During Charles Dickens's lifetime, education publications such as "The Union Sixth Reader" already shared methods for teaching his works. "The Union Sixth Reader" gives evidence to educational concerns surrounding the best uses of language, as though Dickens's turns of phrase could empower students. Today, educators may not…

Using Critical Communication Pedagogy, this semester-long service-learning approach to public speaking requires students to apply public speaking concepts to a speech they develop and deliver to a specific community audience, to examine their own biases, and to explore and evaluate various strategies for adapting to their audience.

One goal for higher education that should be taken very seriously is the development of students who learn the value of being productive members of their communities by contributing pro bono expertise to those with a need, but without the expertise or resources necessary to accomplish the task(s) on their own. In an effort to enhance their images,…

This article describes a project integrating mobile learning games into the author's course at Appalachian State University, in collaboration with a community partner and for the community as a whole. The process of constructing educational mobile games can be as beneficial as the act of playing. Therefore, the author's beliefs about integrating…

By their very nature, courses that contain a community-based component invite opportunities for the practice of empathy, whereby students come to identify with their community partners (such as the low-income children they tutor, the elders they interview). In fact, the building of empathy through the cross-dialogue often catalyzed by such classes…

To promote student engagement, professors must actively seek to create the conditions that foster engagement. Chickering and Gamson (1987) suggest that good practices in undergraduate education are ones that: encourage student-faculty contact, develop reciprocity and cooperation among students, encourage active learning, provide students with…

An oral history project on the coal mining heritage of southwest Virginia's New River Valley developed from a partnership between Radford University and a grassroots community group interested in cultural preservation. Publication products, benefits to participating college students, and reasons for the project's success are discussed. Contains 26…

Classroom experiential-learning activities help college students understand the social-justice issues implicit in their service-learning projects and become culturally dexterous leaders. Classroom exercises described cover trust building, communication, consciousness of power and class issues, differentiating between social service and social…