Immigration is one of the most contentious topics in contemporary American politics. This study presents the planning, implementation, and evaluation of a program of faith community dialogues on immigration developed in partnership between a public university, a faith-based group of volunteers, and Catholic congregations. Based on data from…

This study combines critical service learning (Mitchell, 2008) and antioppressive pedagogies (Kumashiro, 2002) to highlight the importance of using community sites aimed toward transformational social change. How sites are structured and how students are positioned influence what students learn from the experience. Using ethnographic methods, I…

This article reports on the second stage of a 7-year community-based research project involving service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses and nonprofit organizations in Baltimore City. The article explains how students and community members overcame failure to collaborate on literacy and employment workshops. To…

Editor's note: In assembling this issue, I sought to compile compelling stories of arts education cuts and the responses of local communities. I invited National Council on the Arts member Dr. Bruce Carter to share such a story. The following article begins with Carter's narrativized account of informal research on the arts partnership in the…

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…

Satellite university campuses -- whereby established universities decentralise part of their activities, often to areas previously lacking a university -- contribute to the diversification of university systems. While satellite campuses, due to their small scale and limited resources, might perform some activities less efficiently than their…

Since the opening of the University of Nebraska at Omaha's (UNO) Community Engagement Center in 2014, both university and community building partners have been guided by a set of core values. Established by a community/university task force after months of focus groups, community conversations, and other data gathering activities, these values…

In this article, we highlight the affordances of agency that is not merely individual, but rather emerges in and through collectivities. We take up these issues within the context of our own work in the field of sociocultural perspectives on literacy and through the methodological vantage point of community-based and participatory research. First,…

This special report looks at how arts-based charter schools in the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Maryland and North Carolina provide access to arts education and integrate the arts schoolwide across curricula, community engagement and teacher professional development.

Drexel University, a private university in Philadelphia, is expanding its campus to attract more students, faculty, and researchers. The current President, John Fry, envisions transforming West Philadelphia into an innovation district. The university is working with real estate developers on a $3.5 billion real estate project at Schuylkill Yards,…

Despite the increasing popularity in the academy of collaborative approaches to research, evaluating the impacts of Students-as-Partners (SaP) initiatives has thus far received less systematic attention. This paper presents an evaluation of a participatory community-based research project where academics partnered with 15 mature students in a…

To make their mandate more efficient, universities have to either offer services to students either produce innovation and scientific research. From this point of view it is difficult for universities to focus their attention on economic and financial performance. Instead, it is much more relevant for the university to find models of governance…

Discussions around civic engagement are now commonplace in Aotearoa New Zealand universities, albeit to varying degrees of intensity. The results of these discussions are realised in strategic plans, curricular development and the commitments of individual academics to engage with the world outside the university. This article explores the…

English school policy since 1988 has increasingly been defined in neoliberal terms, with an emphasis on markets, competition, and education in its narrowest sense (ENS). However, for a brief interlude from 2005 to 2010, school leaders were challenged by a new Extended Schools (ES) policy to look outside their classrooms and beyond their school…

Improving performance in an environment often tested by intermingled social problems, including poverty, racial isolation, cultural clashes between teachers and students, and school funding disparities requires authentic, committed family, school, and community partnerships. Using Bryk's (2010) model for effective and improving schools, our study…