Education Commons^™

Critical Transformations Through Community Service-Learning Programs For Students Of Color At Predominantly White Institutions, Varsha Ghosh

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Service-learning has become deeply embedded in higher education, as both a co-curricular and curricular tool to achieve learning outcomes, promote civic engagement and promote diversity. Yet it has also struggled with the critique that service-learning, unintentionally, reinforces deficit thinking by promoting a dominant narrative centered on the White middle-class perspective. This narrative excludes the experience of students and faculty who reflect the demographics of the community served or who are simultaneously from the community and the institution. This qualitative study seeks to challenge the traditional narrative to understand the service experience of students of color from low-income backgrounds at predominantly …

A Framework For Justice-Centering Relationships And Understanding Impact In Higher Education Community Engagement, Melissa M. Quan

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Community engagement in higher education has been promoted as critical to fulfilling higher education’s responsibility to the public good through teaching, learning, and knowledge generation. Reciprocity and mutual benefit are key principles of community engagement that connote a two-way exchange of knowledge and shared power and decision making. However, it is not clear, from existing literature, whether community engagement impacts communities in meaningful or positive ways.

The problem addressed through this study was how campus-community partnership stakeholders define impact. This was a study of how impact was determined; it was not an assessment of whether identified outcomes were achieved. Using …