026. The event brought together more than 40 faculty, staff, students, and community partners who care deeply about how learning actually happens. The gathering was not only a celebration of these articles in progress, but also a conversation about how classroom learning can remain connected to the real world: to communities, relationships, specific places, and the people and questions we care about.

At the launch event, the three featured educators shared behind-the-scenes stories from their community-engaged courses.

During the event, the three featured educators shared “behind-the-scenes” stories about why and how they came to design and teach their courses in these ways, the journeys they have been through, and their hopes for future collaborations. Kiri also reflected on her experience interviewing the three faculty members. As a recent NYU Shanghai graduate, she shared that the moments she remembered most clearly from college were not always the ones that happened inside classrooms, but the moments when something she had made or learned met someone outside the university: someone who used it, responded to it, or helped her see something she had not expected.

At the launch event, participants read the first draft, reflected together, and shared feedback.

We hope these stories can reveal these educators’ efforts and passion for teaching through real examples, while also celebrating and acknowledging the labor, care, and imagination they bring to their work. More importantly, we hope they invite further conversations about what universities can still make possible: not only the transmission of knowledge, but also the creation of meaningful encounters, relationships, and learning experiences that connect students with the world they are part of.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Goddard Impact Awards Seed Funding for supporting this project.

We are also grateful to Diane Geng, Director of the Community Engaged Learning Office (CELO), for her support and advice in organizing the interviews, as well as her feedback on the first draft. We would also like to thank all participants at the launch event for their participation, engagement, and thoughtful feedback.

Yanyue Yuan, Editor of The Creative Classroom Kiri Tian, Guest Writer and Co-Editor of the 5th Issue of The Creative Classroom

Yanyue Yuan is an Associate Arts Professor at NYU Shanghai. She is passionate about teaching, and she is a firm believer in experiential learning and project-based learning. Yanyue conducts research on the teaching of design thinking, creative learning in informal settings, and intergenerational learning. Yanyue was born and raised in Shanghai. She loves making and drinking tea and enjoys writing free-verse poems to document her reflections on life.

Kiri Tian switched from sociology to Interactive Media Arts as an undergraduate. Somewhere along the way, she decided to stop only deconstructing the world and to pick up the pleasure of constructing it again. She likes making things from zero to one — teaching herself crafts she has never studied systematically, whether that’s woodworking, electronic toys, or interactive installations — and she likes building with blocks and Lego. She also cares about questions that don’t quite produce an object: what makes a better kind of education, and how people can organize themselves alongside one another. She is currently a research assistant on the Creative Pathways project and is applying to graduate programs in design engineering.