Twenty-five years ago, the aspirational vision of a newly formed national SENCER initiative led one of the authors (Wood) to initiate a long-term relationship between the Smithsonian Institution and George Mason University, involving a residential, immersive approach to education focused on biodiversity conservation. In the Smithsonian-Mason…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe a pilot application of the Sustainable Transportation Analysis & Rating System (STARS), and highlight how a sustainability rating system can be used to promote sustainable urban development through a university-city partnership. STARS is an example of a second-generation "green"…

The Applied and Industrial Mathematics program partners applied mathematics students with businesses, governments, laboratories, and agencies to solve real problems. We will discuss the logistics of the program and give advice on starting and running similar programs. We also give a detailed example of a specific project, namely our work with the…

Using Kotter's model of change as a framework, this case study will describe the structure and efforts of a centralized unit within an urban, research university to deepen and extend the institutionalization of community engagement. The change model will be described along with details about the implemented strategies and practices that fall…

The purpose of this report is to demonstrate the power of connecting Children's Savings Account (CSAs) to college access-success programs and show that, when done together, they produce greater outcomes. First, we briefly describe these closely related fields and explain the merit of partnerships between CSA initiatives and college access and…

This article documents and analyses the uneasy, if not contradictory, relationship between service learning and liberal arts thinking in an undergraduate programme in Global Development Studies (GDS) at a North American University. As an undergraduate, Cororaton participated in a service-learning project to build a greenhouse in Mongolia; at the…

Games and other forms of play are used in today's libraries to attract underserved patrons, to introduce patrons to other library resources and services, and to facilitate engagement between library patrons. While many perceive gaming as a new library service, gaming services have been part of librarianship since the nineteenth century through…

This qualitative study explored a high-intensity, transformational service event following a natural disaster. Using data collected from promptbased journals, the researchers in this study sought to understand how social change leadership develops while serving after a natural disaster. This paper outlines how qualitative research can be used to…

Postdeployment family reintegration and relationship breakdown among combat veterans has received considerable attention from the Department of Defense and the media. Social interventions have been developed as a family strengthening strategy. In this article, we present a university-Wounded Warrior partnership where a relationship enhancement…

This article describes three service-learning projects implemented in three different ESL programs in the United States. Each description includes typical course goals, service-learning assignments, reflection activities, student learning outcomes, and pedagogical challenges. The first project was developing digital literacy through…

The following study analyzes the nearly 20-year curricular evolution of civic engagement at a small liberal arts university in the southeastern United States, the College of William and Mary; in doing so, the researcher qualitatively examines the nature of scholarship in service-learning courses over a period of the last five years to lay…

In recent years, the need to advance the number of individuals pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields has gained much attention. The Montgomery County/Virginia Tech Robotics Collaborative (MCVTRC), a yearlong high school robotics program housed in an educational shop facility in Montgomery County, Virginia, seeks to…

Bordering on North Carolina, the Dan River region of Southside Virginia is a largely rural area south of the state capitol, Richmond, and 135 miles east of Virginia Tech's main residential campus in Blacksburg. The structural problems evident today in this expanse of wooded areas, fields, small cities, and towns were born, in large measure, of the…

The Joint Educational Facilities Inc. (JEF) computer science program has as its goal to acquaint minority and socially disadvantaged K-12 students with computer science basics and the innovative subdisciplines within the field, and to reinforce the college ambitions of participants or help them consider college as an option. A non-profit…

This paper describes a project in which faculty collaborated with two agencies to facilitate student learning about communication with elders. Data on student learning was collected via survey, focus groups, and reflective writing. Survey results showed that the five most important benefits students rated themselves as gaining from the…