Civic Engagement

Numerous studies have chronicled students lack of trust in large social institutions, declining interest in politics, and decreasing civic skills. This book is a comprehensive guide to developing high-quality civic engagement experiences for college students. The book defines civic engagement and explains why it is central to a college education. It describes the state of the art of education for civic engagement and provides guidelines for designing programs that encourage desired learning outcomes. In addition, the book guides leaders in organizing their institutions to create a campus-wide culture of civic engagement.

The essays in this volume address the idea of leadership education through civic engagement. They delineate a new approach to leadership education reflecting important cultural trends driven by technology, globalization, and demographic shifts; look at some of the best leadership education programs nationwide; and offer “next steps” on how to transform higher education more broadly.

Service learning has become an institutionalized practice in higher education. Students are sent out to disadvantaged communities to paint, tutor, feed, and help organize communities. But while the students gain from their experiences, the contributors to The Unheard Voices ask, "Does the Community?" This volume explores the impact of service learning on a community, and considers the unequal relationship between the community and the academy. Using eye-opening interviews with community-organization staff members, The Unheard Voices challenges assumptions about the effectiveness of service learning. Chapters offer strong critiques of service learning practices from the lack of adequate training and supervision, to problems of communication and issues of diversity. The book's conclusion offers ways to improve service learning so that future endeavors can be better at meeting the needs of the communities and the students who work in them.

What are, and what should be, the roles of modern universities and colleges in supporting their host societies? Where have these obligations arisen from, and how can they best be responded to? What are the conditions of membership of a modern university or college? There is an international revival of interest in issues about the purposes of universities and colleges and their role in a wider society. Much of this is structured around perceptions of the role of higher education in modern knowledge economies. Meanwhile, there has been a dearth of scholarly attention to the practice (as opposed to the rhetoric) of civic engagement by universities and colleges in various cultural contexts. This book fills that gap. An historical survey of the founding intentions of universities and colleges in different eras and various countries is followed by case studies of successful recent projects carried out at three leading institutions - the Universities of Brighton, Pennsylvania and Queensland. A practical benchmarking questionnaire that was developed with the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) is also included in order to assist institutions in assessing their own progress.The book contends that genuine engagement, with the community and with civil society, can be uncertain and risky, but that it plays an essential role in managing today's higher education institutions. Managing Civic and Community Engagement provides key reading for people interested in equity and diversity in higher education, including those studying aspects of higher education management, as well as professionals and policy makers in the field.

Teaching Civic Engagement: From Student to Active Citizen provides an exploration of key theoretical discussions, innovative ideas, and best practices in educating citizens in the 21st century. Edited by Alison Rios Millett McCartney, Elizabeth A. Bennion, and Dick Simpson, this book addresses theoretical debates over the place of civic engagement education in political science. It offers pedagogical examples in several subfields, including evidence of their effectiveness and models of appropriate assessment.

International Perspectives on Civic Engagement. The Engaged University is a fully empirical account of a genuinely global movement of higher education institutions to increase university civic engagement.

"Higher Education and Democracy" is a collection of essays written over the last ten years on how civic engagement in higher education works to achieve what authors John Saltmarsh and Edward Zlotkowsi consider to be the academic and civic purposes of higher education. These include creating new modes of teaching and learning, fostering participation in American democracy, the development and respect for community and civic institutions, and encouraging the constant renewal all of these dimensions of American life. Organized chronologically, the twenty-two essays in this volume provide signposts along the road in the journey of fulfilling the civic purposes of higher education. For the authors, service-learning is positioned as centrally important to the primary academic systems and structures of higher education, departments, disciplines, curriculum, and programs that are central to the faculty domain. Progressing from the general and the contextual to specific practices embodied in ever larger academic units, the authors conclude with observations on the future of the civic engagement movement.

A volume in Advances in Service-Learning Research Series Editor Shelley H. Billig, RMC Research Corporation, Denver This eighth volume in the Advances in Service-Learning Research series includes eight essays selected from manuscripts submitted by participants in the seventh annual conference of the International Association of Research in Service-Learning and Community Engagement, held in Tampa, Florida, in October, 2007. The volume builds upon the theme of that conference: "Sustainability and Scholarship: Research and the K-20 Continuum," bringing together the work of scholars from K-12 and higher education to argue for the connection between rigorous and purposeful research and sustainable service-learning and civic engagement. Articles range from models for program-level assessment to examples of significant field-based research projects to approaches to advance discipline-based sustainable impacts to connections between civic education and sustainable communities. Voices of community partners, students, faculty members, administrators, and discipline- based organizations are part of the conversation, and each of the essays raises important challenges for future research that can help to shape, document, and sustain the important impacts of work in this field.

This book will help post-secondary educators to discover the joys and challenges of implementing theoretically grounded civic engagement projects on their campuses. The essays on civic engagement and public scholarship are written by an interdisciplinary group of community college faculty who have designed and implemented civic engagement projects in their classrooms. The projects they describe stand at the intersection of research, theory and pedagogy. They challenge dominant constructions of civic engagement as students bring their community, culture and history into the classroom. The authors consider the particular complexities and constraints of doing civically engaged teaching and scholarship at the community college level and situate their projects within current theoretical debates about civic engagement, public scholarship, and public higher education.

This book outlines how undergraduate students engage with civic and community projects and how this can be encouraged by their universities. It also explores how universities can build on this involvement and develop undergraduates' civic and democratic capacities, including programmatic strategies and conceptual frameworks for understanding the students' activities. As higher education across the globe experiences increasing student numbers it is important to understand how students engage with civic and community service. 

More than a century ago, John Dewey challenged the education community to look to civic involvement for the betterment of both community and campus. Today, the challenge remains. In his landmark book, editor Thomas Ehrlich has collected essays from national leaders who have focused on civic responsibility and higher education. Imparting both philosophy and working example, Ehrlich provides the inspiration for innovative new programs in this essential area of learning.

This book offers a case study of a medium-sized, private metropolitan university's adoption, implementation, and assessment of a civic engagement mission. Situated in a city where the loss of a once robust industrial base has resulted in urban blight faced by many communities throughout the United States, this university is attempting to partner with community members to address the social and economic impact of these changes and to bolster the resiliency of residents and local organisations. While prompted by a genuine desire on the part of many in the university community to serve the community, this civic engagement initiative is also shaped by the belief that such service will enrich the educational experience of the university's students and provide additional professional development opportunities for faculty.

This book provides a cutting edge analysis of the rise and expansion of the community engagement movement in general and the service-learning field in specific.

This book provides everything administrators and teachers need to build service-learning programs that prepare students as engaged citizens committed to equity and justice. Cipolle describes practical strategies for classroom teachers along with the theoretical framework so readers can deftly move beyond the book to a meaningful program for their schools.

In The Spirit of Service , the contributing authors explore the intersection of faith, service, and social justice in higher education. Reflecting upon the role that higher education plays in preparing future generations of citizens and leaders, this book asserts that spirituality and values necessarily involve one's person'and that educators must begin to connect student learning with the human experiences of faith, service, and commitment to social justice. Each of the authors describes a teaching experience in order to critically reflect upon the divide in academic culture between responsible, rigorous, intellectual competence and personal values. The authors' lessons in success and failure are meant to provide guidance for all institutions that are committed to preparing young students to lead lives of leadership and civic engagement. Divided into three parts, this book: Explores the meaning, practice, and implications of religions or spiritually motivated service Offers specific examples from faculty for integrating faith or spiritual perspectives with service, including what has worked and what dilemmas remain Focuses on specific dilemmas and implications for engaging in service for social justice Containing a wealth of practical suggestions and strategies, The Spirit of Service represents a conversation in progress; it is an attempt to understand how to help undergraduates integrate service and spirituality for the purpose of social justice.

This work is a resource for programme evaluators and researchers who want to inform the practice of service learning. It advocates the use of multiple-item scales, presents the rationale for their use, and explains how readers can evaluate them for reliability and validity.

Community-Based Research and Higher Education is the long-awaited guide to how to incorporate a powerful and promising new form of scholarship into academic settings. The book presents a model of community-based research (CBR) that engages community members with students and faculty in the course of their academic work. Unlike traditional academic research, CBR is collaborative and change-oriented and finds its research questions in the needs of communities. This dynamic research model combines classroom learning with social action in ways that can ultimately empower community groups to address their own agendas and shape their own futures. At the same time it emphasizes the development of knowledge and skills that truly prepare students for active civic engagement.

It is clear that service-learning has the potential to yield tremendous benefits to students, communities, and institutions of higher education. Increased student learning has been well documented. As communities gain new energy to meet their needs and greater capacity to capitalize on their assets, service-learning enables higher education to fulfill its civic responsibility. When service-learning lives up to its potential to lead colleges and universities to transform themselves into fully engaged citizens of their communities and the world, its ability to bring about positive social change is limitless. To be successful, service-learning must be grounded in a wide range of solid, reciprocal, democratic partnerships. Building Partnerships for Service-Learning assembles leading voices in the field to bring their expertise to bear on this crucial topic. Faculty, administrators, student leaders, and community and corporate leaders will find this volume filled with vital information, exemplary models, and practical tools needed to make service-learning succeed. Comprehensive in scope, Building Partnerships for Service-Learning includes: Fundamentals and frameworks for developing sustainable partnerships Assessment as a partnership-building process The complex dynamics of collaboration between academic affairs and student affairs Partnering with students to enhance service-learning How to create campuswide infrastructure for service-learning Profiles and case studies of outstanding partnerships with neighborhoods, community agencies, and K-12 schools Partnerships for collaborative action research Exploring the challenges and benefits of corporate and international partnerships The dynamic relationship of service-learning and the civic renewal of higher education Building Partnerships for Service-Learning is the essential guide to taking service-learning and partnerships to the next level.

Today's institutions of higher education find themselves in a struggle to rediscover their roots in civic engagement, and embed such values in their students through intentional leadership, service-learning, and community connectedness. Public Work and the Academy provides academic leaders with a resource to increase their fluency with and ability to lead service-learning and civic engagement efforts on their campuses, with their peers, and throughout their institutions in order to shape the future of higher education. It is written specifically for chief academic officers, provosts, deans, and division and department chairs, who have significant responsibility for their campus's academic programs. This book provides guidance on Using civic engagement to enhance the curriculum Examining the critical leadership role of the academic administrator Institutionalizing service-learning and civic engagement Using service-learning as means of advancing educational reform Faculty roles and rewards Employing service-learning to add depth to the education process It illustrates a wide variety of topics through 11 case studies drawn from two- and four-year institutions across the United States, allowing readers to focus on the specific issues and types of institutions most applicable to them. In addition, this book includes a resources section that lists relevant publications, web sites, consultants, and networks. Public Work and the Academy encourages both reflection and action on the part of academic leaders and their faculty and asks them to make service-learning and civic engagement part of their unique campus context.

Although service-learning programs can have diverse theoretical roots, faculty who engage their students in service-learning may not be be cognizant of alternatives to the one they adopt. This book presents not only a historical perspective, but it also debates the theories and issues surrounding the conflicts inherent in those theories. One theory, based on a philanthropic model, engages students in a commitment to serve others from a sense of gratitude for their own good fortunes or from a desire to give back to communities from which they have benefited. Typically, service-learning programs based on the philanthropic or communitarian models deal with the overt needs of community members. In contrast, the civic model requires deeper analysis of the various political and social issues that may be the cause of social conditions that require the help of the more fortunate. Opponents of the civic theory fear that proponents see the classroom as a forum for advancing particular political agendas, conceivably indoctrinating students to a particular view of social injustices. This book presents the theories and critiques their merits and liabilities, providing insight into the widely divergent curricular applications. It also examines the reasons professors should consider service-learning components in their classes and provides resources for further investigation of both theory and practice.