Reconceptualizing Faculty Development in Service - Learning/Community Engagement : Exploring Intersections, Frameworks, and Models of Practice book review
This article details 7 Tips for Partnership Communication that help, not hurt relationships. Communiation resources and scholarshp are highlighted throughout the article. An overview of the author's Collaborative Communication Framework which can be used to guide community-campus partners throughout their work together is also shared.
Higher education institutions continue to be increasingly interested in examining how social entrepreneurship and community engaged approaches to education can work together. In light of the recent growth and interest in such programs, scholars and educators have called for attention to specific considerations when developing SE and community-based education, which can be summed up in three areas - pedagogy, relationships, and impact. The present essay builds on such propositions, and calls for a critically-orientated approach to SE, grounded in community engagement, collaborative dialogue among diverse voices, and a commitment to transforming oppressive structures.
The mission statements of land-grant institutions consistently describe their students as “engaged.” Beginning with an analysis of the mission statements of Midwestern land-grant institutions, this study discusses the results of a pre- and post-test of a subculture of undergraduate students enrolled in a course with a required community engagement component. The study assesses the dissonance or alignment of the ways mission statements describe students and the ways students describe themselves.
Journalists have often been accused of over-simplifying complex scientific stories leading to less audience engagement and information at a time when U.S news media continue to experience declining audiences. U.S. media has also experienced a gradual decline in coverage of science stories for a variety of reasons. Through a partnership with the National Science Foundation, journalism students at a university in the Midwest sought to correct this problem using a service-learning approach that produced science-based video content distributed through NSF channels. Results show improved student comprehension of scientific content may increase the quality of science stories available on television news.
This study evaluates an experiential learning civic engagement model of leadership education at a liberal arts university in Ghana. The extracurricular program, in which students apply for and receive funding for service projects aimed at impacting children and youth, includes ideation, project management and diversity training, coaching, and structured reflection. Key objectives include positive impacts on the community, growth in students’ leadership and project management competencies and increased civic engagement on campus. Document analysis, interviews with student project leaders and focus groups of community stakeholders were used to assess the degree to which the program met these objectives. Findings indicate that student led projects, particularly those in schools, can lead to academic and non-academic benefits for pupils, and that relationships between university student volunteers and pupils, teachers and parents are an important mechanism for pupils’ academic gains in the Ghanaian context. Service project leaders reported learning gains in 12 out of 13 leadership and project management competencies measured in the study. The funding increased overall student, faculty and staff involvement in community service and brought greater equity to extracurricular community service. The study suggests that such programs can enhance the civic purpose orientation of the university.
What are academic obstacles for Mexican-heritage youth? How can we be critical change agents and turn knowledge into action? This longitudinal study explores these research questions through epistemological, axiological, and ontological discussions. Data gathering occurred at an after-school tutorial agency in a Texas neighborhood near Mexico. The 461 co-researchers were 238 children, 91 parents, and 4 tutorial staff (all Latinx), and 128 mostly-Latinx teacher candidates (TCs). Data sources involved field notes, questionnaires, written reflections, interviews, focus groups, children’s drawings, a news station’s Promesa depictions, and Census data. From a social justice framework and grounded theory data analysis, these themes emerged: outsiders’ stereotypes of Promesa and academic obstacles. In response, we created a Promesa college scholarship and organized financial aid presentations to improve residents’ college graduation rate. Additionally, we launched a technology mentoring program involving TCs and Promesa children as part of community service-learning.
This article entails a case analysis of a sample of schools from a higher education network or consortium in partnership with The Algernon Sydney Sullivan Foundation. The Foundation seeks to empower students and communities through civic engagement and social entrepreneurship. A primary mechanism for doing so is by developing and cultivating a network of 70 colleges and universities, thereby enabling the Foundation’s capacity to educate and prepare nearly 250,000 collegians for life-long and intentional careers in social change-making. To assist with this endeavor, the Foundation commissioned this study to assess the existing service corps and social entrepreneurship framework of its partner institutions. Using a capacity-building framework, the study includes findings from a survey of existing service-learning and social entrepreneurship programs and initiatives as well as recommendations for strengthening the Sullivan network or higher education consortium to provide more formal service-learning and social entrepreneurial experiences for collegians.
As part of the series, Qualitative Inquiry: Critical Ethics, Justice, and Activism, Huckaby’s edited book asks us to think about “what might become possible” (p. 28) … with/through critical (post)qualitative inquiry? Starting off with a forward by the series editor, Cannella claims that the first volume is a valuable “handbook for rethinking and reconceptualizing qualitative research as a public project,” and readers will be “inspired and encouraged to take action” (p xi). The contributors nudge us away from upholding Eurocentric disciplinary conventions in order to honor and support different epistemological approaches and to exclude marginalized students, peoples, and communities. Huckaby’s edited volume is therefore an important (and relevant) contribution to better examine, in these troubled times, how activist-scholars, new or old, may partner with others in our journey to create a more socially just world.
Long recognized as a means for enhancing student awareness of social justice and responsibility, service learning is now also being explored as a means for helping students develop interprofessional teamwork skills. This paper describes preliminary evaluation results of one such pilot program, an interprofessional service-learning project at a county jail. In the model, college students from a range of health professions and inmates work collaboratively with jail staff to design service projects that are implemented in the facility. Qualitative analysis of open-ended surveys completed by student participants identifies key learning outcomes, including awareness of the health and social disparities faced by people incarcerated at the jail, confidence in the ability to engage in culturally-sensitive practice and to address these disparities, and appreciation for the value of interprofessional teamwork. This preliminary evaluation is part of a larger effort to develop tools to measure student and community outcomes in interprofessional serving learning initiatives.
During the last two decades, the knowledge base regarding the benefits and burdens for all stakeholders in service learning has expanded. However, service-learning research has neglected to address the foundation of the pedagogy, its definition, and stakeholders’ perspectives on the meaning of service learning. The current research addresses this deficiency through the use of focus group methodology to explore how community partners, specifically, define service learning. By recognizing the community voice, we hope to empower all those engaged in service-learning pedagogy to communicate understandings, experiences, and expectations to develop beneficial service-learning partnerships.
This article presents findings regarding a community-based learning experience that took place from 2014 to 2017, involving 379 undergraduate students from the Federal University of Sao Paolo. The students developed 82 projects on behalf of 20 community partners (NGOs, public institutions, hospitals, libraries and individual families). The research objective is to reveal the systemic impacts of this experience. The experiment followed an action research approach. Quantitative and qualitative data was gathered by means of questionnaires, focus group notes, community partners’ project evaluations, project documents and project blogs. The data was analyzed following a convergent parallel mixed method approach. The main findings were: 1) Working in real-life projects on behalf of a network of community partners that help people in need motivates the students to do their best to accomplish the projects; however, real-life projects may also bring difficulties that could negatively impact students’ motivation; 2) The need to solve real-life problems encourages students to search for learning opportunities, which encourages self-learning, learning with peers and learning with community partners; 3) The academic projects bring many benefits (material, educational, research opportunities, motivational) to the participants, which foster the continuity of the partnership.
As instructors at [University], a core conviction informs the service learning and community engagement (SLCE) courses we have designed: we cannot have thriving human communities, robust democratic citizenship, and authentic community/civic engagement when the ecological systems upon which all life depends, now and in the future, are ignored and ruined. Institutions of higher education need to use sustainability as an organizing tenet for SLCE and to achieve this, intentional collaboration must be made between SLCE and a sister discipline: sustainability in higher education (SHE). This article presents prototypes for SLCE-SHE partnerships. The preliminary qualitative data from these SLCE courses at [University] shows that strategic SLCE-SHE alliances cultivate the attitudes, goals, and learning outcomes sought by both disciplines in creative and perhaps, more adequate ways. When SLCE seriously attends to ecological sustainability -- when it becomes intentionally ecocentric -- place-engaged, ecologically literate, planetary citizens who value eco-social justice can be cultivated.
Service-learning (SL) is a form of pedagogy which integrates community service into class curriculums. Literature has highlighted the benefits of service-learning within a variety of student outcomes, including personal development, academic learning, interpersonal outcomes and outcomes related to the university experience. However, there is debate as to whether community service may provide a better foundation for these outcomes. Therefore, it is pertinent to compare outcomes of service-learning and community service volunteering in order to better understand and implement theory and implications for practice. This study compares the experiential and vocational outcomes of service-learners and community service volunteers (CS) involved in a community-based exercise program. Participants (SL; n = 22, CS; n =24) were alumni recruited from the XXXX database within the XXXX School of Kinesiology and Health Studies. Online surveys were used to collect data examining outcomes related to Self-Determination Theory constructs for assessment of service experience and career transitions. Analyses of covariance revealed statistically significant higher scores for SL regarding outcomes of autonomy perceptions in their service role and perceived influence of relatedness in guiding career pursuits. SL provides experiential and vocational benefits that may exceed community service volunteering, specifically in regard to fostering career relatedness and autonomy supportive program structures.
