As higher education struggles to prove its ongoing relevance within the broader society in the face of increasing costs and little visible accountability, community engagement has emerged as one strategy to demonstrate that relevance. Such engagement is difficult and often messy, however, and structural differences among universities and the…

Service learning is an educational practice that bridges the gap between academics and the real world. Knowledge generated within educational institutions is offered to a community with the goal of strengthening student learning and increasing students' civic engagement. There is a pedagogical congruence between service learning, civic engagement,…

Digital repositories are new tools for documenting the accumulated scholarly work produced at academic institutions and disseminating that material broadly via the internet. Digital repositories support all file types and can be adapted to meet the custom design specifications of individual institutions. A section for community engagement…

Based on quantitative survey data and qualitative data from journal entries by students in a seminar focused on community-based research, undergraduate student perceptions of community partners are explored in the context of debates about the politics of knowledge. Student perceptions that frame community partners as the recipients of academic…

The service learning movement has gained new energy with the election of President Obama, who has made increasing service a central plank of his higher-education agenda. But across the board, colleges and universities struggle with service learning's twin goals of providing meaningful help to the community and academic rigor to students. The…

Assessments of U.S. students typically reveal stronger performance in science than mathematics yet their science performance remains uninspiring at best. Whether the metric considered is an international benchmark from TIMSS or PISA or the nation's NAEP report card, the mediocre portrait of U.S. science achievement has remained virtually unchanged…

The cultural competence of 13 parenting education programs for Latino families with young children was examined in this study. Based on our analyses, we make several recommendations for improving the cultural competence and effectiveness of parenting education programs for Latino families with young children. Specifically, we recommend the…

This case documents a participatory arts-based research project that took place over the 2012-2013 school year at a US Midwestern, urban middle school. In this account, we, the adult research partners, describe the participatory research process from our partnership formation to project evaluation. The primary methodology employed was Videovoice,…

Over the past several decades, interdisciplinary programming, community engagement courses, and Writing Across the Curriculum initiatives have proliferated as colleges and universities seek to enhance student learning outcomes, prepare students for a global economy, and seek creative solutions to emergent social and scientific problems…

This semester-long activity requires students to reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses in attempting to take on a personally meaningful health behavior change challenge. This assignment affords them the opportunity to take a deeper look at theory and health concepts learned throughout the semester and to see how it has informed their own…

Based on a qualitative study, this article describes how undergraduate students in a teacher preparation program construct and make meaning of their experiences in supporting an adult with a disability as the member of a "circle of support". Data were collected through detailed reflection journals that were submitted by the students. Findings…

Operation Cleansweep is a free pesticide disposal program that has operated in Florida since 1995. The program is open to commercial facilities, including agricultural production establishments, golf course operators, and pest control companies. Since its inception, the program has had more than 1,700 participants and collected more than 1,000,000…

For six years the Food Security Research Network at Lakehead University, Canada, has been engaged in an interdisciplinary theme-based service-learning initiative focusing on food security. Informed by complexity theory, the contextual fluidity partnership model brings community partners, students, and faculty into a nexus through which new…

Background: For decades, scholars have argued that teaching and learning depend fundamentally on the quality of relationships between teachers and students, yet there is little research about how teachers develop relationships with students or how teacher education prepares teachers to do this work. Arguably, articulating the relational practices…

Digital literacies have fast become indispensable for productive engagement, competency, and citizenship in a rapidly changing world. After-school programs represent an important venue where many young people can develop a mastery of digital literacies, encompassing both the creative and responsible use of a broad range of new media. This paper…