Community Engaged Learning

With contributions from leading experts across disciplinary fields, this book explores best practices from the field's most notable researchers, as well as important historically based and politically focused challenges to a field whose impact has reached an important crossroads. The comprehensive and powerfully critical analysis considers the history of community engagement and service learning, best teaching practices and pedagogies, engagement across disciplines, and current research and policies - and contemplates the future of the field. The book will not only inform faculty, staff, and students on ways to improve their work, but also suggest a bigger social and political focus for programs intended to seriously establish democracy and social justice in their communities and campuses.

This book focuses on partnerships at the most basic level of interaction - between two people as they work toward common goals. Interpersonal dynamics described in this book are intended to guide formal and institutional relationships between members of a community or community organization on the one hand and representatives from campus on the other. Collaborative communication principles and practices shared can form a foundation for individuals to build flexible, lasting relationships that will weather most challenges and sustain the larger partnerships of their respective organizations. This book offers a conceptual framework of collaborative communication to build and sustain partnerships, recognizing that relationships change over time as the people involved and their circumstances evolve. Collaborative communication uses a repertoire of knowledge and skills that allow partners to make choices that fit their situation or context and to work through differences and challenges as they occur, to include managing conflict and navigating cultural differences. It further takes into account the different means of communication, whether face-to-face, using e-mail, text messaging, or social media. Readers will appreciate the numerous real world examples that illustrate and bring its key concepts to life. This book is addressed to partners at all levels focused on community engagement and service-learning. It is intended for preparing college students to work more effectively in the community, as well as for workshops for community and campus members who work with service-learning students. It can equally be used in leadership workshops in academic and community settings. Scholars, students, or community members involved in community engaged research will also find useable ideas for their work. The appendices offer an annotated bibliography of useful resources and provide readers with a repertoire of activities for building a collaborative communication repertoire.

This compact, accessibly written text prepares students for their experience of community-based learning. It is designed for students to read and reflect on independently or to foster discussion in class on their motivations and dispositions toward community engagement and service learning. It prepares students to work with diverse individuals, groups, and organizations that may be outside their prior experience. Faculty can use the book as a tool to deepen the educational experience of the course and enrich community engagement. This text is a guide to what's involved in community-engaged learning, from understanding the pervasiveness of social, economic and environmental problems, to learning about how individuals and organizations in communities work to overcome them. Students will discover through a process of reflection how service connects to personal development and the content of their courses, builds their ability to engage with people different from themselves, and develops new life skills, all in the context of working with communities to overcome systemic injustice. Critical questions woven into each chapter prompt students to reflect on ideas and perspectives about social justice, community development, and their role in fostering them. The book concludes with case studies of students who have experienced the transformative power of community-engaged learning. The stories illustrate common themes inherent in the student experience, including listening to understand, challenging stereotypes, learning the nature of their role, and seeing the world through a new lens. A special feature of this book is the embedded QR codes that provide access, as students read the text, to online resources, and original and public videos that explore particular themes or perspectives more deeply. The authors also include text directed to faculty to provide ideas about framing their community-engaged course and integrating the book.

Service-Learning Essentials is the resource you need to help you develop high-quality service-learning experiences for college students. Written by one of the field's leading experts and sponsored by Campus Compact, the book is the definitive work on this high-impact educational practice. Service-learning has been identified by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as having been widely tested and shown to be beneficial to college students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Organized in an accessible question-and-answer format, the book responds clearly and completely to the most common questions and concerns about service-learning. Each chapter addresses issues related to individual practice as well as to the collective work of starting and developing a service-learning center or program, with examples drawn from a variety of disciplines, situations, and institutional types. The questions range from basic to advanced and the answers cover both the fundamentals and complexities of service-learning. Topics include: Determining what service-learning opportunities institutions should offer How to engage students in critical reflection in academic courses and in cocurricular experiences Best practices for developing and sustaining mutually beneficial campus-community partnerships Integrating service-learning into the curriculum in all disciplines and at all levels, as well as various areas of student life outside the classroom Assessing service-learning programs and outcomes The dilemmas of service-learning in the context of power and privilege The future of service-learning in online and rapidly globalizing environments Service-learning has virtually limitless potential to enable colleges and universities to meet their goals for student learning while making unique contributions to addressing unmet local, national, and global needs. However, in order to realize these benefits, service-learning must be thoughtfully designed and carefully implemented. This easy-to-use volume contains everything faculty, leaders, and staff members need to know about service-learning to enhance communities, improve higher education institutions, and educate the next generation of citizens, scholars, and leaders.

The authors of this volume collectively demonstrate the importance of critical service-learning in this historic moment as we participate in, and witness ongoing struggles for justice around the world. The contributors of this volume offer guidance to educators and scholars alike who are interested in designing, participating in, and studying the potential of alliances formed through critical service-learning. The volume emphasizes theoretical and historical foundations of critical service-learning, pressing questions facing the field, exploration of outcomes of, and ongoing challenges for the pedagogy, and design features and larger scale models of critical service-learning that can be implemented across the educational landscape of elementary, secondary, and higher education.

This book examines key concepts, principles, and applications of the service-learning approach. It explores the theory, research, and practices of how service-learning is understood, implemented, and evaluated in different contexts.

This book charts the development of a whole-institution approach to university-community engagement at a modern Australian university, highlighting the pivotal role that curriculum renewal can play in organizational transformation. It describes how Macquarie University's PACE (Professional and Community Engagement) program developed and fostered a culture of learning that has been at the center of academic renewal, differentiation, and institutional change. It details the development of the PACE pedagogical model, the establishment of the network of stakeholder relationships which underpin it, and the embedding of the model across the whole institution. Authored by those directly involved in the change project, this book tells the story of PACE, its achievements, challenges, success factors and future directions. A series of dovetailing contributions by leading international scholars of university-community engagement set the PACE story in its global context. This book adds to the scholarship of learning through community engagement, provides international perspectives on trends and issues in university-community engagement, contributes to a broader understanding of the practice and pedagogy of community engagement, and discusses the challenges and opportunities of implementing and sustaining change in the higher education sector.

This is a practical guide to designing, teaching, and coordinating service-learning courses, and for developing reciprocal community partnerships and community-based research through a lens of equity that addresses the endemic racial, social, economic, and environmental disparities across society. The text provides a comprehensive framework for developing both in-person and on-line service-learning, with a chapter on virtual delivery of courses that integrates the principles and practices described throughout the book. The authors uniquely integrate the how-to of conducting service-learning with the theoretical foundations to enact effective, equitable, and inclusive community engagement. Given this moment of enormous social inequality and divisiveness, the authors offer a new definition and set of educational principles that they characterize as Equity-Centered Community Engagement Excellence. These principles serve to guide academic and community engagement that is democratic, recognizes the voice and expertise of community partners, addresses the power imbalances between communities and academic institutions, and develops an educational experience that is potentially transformative and promotes civic responsibility. Informed by the literature of critical service-learning, critical race theory, intercultural communication theory, and social-constructivism, this book attempts to deconstruct the assumption of the preeminence of academic knowledge to reconstruct a new operational paradigm of equity-centeredness that validates community capacity to guide faculty in their redesign of service-learning curriculum, activities, collaborations, and scholarship. It is based on the principles of: Student Agency (demonstrated as enhanced skills, knowledge, and motivation) Community Efficacy (recognition of community assets and capacity-building) Scholarly Advocacy (leveraging evidence-based research-based for equity-centered learning, serving, and social justice) The authors offer examples of syllabi, lessons and assignments, reflection questions, evaluation rubrics, as well as an array of teaching tips that illustrate strategies for use in the classroom and in the field. The book is addressed to faculty embarking on service-learning and to seasoned scholar practitioners looking for innovative ideas, as well as to campus administrators who coordinate community outreach or college student volunteer services, offering guidance on leveraging resources and fiscal support from external stakeholders. It is also designed to serve as a resource for professional development workshops and faculty scholar learning communities. It offers a rich compendium of ideas and examples from which faculty and practitioners can select exercises and elements to incorporate or adapt for their courses, whether designing short-term engagements or extended service-learning programs.

Ensuring doctoral students receive a well-rounded and thorough education is critical for their future success. Service learning within the doctoral program is one of the many aspects that helps shape students' experiences and prepares them for life after graduation. Co-Constructing and Sustaining Service Learning in a Doctoral Program captures the experiences of doctoral students who were involved in socially just and sustainable service-learning projects and what it meant for them to be engaged in scholarship through service-learning. The book also illustrates what service-learning looks like and should look like in higher education particularly given the inequities that exist in the field of education. Covering key topics such as online education, academic identity, and sustainable learning, this reference work is ideal for administrators, policymakers, researchers, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

International Case Studies in Service Learning contributes a deeper insight into the multifaceted nature of the subject and its associated perplexities. Featuring authors that have adopted a holistic approach, capturing various interventions and approaches and moving to discover the most accurate path towards gaining a complete picture of how service-learning impacts students, the chapters investigate the issue specifically through an emphasis on problem solving, experiential learning and community engagement. Shedding light on how successfully service learning has been adopted to the existing curriculum and the emergence of a new breed of students, who are aligned with the needs of the community and undertake collaborative work to solve real world issues, International Case Studies in Service Learning is invaluable to both researchers, teachers and scholars.

This substantially expanded new edition of this widely-used and acclaimed text maintains the objectives and tenets of the first. It is designed to help students understand and reflect on their community service experiences both as individuals and as citizens of communities in need of their compassionate expertise. It is designed to assist faculty in facilitating student development of compassionate expertise through the context of service in applying disciplinary knowledge to community issues and challenges. In sum, the book is about how to make academic sense of civic service in preparing for roles as future citizen leaders. Each chapter has been developed to be read and reviewed, in sequence, over the term of a service-learning course. Students in a semester course might read just one chapter each week, while those in a quarter-term course might need to read one to two chapters per week. The chapters are intentionally short, averaging 8 to 14 pages, so they do not interfere with other course content reading. This edition presents four new chapters on Mentoring, Leadership, Becoming a Change Agent, and Short-Term Immersive and Global Service-Learning experiences. The authors have also revised the original chapters to more fully address issues of social justice, privilege/power, diversity, intercultural communication, and technology; have added more disciplinary examples; incorporated additional academic content for understanding service-learning issues (e.g., attribution theory); and cover issues related to students with disabilities, and international students. This text is a student-friendly, self-directed guide to service-learning that: * Develops the skills needed to succeed * Clearly links service-learning to the learning goals of the course * Combines self-study and peer-study workbook formats with activities that can be incorporated in class, to give teachers maximum flexibility in structuring their service-learning courses * Promotes independent and collaborative learning * Equally suitable for courses of a few weeks' or a few months' duration * Shows students how to assess progress and communicate end-results * Written for students participating in service learning as a class, but also suitable for students working individually on a project. Instructor's Manual This Instructor Manual discusses the following six key areas for aligning your course with use of Learning through Serving, whether you teach a senior-level high school class, freshman studies course, or a college capstone class: 1. Course and syllabus design 2. Community-partner collaboration 3. Creating class community 4. Strategic teaching techniques 5. Developing intercultural competence 6. Impact assessment This Manual is free and available for download in PDF format by clicking on "INSTRUCTOR MANUAL" on the left side of this webpage, just underneath the cover image.