This article explores the outcomes of using community-engaged learning in a sustainability-focused social sciences research course titled Methods of Social Research. The integrated components of the course were designed to teach students about the research process while addressing sustainability issues at Utah State University. Throughout the…

The distressing events of 2020 challenged the United States to reimagine how our social institutions can and should respond to demands for racial justice. These demands impacted higher education and debates arose about whether the classroom is an appropriate place for teaching abolition. I address this debate by introducing a senior-level elective…

As a best practice, community-engaged courses should benefit students, community, and faculty through centering the needs and goals of each entity. Ensuring reciprocity and centering sustainable authentic relationships requires great care, intention, time, and a clear strategy to execute. We describe how our intercollegiate and co-instructed…

Community-based research (CBR) as a form of community-engaged learning (CEL) offers students valuable sociological practice and learning experiences. Although CEL strategies are well documented for enhancing students' sociological imagination, gaps persist in the literature regarding the impact on community partners. This article addresses the…

Service sociology is a critical strategy for teaching and learning in sociology. Even beyond that, service sociology is an imperative for communicating the value of our discipline to our students and other constituents. Using data collected from faculty members in Minnesota colleges and universities, I describe the salience of the sociology…

Drawing on a multiyear local research project on the affordable housing crisis, this article outlines a pedagogical approach we call Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research, or CISER. The CISER model brings together three key groups of actors--undergraduate students, university researchers, and community organizations--drawing on and…

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…

Data reproducibility is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences, but it has yet to be incorporated into many undergraduate sociology programs. This note describes a service-learning activity that can be added to an introductory statistics course. Students partner with a nonprofit and analyze quantitative data to answer questions…

This article describes a senior capstone, Neighborhoods and Health, which used community-based research (CBR) as its primary pedagogy. Students in the course drew upon multiple research methods and forms of data to provide our partner, the Urban Farming Institute of Boston, with an array of research products in support of the revitalization of a…

Fostering a sociological imagination in students is a central goal for most introductory sociology courses and sociology departments generally, yet success is difficult to achieve. This project suggests that using elements of asset-based community development can be used in sociology classrooms to develop a sociological perspective. After…

Service learning (SL) is growing in our universities and in Spain. However, still much action and research are needed with a gender perspective. This article aims to evaluate an SL project that consisted of workshops in schools on gender and technology. We evaluated the experience with a mixed-methods approach and a gender perspective. This…

Traditional service-learning pedagogy assumes that learning occurs when contact between relatively advantaged students and a relatively disadvantaged service population reduces prejudice. However, little is known about how students whose backgrounds are similar to the populations they serve process this learning experience. This study explores the…

This paper presents an analysis of my experiences with a teaching activity that engages students in publishing in Wikipedia on issues relating to globalization. It begins with a short overview of some of the current debates revolving around teaching globalization, which lay ground for the assignment. I discuss how this teaching tool fits with a…

Prior research measuring service-learning program successes reveals the approach can positively affect students' attitudes toward community service, can increase students' motivation to learn and ability to internalize class material, and can change their view of social issues. Studies also suggest that college students sometimes enter and leave a…

In response to increasing homelessness in our city, Seattle Pacific University invited a homeless encampment (Tent City) to reside on our university campus for three months. This provided an opportunity to engage students on issues of poverty and inequality. Building from a service-learning model, we devised course work around homelessness and…