A campus-wide student-formed consulting community provides an interdisciplinary co-curriculum service-learning opportunity that connects students from various disciplines across a Midwest university to work on sustainability challenges in the local community. Projects include using waste glass in construction materials, cutting carbon footprint by…

Community-based service learning (CBSL) is a powerful pedagogical approach for teacher education and other service-oriented training programs that integrates meaningful community engagement with academic learning. Benefits of CBSL include enhancing teacher candidates' ability to connect theory with practice, cultivating reflective practitioners,…

Over the past decade, Illinois has emerged as a national exemplar of how state policy can drive systemic change in civics education. The Illinois Civic Mission Coalition, a pan-ideological alliance of educators, policymakers, and civic organizations, has shaped the state's civics education vision. The coalition built a scalable infrastructure of…

Interfaith America's 2023 Landscape Analysis explores the purpose, range of desired outcomes, promising models, challenges, and opportunities of bridgebuilding efforts across U.S. higher education. This article articulates the importance of bridgebuilding for the sector and summarizes key findings from the Landscape Analysis. It highlights…

The Policy Practice in Field Initiative was created to seed innovation and develop new models for an integrated approach to enhance the policy skill set of all social work students regardless of specialization. Funds provided to the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) are regranted to schools and programs of social work for field placement and…

We describe several service-learning initiatives implemented by the mathematics and education departments. College students with majors and minors in math and math education have helped to design and implement math events for elementary and middle school students. Formal and informal reflections on these service-related experiences have…

Over the last four years, the Afterschool Alliance and MetLife Foundation have worked together to identify exemplary, and often lesser-known afterschool programs across the nation. For the past two years, efforts have focused on finding innovative afterschool programs serving middle school students. This focus was developed to address the need for…

Career and technical education (CTE) is starting to turn green. Due to a host of reports, research, workforce initiatives, and scholarly speaking engagements, it is evident that higher education and workforce consultants recognize the need for today's students to gain exposure to sustainability or green career pathways. But for secondary and…

This year, across the nation, state legislators and powerful corporate interests with financial ties to universities and influence over them have launched an unprecedented number of attacks on law school clinics. As universities increasingly seek to educate students through service-learning courses, law school clinics may be the bellwether for…

Authentic service learning in city schools helps students work toward important change in their own communities. Students are able to face and address issues that have an immediate impact on their neighbors and themselves. Two examples from Chicago neighborhoods illustrate how powerful the concept is: Students worked with a community organization…

Children with special health care needs face many barriers to oral care and are at high risk for oral disease. School nurses are in a unique position to promote oral wellness in this vulnerable population. Collaboration between school nurses and dental hygiene faculty resulted in the formation of a partnership between a university-based dental…

A great deal of attention has been given to the need for more minority teachers. This issue deserves serious consideration as the K-12 minority student population increases and the number of minority teachers does not. Various states have implemented programs designed to recruit minority teachers, including teacher shadowing initiatives in South…

Universities are uniquely positioned to lead society toward sustainability and their collaborations with community organizations are essential to this transition. The Biodiesel Program at Loyola University at Chicago Center for Urban Environmental Research and Policy provides a case study of course-based service learning projects facilitating…

Many educators consider the final year of high school to be a "vast wasteland," an epidemic of disengagement. Although high schools across the country have struggled with senioritis, their approaches to the problem have largely fallen into one of three types of responses: vertical acceleration; remediation; and structured containment.…

One faces several challenges when designing an education abroad program. These include engaging non-traditional majors in study abroad experiences; facilitating learning activities that directly align with the learning goals of the courses; assessing specific learning outcomes; and finding ways to close the circle after the study abroad programs…