Saint Mary's College of California is a small, Catholic Lasallian, liberal arts institution located in the San Francisco Bay area. Founded in 1863, the institution currently serves approximately 2,000 enrolled students. The Catholic Institute for Lasallian Social Action (CILSA) is the social justice and community engagement center that provides…

A number of social and ecological justice educators have long recognized the need for educational institutions to foster the development of a critical interest in civic engagement. They also have recognized the lack of appropriate education for students who are already civically engaged. One popular way to address this context in higher education…

Mitchell (2008) asks faculty to adopt "a 'critical' approach to community service learning" (p. 50), one that focuses on social change, redistribution of power, and the development of authentic relationships. However, the path of transformation from "traditional" to "critical" service-learning practices remains…

If service-learning is to fulfill its potential to contribute to meaningful social change, scholars and practitioners must consider how service might foster a dynamic relationship between knowledge, the learner and the community. This paper challenges modernist conceptions of knowledge as a 'commodity' that can be delivered and consumed, and…

The author is a Black woman working and teaching within the field of criminology. Her students at Ball State University are predominantly White and have had few interactions with Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The author feels that it is important for her to disrupt stereotypes her students may have by introducing them to Black people who…

This study extended research on transformational service learning by examining the impact that a community placement context can have on college students' transformational processes. Kiely's "Transformational Service-Learning Process Model" was used as a framework to better understand how context, dissonance, and student reactions are…

At least one of the goals of the transformation of universities in South Africa is to develop civic-minded graduates who leave university to become agents of positive social change in broader society. More specifically, universities in South Africa aim to develop graduates who are critical, capable and balanced--graduates who are aware of their…

Higher education serves as an agent of social change that plays a significant role in the development of socially conscious and engaged students. The duty higher education has toward society, the role for-profit educational institutions play in enhancing the public good, and the prospect of making social change an element of these providers'…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of an academic service learning course in a foreign university branch campus in Malaysia, and its outcomes in terms of student learning. Drawing on the transformative learning theory and case study research, it discusses three forms of learning that characterise the students'…

Each year, millions of people around the world are affected by natural disasters. Following these disasters, many students from colleges and universities arrive to support the affected areas. These seamless leadership learning opportunities engage students by allowing them to implement the concepts they learned in a classroom. Humanitarian relief…

Academic programs focused on engineering entrepreneurship are growing in number and popularity at American universities. However, the fields of engineering, entrepreneurship and technology-based entrepreneurship struggle to recruit and retain female students: a historic and endemic failure at obtaining gender-balanced participation. Understanding…

This research investigates the potential of service-learning to develop a situated, embodied and critically reflective human agency for sustainability. It employs document analysis to review the intended curriculum and the institutional contexts of national and international cases wherein service-learning is a component of pre-service teacher…

Transformative learning, and its processes as proposed by Mezirow, has been the subject of much debate. This study contributes to the literature about these debates by examining transformative experiences within a foreign service-learning context. Canadian post-secondary students lived and worked to build a school in solidarity with a community in…

Connecting with others and experiences of dissonance are two factors identified as central to transformative learning in engaged teaching and research (Kiely, 2005). At the same time, these ways of knowing are unpredictable and come with the risk of actually disrupting rather than enhancing learning. This article reports the findings of a mixed…

Faced with the facts of economic inequality, the wealthy are confronted with a particular set of moral, social, and political questions, not least of which is the question of how to preserve a sense of being a "good" human being. In the case of justifying privilege, the problem becomes how to position oneself as being uniquely able to enact a…