Through a collected case study, this research study examines the relationships between college students and community partners in three separate service-learning projects. Although all of the service-learning relationships can be characterized as transactional, the reciprocity within each relationship manifests in different ways based on the…

Community and campus partners face inherent differences due to their distinct cultures, assumptions, practices, and constituencies. How partners handle the resulting tensions can impact how well the partnership functions. This article introduces relational dialectics as a framework to think about recurring tensions as natural and normal when…