Columbus, the largest city in Ohio, is an epicenter for several overlapping health disparities, including poverty, food insecurity, and infant mortality. A group of volunteer undergraduate students at The Ohio State University sought to reduce some of these disparities through the creation of ENCompass: Empowering Neighborhoods of Columbus. This…

The matriculation, retention, and graduation of students is a critical and ongoing effort in undergraduate engineering education. Implementing measures is vital in increasing student motivation to continue pursuing engineering and is especially important for individuals from low-income and academically talented students. At the University of…

This article explores how the formation of civic-minded college graduates has shifted in recent decades. It presents preliminary research from a group of undergraduate college students engaged in an urban, experiential education program and explores opportunities for utilizing academic-based internships in developing civic-minded graduates.

The EPICS Program was created in 1995 with the dual purposes of improving engineering education and addressing compelling needs within our communities. The model broke with many traditional academic traditions, involving students in multidisciplinary teams of students from first-year to fourth years for multiple semesters or even years on projects…

The Policy Practice in Field Initiative was created to seed innovation and develop new models for an integrated approach to enhance the policy skill set of all social work students regardless of specialization. Funds provided to the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) are regranted to schools and programs of social work for field placement and…

Between historic changes in American undergraduate student demography and increasing stresses on civil society, institutions of higher education face mounting pressure to help their students foster strong civic skills and practices. At Queens University of Charlotte, the authors leveraged a curriculum revision process to create a general…

Community geography (CG) pedagogy sits at the intersection of three systematic shifts in higher education: desires to expand engagement with society; the evolution of student-centered, evidence-based instruction; and, the desire to diversify voices and knowledge production in the academy. Since the 1960s geographers have regularly partnered with…

Background: Service-learning has historically been seen as a high-impact practice that empowers undergraduates to develop essential learning outcomes. Most service-learning discussed within the literature occurs as a required element of a credit-bearing academic course. Purpose: This study explored what happens when service-learning is reimagined…

This article compares the post-activity perceptions of both the volunteer clients and student service providers in a community-based service learning project. Students served as either personal trainers or nutrition coaches for recruited clients during the final month of their respective classes. The clients were asked to rank different factors…

This article presents an overview of the creation and consolidation of an undergraduate certificate in Spanish translation offered at the University of Texas at Arlington. The certificate is a 15 credit-hour program oriented towards community translation and service-learning. It also offers a curricular model that could be beneficial for other…

The University of South Florida, a public research university, and the University Area Community Development Corporation Inc., a nonprofit organization, collaboratively developed a community-based global learning experience for undergraduate students. We present the results of a study exploring the impact of the experience on students who…

We present a case study of a multi-year, academic civic engagement (ACE) collaboration in a computer science capstone course. ACE projects in computer science provide an avenue for students to apply software development concepts to real-world projects with actual clients, and can offer meaningful engagement with ethical issues. The typical…

Service-learning college courses and service-learning components of traditional courses combine discipline-specific learning objectives with service activities in the community. "Chemistry Discovery" is a one-unit service-learning course focused on chemistry outreach at the University of Arizona. In a collaborative learning environment,…

The project described in this paper was designed for an undergraduate course titled the "Psychology of Adulthood and Aging". This course, capped at 20 students, is typically comprised of psychology, pre-nursing, and family studies students. The student learning objectives (SLO's) for the course are: (1) to understand and apply current…

This article describes the Social Entrepreneurship for Poverty Alleviation (SEPA) grant-writing program at Austin College. The SEPA program provides a service-learning experience in which students spend a summer writing grants with local nonprofit agencies. In the hope that others might choose to emulate our efforts, what follows is a detailed…