Two current movements of experiential learning receiving attention in mainstream educational reform are service-learning and outdoor education/adventure programming. Although sharing common philosophical roots, these movements have branched out into a variety of different applications and approaches. With increasing pressures on educational reform…

The rhetorical nature of the challenge to convert people to the cause of community development is illustrated in the discussion of three of the leadership portraits that students created for Urban Matters. The way these leaders persuade the residents to transform the negativity of a housing project into the positivity is analyzed.

The Banneker History Project was a service learning project in which students investigated the history of the Benjamin Banneker School, a segregated school that operated from 1915?1951 in a Midwestern college community. This article discusses the research these students conducted and the perceptions they adopted as a result of their work.

The Duke TIP Leadership Institute was developed specifically for a 2-week summer experience; however, the model can be applied to today's high school classroom. Through a combination of fundamental leadership skills and guided service learning, students identify important unmet needs within their community and begin working to address them. This…

The American Youth Policy Forum event -- one of three in a series -- focused on the research justification for integrating community service and civic education with academic goals. The evidence is there; these initiatives do enhance academic learning. But speaking in the August hearing room of the U.S. House of Representatives, most of the…

A consortium of teacher education professors worked together in a 3 year project to infuse service-learning into their courses. Although they had participated in the same preparatory workshops, they largely integrated it in ways that appeared to eclipse S-L orthodoxy. To understand their variances we examined the choices and contexts that shaped…

This essay turns to feminist ethnography and postcolonial theory to address how the figure of "the stranger" haunts the project of community service learning. By explicating the immediate and broader relations of power that structure these "strange(r) encounters," we are more likely to produce the kind of agitated pedagogy that creates…

Knowledge of learners' assets beyond the traditional structure of school can provide preservice teachers with essential gateways to connecting learners with the content to be studied, and with forming beneficial social relationships that can enhance learning. This article describes ways that preservice teachers responded to community-based…

Service-learning, an increasingly popular pedagogical strategy in higher education, has been largely ignored in the scholarship of literature teaching. Because political and social activities are inextricably linked with aesthetic and intellectual activities, literary texts and community service can work in complementary ways to inform students'…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which organizational infrastructure and institutional leadership facilitated or hindered institutionalizing service learning as pedagogy at a small health professions college. Through interviews and content and discourse analysis, we found that data supported the notion that service learning…

Statistics in the Community (STATCOM) is a student-run statistical consulting program that has been serving its local community since 2001. Directed and staffed by graduate students from Purdue University's Department of Statistics, it provides professional consulting services to governmental and nonprofit groups free of charge. Students work in…

Adult volunteers who work as experiential educators in Public Achievement (PA) told us about their experiences, and we contrasted these with the stated aims of Public Achievement, young peoples' experiences, and what it is like to be an adult volunteer. PA coaches reflected that there was a significant disjuncture between the official aims of PA…

Researchers have described "service learning" as an ideal way to integrate experiential education into coursework while meeting community needs and imbuing students with civic responsibility. They have advocated service learning in business as a method to implement course concepts and increase student understanding of the external environment. In…

This paper discusses how the researcher examined learning and teaching over the course of a year, in the course titled: TH 460 Storytelling and Ethnographic Theatre. Discussion revolves around how the course was conceptualized, the procedures and protocols created, engagement and collaborations developed, learnings and outcomes experienced by…

This article analyzes the challenges encountered in a first-year service-learning course in which students had high expectations for community involvement and a commitment to social responsibility, yet significant difficulty connecting their service orientation to the intellectual inquiry expected of them at the college level. This conflict…