This article contributes to a long-standing conversation about the implementation of service-learning by proposing an updated revision for the 21st century: critically engaged civic learning (CECL). The term service-learning is problematic as it invokes inequitable power dynamics that inherently privilege one group over another, with more…

From a university perspective, service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) has been identified as a high-impact practice that offers advantages over traditional lecture and assignments, yet students do not always embrace SLCE courses. While most studies of undergraduate students' perceptions of SLCE focus on particular experiences or on SLCE…

Governments and private funders are placing increasing demands on postsecondary institutions and community-based organizations to account for the impacts from their collaborative research and learning efforts. In this article, we explore how best to account for impacts arising from the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement project…

The purpose of this article is to share tensions experienced by the Center for Community-Based Learning and Engagement (CU Engage) at the University of Colorado Boulder during its attempts to facilitate social justice-oriented community change. These tensions speak to larger questions about the goals of community-campus engagement (CCE) programs,…

We evaluate how the U-Links Centre for Community-Based Research (U-Links), a nonprofit organization that brokers research for community-based organizations with postsecondary institutions in Haliburton County, Ontario, has impacted this rural region of Ontario. Our approach uses contribution analysis and realist evaluation as layered tactics…

This article presents an experiential model for community-engaged research that understands communities as living meshworks of embodied human beings, material circumstances, and affective environments. We first trace how community organizations and academics must increasingly respond to a push for hard data. Using an analysis of a national…

This article examines the intersection of critical pedagogy, service-learning, and interactive performance epistemology to describe the impact performance events and processes have on student learning. Specifically, this research extends Jill Dolan's concept of utopian performance and illustrates the potential of performance not only to generate a…

At the center of the vision for the future of the service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) movement is an inextricable link between dialogue and collaborative action. In campus-community initiative "Tools for Social Change," the authors use intergroup dialogue (IGD) to help students, faculty, staff, and city residents co-create…

An important future direction for service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) is to collaborate with the sustainability in higher education (SHE) movement. SHE is a diverse, transdisciplinary area of inquiry and practice that seeks to help lead efforts to create a "thriving, equitable and ecologically healthy world." When SLCE…

"Service-learning" is a multilayered term with a complex historical evolution. In the last two decades, service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) have flourished in higher education as staff, faculty, and students have realized it can be a high-impact teaching and learning practice to promote student learning and development.…

Graduate school is an intense period of identity formation, where scholars-in-training form the attitudes and values that shape their research. The extent to which students assimilate public engagement into their academic formation may depend on the system of beliefs that underpin their particular field of study. In some fields, public engagement…

Drawing on the authors' experiences initiating and directing a community partnership program, this article illustrates how graduate students who lead engagement programs can be caught between forces that pull them toward tactical partnerships unaffiliated with the university and strategic partnerships incorporated into university departments.…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds research proposals on the basis of two review criteria: intellectual merit (IM) and broader impacts (BI). The intellectual merit criterion is well-established and understood, but the broader impacts criterion, which is focused on the ways in which research can benefit society and/or meet NSF-identified…

Increasingly, graduate and professional students arrive at institutions of higher education with personal and professional commitments to make the world a better place through community engagement; however, departments often do not incorporate outreach and engagement into graduate curricula (Austin & McDaniels, 2006; O'Meara & Jaeger,…

This article presents the Psycho-Ecological Systems Model (PESM)--an integrative conceptual model rooted in General Systems Theory (GST). PESM was developed to inform and guide the development, implementation, and evaluation of transdisciplinary (and multilevel) community-engaged scholarship (e.g., a participatory community action research project…