This article explores the collaborative process behind the development and promotion of "Anti-Racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices," an edited collection produced by an interracial team of editors and authors of 22 chapters. Through reflective narratives and critical conversations, we highlight the transformative…

This Projects With Promise case study offers insights for addressing tensions between universities and communities in building partnerships and collectively rethinking "the field" of community engagement. We explore moving beyond a solely place-based understanding of "the field" into an ethos based on human interactions and…

Many reviewers of applications for ethical approval of research at universities struggle to understand what is considered ethical conduct in community-based research (CBR). Their difficulty in understanding CBR and the ethics embedded within it is, in part, due to the exclusion of CBR from researchers' mandatory research ethics training. After…

Community and campus partners can benefit from place-based community engagement to enact a commitment to racial equity and community-driven decision-making. Racial equity is paramount in place-based community engagement. However, very little attention has been given to how whiteness in the ideological foundations of higher education shapes the…

Civic learning and democratic engagement (CLDE) work has become a central piece of higher education's mission, woven in daily tasks. This chapter explores how the community engagement professional (CEP) role can be reimagined across institutions and the opportunities, challenges, and next steps for moving forward. The strategic positioning of…

Extractive knowledge is prevalent in higher education community engagement. It is a type of epistemic injustice that is harmful to the historically and systemically minoritized communities and community nonprofits that many universities, particularly predominately white institutions, seek to engage. Extractive knowledge results from what we can…

The COVID-19 pandemic set higher education institutions on an unprecedented path requiring of them to identify alternative strategies and implement various initiatives to sustain their academic projects. With the widespread devastation of the pandemic, the purpose of universities within their communities were again in the spotlight. A sensibility…

This theoretical paper anchors service learning (S-L) in three broad sociological theories. From there, discussions on the actual implementation of S-L based on these theories are explained to build an integrated S-L sociological framework. Four S-L modalities of community engagement are identified--namely transactional, transitional,…

The idea of the "developmental university" was popularised on the African continent in the post-independence period, but has recently returned to view on account of the positioning of the university in the newly agreed United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The developmental model is characterised by service to society,…

In this reflective conceptual essay, we critically examine two complementary models related to leadership for community engagement--the boundary-spanning model (Weerts & Sandmann, 2010) and the preliminary competency model for CEPs (Dostilio, 2017a). Both models organize and present prioritized activities necessary for individuals to advance…

This policy brief is produced by UEA UNESCO Chair in Adult Literacy and Learning for Social Transformation at Bahir Dar University, as part of impact activities for "Family Literacy, Indigenous Learning and Sustainable Development: Proof of Concept Pilot" Project. This work was supported by University of East Anglia's Global Research…

As community-based global learning (CBGL) programs become more common on college/university campuses and utilize the UN's Sustainable Development Goals to guide programmatic outcomes, open-access evaluation instruments that both benchmark and effectively measure programmatic enhancements over time are needed. The 147-item Community Engagement and…

Higher education and America stand at a perilous moment brought about by economic and social inequality, racism, and the fracture of civic cohesion and structures. From its origins, the mission of American higher education was to promote democratic governance and a free, fair, and orderly society through the education of responsible citizens. Just…

In recent years, grand challenge initiatives have emerged nationally with the goal of addressing large, multidisciplinary public problems. The advent of university-led grand challenge initiatives offers an important opportunity to reflect on how institutions of higher education design, implement, and orient externally relevant activities at a time…

The Decolonising the Curriculum (DtC) movement questions the very values we take for granted as learning developers. If our role is to develop academic literacies and support students to succeed in the curriculum as it is, can we as learning developers be decolonisers? This opinion piece argues that we can and should. It outlines where we can…