In this reflection, using the work of Ellen Cushman and Paula Mathieu as a framework from which to extend, I explore how my positionality as a graduate student affected my experience wading into community-engaged literacy work. Specifically, I reflect on my time with a nonprofit organization that provides no-cost legal support and safety planning…

Service-learning is often identified as a pedagogy to prepare undergraduates for life beyond college. However, research suggests service-learning courses rarely challenge learners to explore structural causes of inequity or engage in transformative action. This study explores how one college professor positioned students as they engaged in…

"Transformative Critical Service-Learning" offers hands-on tools for implementing, reflecting on, and assessing critical service-learning in classrooms and community spaces. Answering a need from practitioners for a practical tool for making sense of critical service-learning, the authors introduce the Critical Service-Learning…

This article contributes to a long-standing conversation about the implementation of service-learning by proposing an updated revision for the 21st century: critically engaged civic learning (CECL). The term service-learning is problematic as it invokes inequitable power dynamics that inherently privilege one group over another, with more…

The U.S. K-12 public education system is fundamentally unequal. What efforts can facilitate students to become deeply immersed in the realities of the system and to embody the need for social change? This article investigates scaffolded, semester-long writing assignments to demonstrate patterns in the three tenets of critical community-engaged…

This article chronicles a service-learning (SL) subject on community psychology in Hong Kong (n = 26) and elaborates on how students experience concepts, frameworks, and values in community psychology and put them into practice at servicelearning settings. Upon acquiring basic concepts in community psychology, including sense of community,…

Universities engage students in traditional service-learning projects that often yield "good feelings", even a savior mentality, but typically leave the root causes of social justice issues unexamined and untouched. In contrast to traditional service-learning, critical service-learning bridges this gap with an explicit focus on justice…

This manuscript explains a civic engagement activity and presents assessment data on the activity.

Background: The ability to effectively teach culturally and linguistically diverse students is critically important. Research has shown that providing teacher candidates educative experiences through critical service-learning can better prepare future teachers and can foster a social justice stance. Purpose: This study examines teacher candidates'…

This article analyzes the experience of teaching and learning in a "Literature of Service" course in its attempt to utilize the best of civic learning and faith-based reflection to make sense of social inequality. The language of students' final portfolios for the course suggests a direct connection between their classroom talk about literary…

Colleges of education must instantiate their candidates' knowledge, skills, and dispositions for accreditation. Professors often have candidates reflect on field experience as a way to enhance their learning. This study examines reflections of 43 candidates over a 2-year period. Candidates engaged in an after-school enrichment program as…

Implementing service-learning is challenging in light of issues such as changes in student demographics and pressure from existing curricula goals. However, closer community engagement is increasingly important in the long-term goals of our universities. Members of a faculty learning community at an open-access college reflect on the process of…

In an ongoing effort to address the needs of 21st century teachers, a service-learning project was designed which coupled structured reflection and technology. The reflective practitioner model through the use of traditional methods coursework has long been viewed as the most appropriate model for the development of teachers (Hall, 2012). However,…

The Cultural Immersion Projects at Indiana University offer teacher education majors the opportunity to be placed in culturally-diverse settings, where full-time student teaching, required community participation, ongoing reflection, and academic reporting combine to provide experiences that go well beyond the common foci of conventional student…

Little research has examined the effects of service participation and the level of integration of service into courses on alumni service-related attitudes and behaviors. In the present study, 481 alumni of a religious-affiliated liberal arts college participated in a phone survey that examined their present and past behaviors related to service…