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Community Engagement, Graduate Students, And "Naive Complicity": Service In The University, Jonathan S. Isaac

Open Access Theses

This thesis takes issue with current models of community engagement and service learning that do not take into consideration the constraints imposed upon graduate students or short-term instructors who teach a service learning course or who undertake community-oriented research. Bound up in the long history of academic needs overshadowing or entirely neglecting community concerns, campus-community partnerships involving graduate students are much more likely to maintain, to quote Linda Flower, a “naïve complicity in the social structures that put power and prestige on the university side of the ledger while putting passive need and incapacity on the debit, community side” (105). …