While there is a rich array of community-based learning activities and approaches across the Portland State University campus, the authors assert that integrating a critical service learning (CSL), rather than traditional service learning (TSL), model in the first-year curriculum benefits both students and community partners. They advocate for…

Purpose: The main purpose of service learning is to produce holistically developed students. Since 2015, the Ministry of Higher Education has mandated the infusion of service learning into various study programs, however till today, service learning across the country is still in its infancy. Critical insights on its contextual compatibility is…

Grassroots initiatives towards climate resilience in cities are likely to embed environmental education practices with potential transformative impact among young people. Through interviews and document review, we examine two initiatives involving different non-formal educational actions in Barcelona: a civic ecology practice based on the…

This article is about a Hong Kong-based summer internship program designed to foster service leadership attributes through service-learning. We report research based on interviews with interns and their partner organization representatives (PORs) and on written assignments as required by the program. We also report how the research informed the…

This paper examines how two language educators of color developed critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) in a combined youth participatory action research and teacher education program. Specifically, as a multilingual and diverse group of educators, we chose to use Latin@/o Critical Theory (LatCrit) as our methodology to align with the…

In this article we explore the dynamic between the pedagogical and the urban, attending to 'agentive urban learning'. By this we mean processes by which young people build agency in the urban context, in using the resources of the city to develop their own agency, and of developing agency to act within the city. By agency, we refer to the capacity…

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…