CEWIL Insights | Viewing Party Series: Lollipop Woods

Join the Experiential Learning Hub's watch party to view the encore presentations and sessions from CEWIL Canada's 2025 Conference.

Lollipop Woods, Chocolate Swamps, Licorice Forests  

Presented by: Danielle Robinson and the C4 team at York University 

This large retrospective roundtable brings together an array of alumni, partners, professors, and staff members to reflect on the lessons learned during the eventful first five years of C4 (Cross-Campus Capstone Classroom). This WIL program began in 2019 as a pan-university, faculty-led grassroots initiative at York University with just 70 students, and it now serves close to 600 per year.

C4’s purpose was and is to provide students with an opportunity to work effectively in interdisciplinary teams on real-world challenges with social impact. Throughout this journey, students develop and hone transferrable skills while learning the value of multiple perspectives and approaches to research, design, and problem solving. This experience helps students to recognize what they can offer the world and thus prepare them for their future.

Participants in this round table will hear how we designed and launched a grassroots, pan-university WIL program; how we iterated the program within the complex webs of relations and expectations within a university; how we scaled it without losing our core values along the way; and how we persevered—and most importantly learned—while doing all of these things. Even though C4 is a unique program, its development, launching, and subsequent scaling provide a fascinating case study for professor-driven, WIL curricular innovation from the ground-up. It raises important questions about professors’, partners’, and staff members’ roles and relationships within WIL as well as the sources and mechanisms for WIL innovation within university spaces.

As a result, participants will be well-positioned to consider and/or reconsider pan-university WIL programming at their own academic contexts as well as processes through which new WIL programming is developed and the priorities they pursue. More specifically, C4 offers participants a means of integrating the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals into WIL, centering communities and community members within project-based classrooms, and empowering students as leaders and changemakers through experiential education opportunities.