With 23 campuses serving nearly 500,000 students, the California State University (CSU) is the largest and most diverse university system in the country. Annually, 3,500 service-learning (SL) courses are offered to more than 67,000 students, 17% of whom are science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. However, there is little…

This study analyzes attitudes that first-year students from three different learning communities (LCs) and their faculty had about service learning in general and their actual placement with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) serving a West African refugee and immigrant community in particular. Similar to other studies, we found that students…

Critical information literacy (CIL) and critical service learning (CSL) have developed in parallel over recent years but have yet to intersect robustly. Rooted in critical theory, these approaches emphasize both conceptual frameworks and practices that center questions of social inequality in our teaching and learning practices--and in our…

This article asserts that academics should constitute the majority of the teaching team of university service-learning curriculum. Using appraisals for service-learning courses for eight recent years at Shantou University, we apply the methods of one-way variance analysis and correlation analysis to analyze the data. The results show that…

Service-learning is a pedagogical approach that higher education can use to promote civic engagement among students, but it has not fully realized its original civic purpose. Butin (2010) argues that to meet its civic mission, service-learning must move toward a more justice-oriented pedagogy that empowers stakeholders to bring about social…

The research investigates the processes and characteristics of community-valued undergraduate community service-learning (CSL) initiatives that are housed within long-term community-university partnerships (CUPs). Using a case study design, the study used in-depth, semi-structured interviews, document review, and observation to understand three…

While there are various theories about faculty involvement in community-engaged scholarship (CES), there is little understanding of how faculty approach and make meaning of CES for themselves (Morrison & Wagner, 2016). The purpose of this study was (a) to determine if a typology can represent the variety of ways in which faculty approach and…

Increasingly, graduate and professional students arrive at institutions of higher education with personal and professional commitments to make the world a better place through community engagement; however, departments often do not incorporate outreach and engagement into graduate curricula (Austin & McDaniels, 2006; O'Meara & Jaeger,…

What is one value that grounds you in your civic engagement work? How are you walking the talk of that value in your assessment work? Or, how might you? And, what both helps and gets in the way of your doing that? These questions were posed to service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) faculty and staff gathered for an assessment institute…

This paper examines how the structural features of engineering engagement programs (EEPs) are related to the nature of their service-learning partnerships. "Structure" refers to formal and informal models, processes, and operations adopted or used to describe engagement programs, while "nature" signifies the quality of…

In this article I analyze postcolonial theory as a critical framework to improve understanding of global service-learning (GSL) partnerships. Although research on student learning outcomes from participation in GSL has grown dramatically over the past decade, scholarship on community outcomes and perspectives in GSL continues to lag. Just as…

As service-learning and community-based learning proliferate in higher education, increased attention has been directed toward gathering evidence of their impacts. While the bulk of the literature has focused on student outcomes, little work has been done to examine how the perspectives of stakeholder groups overlap and intersect. This study uses…

Reading Plato's "Meno" and the "Republic's" allegory of the cave in the context of a service-learning classroom involves students in a drama urging them to become self-conscious participants in the active pedagogy of the class. The "Meno" illustrates two competing philosophies of education as it invites students and…

In this article we share the theoretical framework of threshold concepts--concepts on which deep understanding of a field of practice and inquiry hinges and which, once understood and internalized, open a doorway to otherwise inaccessible ways of thinking--and explore its relevance to learning how to teach, learn, serve, partner, and generate…

In May 2012, University of North Carolina (UNC) President Tom Ross simultaneously commissioned two task forces to develop indicators that all UNC campuses could use to measure "progress in community engagement and economic development." The charge to the Community Engagement Task Force and the Economic Development Task Force was to…