Restorative practices can serve as a proactive approach to address behavior in a way that not only repairs harm and restores relationships, but also creates stronger communities. Using a circle-style conversation to elicit our perceptions of the potential of these practices to support and advance liberatory principles, we sought to uncover the…

Responding to an ongoing disconnect between higher education institutions (HEIs) and contemporary challenges communities face worldwide, universities can become a driving force to strengthen communities' capacity toward innovative solutions to the challenges they face. This article introduces an analytical framework that provides a roadmap to…

Drawing inspiration from Dr. Ada Long's (1995) presidential address, the authors describe an experience that facilitates neighborhood-building among honors educators and students across the nation as well as a neighborhood approach to understanding social problems. Focusing on food justice in the first year of the Justice Challenge, honors…

Philosophy confronts two existential crises: the threats to its existence from scientists like Stephen Hawking who claim that philosophy is dead; and the threat to life itself from catastrophic climate change. The essay's first theoretical part critiques Nietzsche's claim that philosophy's primary function is to guarantee the future of life. The…

Started in 1998, the Whisenton Public Scholars program is a collaboration of Joffre T. Whisenton and Associates, the Kettering Foundation, and participating higher education professionals. The program works primarily with faculty and administrators from schools with a mission to serve minority communities (such as historically black colleges and…

Student engagement is highly visible in higher education research about learning and teaching, but lacks a single meaning. It can be conceived narrowly as a set of student and institutional behaviours in a classroom or holistically and critically as a social-cultural ecosystem in which engagement is the glue linking classroom, personal background…

In this reflective essay, we describe Widener University's 10-year transformation from a disengaged institution to an institution that has a metropolitan-focused mission vested in civic leadership, community engagement, and service-learning. We describe our journey to embed an expansive civic frame that includes concrete practices of pedagogy,…

"Appreciative Inquiry" (AI) is a structured approach to visioning focused on reflection, introspection, and collaboration. Rooted in organizational behavior theory, AI was introduced in the early 1980s as a life-centric approach to human systems (Watkins and Mohr 2001). Since then, AI has been used widely within the business community;…

Written in the first person and drawing from an autoethnographic methodological framework, this essay shares aspirations, experiences, and reflections on a faculty member's professional work in a large U.S. public research-oriented university, focusing specifically on her attempts to reconcile her service-oriented civic engagement work with her…

The mission of The Research University Civic Engagement Network (TRUCEN) is to advance civic engagement and engaged scholarship among research universities. TRUCEN has adopted the following goals for advancing civic engagement and engaged scholarship as part of the core mission of all research universities: (1) Encourage community-engaged…

The inaugural National Leadership Education Research Agenda was created to establish a foundation for scholarship that will guide the field of Leadership Education and develop it as a discipline. Its timely research priorities present a framework for scholarship and resulting applied and basic implications. This paper provides perspective about…

This article describes the challenges in organizing professional learning communities (PLCs) in special education, identifies the teacher and student benefits of using a PLC approach to professional development, and discusses the promise and pitfalls of organizing web-based PLCs to engage distributed stakeholders in the practice of special…

This essay builds on and extends earlier research and writing that the authors have done, trying to understand how a commitment to local engagement, which is the term commonly used at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), becomes embedded in the core work of the institution. Their inquiries have been guided by social psychologist Kurt Lewin's…

In January 2003, the Northwest Area Foundation (NWAF) contacted land grant universities in Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington to involve them in a program initiative to address rural poverty. After a strategic planning process, NWAF had shifted from traditional grant making to operating programs that…

This article examines relational ways of knowing--a concept both broad and deep--as a strategy we have infused throughout our design of one first-year Living and Learning Community (LLC). As outlined here, the authors teach faith as relationship; justice as being in just relationship with others, research as the concept of putting ideas in…