Civic and Community Engagement Commons^™

Calling All Students? Enrollment In Community-Engaged Learning Courses At A Marianist University, Molly Malany Sayre, Castel V. Sweet, Kelly Bohrer

Research and Reflection on Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

‘Community’ is a pervasive concept at the University of Dayton, a Catholic, Marianist institution in Dayton, Ohio. As such, it was unknown how students who enrolled in community engaged learning (CEL) courses were different from their peers in demographic characteristics, previous experiential learning, and views of community engagement. Findings can inform CEL recruitment as well as evaluation of CEL outcomes, especially at institutions with a similar values orientation. This mixed-methods study indicates that among four semesters of students in three selected CEL courses, few differences were found with students in non-CEL control groups. One significant difference found was in racial …

Racializing Service (Learning): A Critical Content Analysis Of Service Learning Syllabi, Tania Mitchell, Carmine Perrotti

Race and Pedagogy Journal: Teaching and Learning for Justice

This study examines service learning pedagogy and its use of racialized terms to frame service. Through a critical content analysis using 270 syllabi from 193 four-year U.S. institutions with the Community Engagement Classification from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, this study explores how the language used in service learning syllabi perpetuates and sustains racialized hierarchies in community engagement experiences.

Staying Engaged While Staying Home?: Service-Learning, Writing, And Covid-19, Christopher Iverson

The SUNY Journal of the Scholarship of Engagement: JoSE

As an approach to writing instruction that has traditionally required students to engage in in-person community projects, service-learning has also traditionally involved risks. For example, students engaging in service-learning without proper support often do not approach community partners with the appropriate respect, and when university stakeholders fail to make clear what their side can offer in a partnership, they can leave community partners in the lurch when the semester ends and students finish their community-engaged coursework. These risks can be mitigated through education and reflection for instructors and students alike. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing social distancing orders, however, left …

Social Justice And The Us Food System: A Critical Course On The Human Dimensions Of Food, Ali Brooks

Food Systems Master's Project Reports

Our world is made up of overlapping political, environmental, and economic spheres that engender social injustice and inequality. Though separate societal issues can seem divergent and unconnected, they are all linked together by one universal necessity: food. Because everyone eats, everyone is connected to—and dependent on—food and the systems that govern it. However, the impacts of our industrial food system are not felt equally among people who hold different positions of power within it.

Today’s industrial food complex operates on the capitalist principle of profit accumulation through exploitation, commodification, and extraction. This set of relations is not defined by scale …

Building Resilient Higher Education Communities: Lessons Learned From Pandemic Teaching, Christian Williams, Carmen Veloria, Debra Harkins

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

The COVID-19 pandemic has left many educators grappling with uncertainties about the future of higher education while feeling exhausted from the stress and pressure to deliver quality education in unprecedented ways. While learning to incorporate new technology into remote, hybrid, and flipped classrooms, educators also find themselves responding to the psychosocial needs of students more than ever before. Yet the lack of established promising practices coupled with limited training and support on how to support students’ emotional well-being creates confusion and self-doubt. This conceptual article explores teacher experiences of teaching during a pandemic, missed opportunities, and highlights the need to …

Reimagining Student Engagement In The Remote Classroom Environment, Christopher B. Denning, Serra Acar, Carol Sharicz, Ellen Foust

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

As higher education institutions struggled with switching to remote teaching due to the COVID19 pandemic, perhaps one of the most important lessons learned is that instructors need additional support to successfully engage students in remote classrooms. Moving courses from the classroom to online delivery radically alters all aspects of teaching and learning, making it easy for interactions to be lost in the transition. It is, therefore, imperative that instructors use elements of effective online teaching and synchronous classroom pedagogy to maintain student engagement. This paper uses the constructivist learning theory as a framework, especially as this theory is applied in …

Critical Foundations For Civic Engagement: Reimagining Civic Learning For A University Honors Program, Alison Handy Twang, Benjamin J. Deangelis, Justine L. Lewis, Elizabeth A. Mellin, Katherine S H Bouman, William L. Ziegler

The SUNY Journal of the Scholarship of Engagement: JoSE

Scholars are calling attention to shortcomings of service-learning, including the development of civic skills and adoption of a social change framework. Informed by this literature, this article uses a mixed-methods case study to detail the development, and initial outcomes, of a civic engagement course intended to lay a critical foundation for future service. This study documents the process of reimagining the class, formerly organized as a service project, and course evaluations and reflections are used to assess outcomes. Initial assessment signals impact in challenging previous assumptions about service, understanding the multifaceted nature of civic engagement, and motivating future responsible engagement.

Transforming Higher Education: Responding To The Coronavirus And Other Looming Crises, Michael Mascolo

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

Higher education is being deeply challenged by the coronavirus. The immediate threats of the coronavirus come at the heels of an existing panoply of problems that already threaten higher education as we know it. These include, of course, the looming enrollment crisis, the high cost of higher education, intractable student debt, the corporatization of education, limited learning on campus, and a general loss of faith in higher education among many sectors of the nation. How are colleges and universities to respond to these challenges? This paper calls upon colleges and universities to consider the need for structural transformation in order …

Service-Learning In The Covid19 Era: Learning In The Midst Of Crisis, Lauren Grenier, Elizabeth Robinson, Debra A. Harkins

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

No abstract provided.

“You’Re Almost In This Place That Doesn’T Exist”: The Impact Of College In Prison As Understood By Formerly Incarcerated Students From The Northeastern United States, Hilary Binda, Jill D. Weinberg, Nora Maetzener, Carolyn Rubin

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

This qualitative study examines the immediate and lasting impact of liberal arts higher education in prison from the perspective of former college-in-prison students from the Northeastern United States. Findings obtained through semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people are presented in the following three areas: self-confidence and agency, interpersonal relationships, and capacity for civic leadership. This study further examines former students’ reflections on the relationship between education and human transformation and begins to benchmark college programming with attention to the potential for such transformation. The authors identify four characteristics critical to a program’s success: academic rigor, the professor's respect for students, …

Jose: Mapping Civic Engagement In The Suny System, John Suarez

The SUNY Journal of the Scholarship of Engagement: JoSE

This editorial notes that SUNY is dedicated to developing civic engagement in general, and applied learning in particular, as ways of nurturing SUNY students’ commitment to civic engagement and their strength as valued employees in an ever-changing competitive work environment. JoSE supports these goals by serving as a platform for faculty to design, test, and refine civic engagement and applied learning pedagogies.

Envisioning Critical Social Entrepreneurship Education: Possibilities, Questions, And Guiding Commitments, Mark Congdon Jr., Liliana Herakova

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

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

Managing ‘Send Her Back’: Civil Discourse And Educating For Democracy As Campus Culture, Jeremy Tuchmayer Phd, Dennis Mccunney Phd, Tara Kermiet

eJournal of Public Affairs

Until recently, Research University had a small culture of marches, protests, and other free speech actions. However, police involved shootings in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, followed by the 2016 summer of violence with the mass shooting in Orlando and more police-involved shootings in New York, Chicago, Minnesota, and Texas, dramatically changed the culture at Research University. During the 2016-17 academic year, Research University student organizations hosted more than 25 campus protests and demonstrations—relatively few compared to other institutions, but a large increase for our campus community. Even with wide-ranging topics -- from Black Lives Matter to Turning Point USA speakers …

Shifting Views: How Experiential Learning Shapes University Students’ Sense Of Civic Engagement And Solidarity On Migration, Karen Larke

Master's Theses

Higher education institutions have put more weight on the use of experiential learning to provide students with opportunities to grow intellectually and develop as engaged citizens. Many recent studies have looked at the quality and educational impacts of a variety of experiential and service learning experiences, yet few have explored what other ideological impacts may result from specific non-curricular experiential learning experiences. This study measured the impact of experiential learning, in the form of week-long migration-themed trips, on undergraduate student’s self-reported levels of solidarity, and related measures of civic engagement and political engagement and activism around migration issues. This study …

Numeracy And Social Justice: A Wide, Deep, And Longstanding Intersection, Kira Hamman, Victor Piercey, Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

We discuss the connection between the numeracy and social justice movements both in historical context and in its modern incarnation. The intersection between numeracy and social justice encompasses a wide variety of disciplines and quantitative topics, but within that variety there are important commonalities. We examine the importance of sound quantitative measures for understanding social issues and the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration in this work. Particular reference is made to the papers in the first part of the Numeracy special collection on social justice, which appear in this issue.

Ignatian Pedagogy For Sustainability To Support Community-Based Projects: Client-Focused Sustainable Energy Solutions, Andrew Baruth

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

Seeing the words of Laudato Si’ as a call to action, we are engaging students in Ignatian Pedagogy for Sustainability through a series of community-based projects with the goal of client-focused sustainable energy solutions and associated dialogue. We outline the development of a purpose-created Energy Technology undergraduate program housed in the College of Arts and Sciences at Creighton University, born from Ignatian Sensibilities, and highlight the role of client engagement to engross students in a client-focused design process to deliver sustainable energy initiatives that become practically feasible with student leadership. For the senior capstone of this program, students engage in …

Introducing Critical Pedagogies, Deepening Service-Learning Practices, Kathryn J. Kozak

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

Book review of Critical Perspectives on Service-Learning in Higher Education by Susan J. Deeley. (2015). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

Multi-Stakeholder Partnership In Teacher Education And Development, Linyuan Guo-Brennan, Carolyn Francis, Elizabeth Townsend, Michael Guo-Brennan

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

While there is a growing interest in offering international teaching practicums to pre-service teachers as an approach to developing teachers' global perspectives on education, however, understanding of the impact of such practice on the host communities is insufficient or absent. This study collected data from multiple sources and, using the Theory of Change framework, examined the impact of pre-service teachers' international practicum on the school and community development in Kenya. Through exploring the context of host communities, the perceptions of Kenyan educators, and the changes that have occurred in Kenyan schools and communities, this study revealed positive development changes in …

Social Justice And The Future Of Higher Education Kinesiology, Brian Culp

Faculty and Research Publications

This article presents a rationale for the infusion of social justice into kinesiology programs for the purpose of reducing inequities in society. Specifically, the current climate for social justice is considered and discussed using examples from an university-inspired service-learning initiative, law, and politics. Of note are the following areas of discussion: (a) differentiation between social diversity and social justice, (b) public pedagogy as a means by which to inspire service action, (c) the creation of climates for speech and application of social justice, (d) modeling and socialization for equity, and (e) the neoliberal threat to inclusiveness. The article concludes with …

P-16 Initiative, Uno Service Learning Academy

Newsletters 2015-2016

This newsletter features: Gaining Perspective: Race & Our Juvenile Justice System; Mapping Histories: Learning Across the Ages; College & Career Readiness Characteristics Found in Service Learning; Service Learning Around the World; Student's Collaboration Leads to Environmental Sustainability; Multiple Collaborative Projects Created Diverse Experiences for Students; Students Learn to Speak Mandarin; Infusing Rigor into Service Learning: A K-12 Teacher & UNO Professor's Perspective; A Lesson in Ethics: What Would a Boys Town Middle School Student Do? and Letter from the Program Coordinator.

Of All Days: Critical Pedagogy Outside The Classroom, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

A student at the author’s college pens a racist column on immigration for the school newspaper. Two departments, including the author’s, send campus-wide emails denouncing the rhetoric. A firestorm erupts, as much over the emails as over the op-ed. Years later, the student visits the author unannounced.

The Arts And Social Capital For The American 21st Century: A College Course, Kathleen Escamilla

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This course is designed to introduce college students to the current significance of the Arts in American civil society. We will begin by examining the concepts of civil society and social capital and their correlations to social well-being. The robustness of voluntary associations is a distinguishing characteristic of American civil society. It is a basis for how we carry out democracy and maintain our common resources. Social capital is the embedded value of our social connections with others. Our mutual trust and reciprocity contributes to the health, wealth, tolerance, and efficient governance of society. We will explore the unique ability …

Education For Self-Reliance, Responsibility And Hope, John Strassburger

Publications

This is the first in a series of occasional papers about the challenges confronting students and what Ursinus is doing to help them enter adult life.