Institutionalizing engagement, especially at research universities, calls for thinking beyond service-learning and the teaching mission. We conducted interviews with 20 faculty members at 15 research institutions in the United States who integrate teaching, research, and service in a community-focused scholarly agenda to support the civic missions…

As service-learning is adopted by growing numbers of higher education institutions, there is increasing interest in understanding the factors necessary to sustain service-learning for the long-term. Institutions that were early adopters of service-learning may offer important insights into what factors influence long-term sustainability. With this…

This article tells a story of practice, a story of theory, and how each informs and transforms the other through a two-way flow of people and knowledge from a city to a campus and back again. By reflecting with fellow participants on the events and outcomes of a sustained city campus partnership, the author introduces a theory of engagement from…

As a defining aspect of service-learning and civic engagement, relationships can exist among faculty members, students, community organizations, community members, and administrators on campus. This research developed procedures to measure several aspects of these relationships. Investigators collected information from 20 experienced…

This paper explores the methodological implications of applying an ethnographic sensibility to evaluation in service-learning. It describes the evolution of such a method over the past 10 years within the Citizen Scholars Program at the University of Massachusetts, and outlines what we have learned from employing this method, as well as the…

Retention of college students is a priority of all colleges and universities. This research investigated whether or not student enrollment in a service-learning course in the fall semester of college was related to (a) intentions to stay on that campus, based on self-reports at the end of the semester, and (b) re-enrollment the following fall on…

Low-income students who are the first in their family to attend college continue to drop out at alarmingly high rates. Previous studies have shown that service-learning can have a positive influence on student retention. However, little research exists to explore how low-income, first-generation (LIFG) college students experience service-learning,…

Stigmas toward those who have mental illnesses are wide-spread and detrimental to the health and well-being of those suffering from these debilitating conditions, and to society as a whole. Stigma-reducing programs are plentiful but many are only marginally effective. In this paper we describe and evaluate a course in Psychopathology that included…

The purpose of this study was to develop a Web-based Faculty Service-Learning Beliefs Inventory (wFSLBI) assessing faculty members' views of the benefits and barriers involved with service-learning (SL) pedagogy. Analyses of the responses of 362 faculty members showed that Inventory items loaded consistently on four sub-scales: Perceived benefits…

Few studies have directly examined how recipients of service view the service. This qualitative study presents the results of interviews and observations of nine community members who participated in a service-learning, language exchange program, Intercambio, in which Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants were paired with English-speaking university…

Many researchers have explored faculty engagement in service-learning. However, scholarship rarely considers ways in which the discourses used by faculty to describe service-learning--the stories they tell about what it is they are doing and why--construct images of subject positions, problems, and solutions that inform our beliefs about…

This paper reports on the first two semesters of an ongoing longitudinal study exploring how 22 pre-service teachers' involvement with change-oriented service-learning impacted their thinking about citizenship and civic education. Drawing upon Westheimer and Kahne's (2004) notions of citizenship, we analyzed three data sources: pre- and…

Higher education continues to wrestle with the challenge of engaging and retaining traditionally marginalized populations, particularly first-generation college students of color from low-income backgrounds. The typical North American campus, as a privileged space, has failed to successfully address or dismantle systems of power and difference…

I explore certain complexities of partnering university students with members of the Mexican and Honduran immigrant community through service-learning. I reveal how my "good intentions" inadvertently created social hierarchy and deficit notions of the community, establishing the students as "haves" and community members as "have-nots." Critically…

Students who had enrolled in an innovative university-based service-learning class were asked to reflect on their expectations prior to mentoring youth attending high-poverty high schools, and whether they believed they had met these expectations post-mentoring. Findings indicated that students primarily were motivated by learning about the…