Band 13, Heft 1 - Volume 13, Issue 1 (2012) The Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education

Featured articles in this issue focus on the key role of community service-learning in the civic identity development of American college students and highlight majors, minors, and certificate programs as important and increasingly popular structures for engaging college students in community service-learning.

This introduction to the special issue on “The Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education” first describes the key role of community service-learning in the civic identity development of American college students and then proposes majors, minors, and certificate programs as important and increasingly popular structures for engaging college students in community service-learning. This introduction also provides an overview of the six feature articles included in the special issue that focus on specific best practices and obstacles in the implementation of such majors, minors, and certificate programs.

This article articulates a model for the “engaged campus” through academic programs focused on community engagement, broadly construed. Such academic programs—usually coalesced in certificate programs, minors, and majors—provide a complementary vision for the deep institutionalization of civic and community engagement in the academy that can revitalize an “apprenticeship of liberty” for students, faculty, and academic staff.

This essay is an excerpt from a keynote speech delivered by Benjamin Barber at the 2nd Annual Summer Research Institute on the “Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education.” The speech focuses on six conditions that will impact community service-learning and voluntarism efforts in the years ahead: the ideology of neo-liberalism and privatization, multiculturalism, political polarization, widening inequality, and global interdependence.

The Values, Ethics, and Social Action (VESA) minor at Allegheny College has been an academic program since 1999. This article describes the unique strengths of VESA and some of the institutional and conceptual challenges faced by the program and presents details of practices employed to meet these challenges in order to sustain this community engagement program. One of the most promising practices is to align the program firmly with the recent strategic plan for the college. The VESA program embodies the mission of the college, demonstrating how civic participation is a valuable foundation for liberal arts institutions.

Since the early 1990s, Portland State University has furthered its commitment to civic engagement education by adopting an integrated approach to its general education curriculum. As an outgrowth to this initiative, the minor in Civic Leadership was developed in 2004–05. This interdisciplinary minor was designed with the intent to further integrate and sustain institutional engagement with the Portland Metropolitan community and beyond. This article discusses the history, structure, and roles of academic and community partners associated with the Civic Leadership minor, and elaborates the philosophical foundation of the interdisciplinary curriculum that aims to build student capacity for the common good.

The Community Based Learning (CBL) Certificate and the Civic Honors Program provide unique opportunities for students to receive college credit for their civic participation. The authors describe these programs and the historical and administrative changes at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, which created an environment for their development and support. This support includes recruiting administrators and faculty who support CBL, developing an infrastructure to recruit students into these programs, building relationships with community partners, and providing training and professional development to faculty. Collaborations with the volunteer and career centers and clarification of roles have contributed to cooperation across university programs. Descriptions of promising practices in developing community partners and connecting with community resources are offered. Future challenges to expand CBL and credit faculty for their engagement efforts are discussed.

Despite solid foundations for service-learning at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB), the economic context of higher education in California, and in particular the CSU system, has created significant challenges for service-learning practitioners. This article provides an overview of the institutional foundations in place at CSUMB that have allowed for an extensive service-learning program, discusses mentoring as a pedagogical and ethical necessity that is threatened by the system’s financial crisis, and concludes with thoughts about the value of a cohort model to alleviate mentoring challenges and the role of service-learning practitioners institutionally in the current economic and political context of higher education.

This study explores the role that identity and the identity development process play in a short-term, international service-learning experience. Employing narrative inquiry, two of the co-authors, student participants in a 2-week service-learning program in Honduras, describe and interpret their servicelearning experience in the context of life experiences that preceded the service-learning program. An emphasis is placed upon the ways that the students’ multiple identities and personal histories interact with the people, places, and ideas they encountered abroad. Findings are interpreted against the research and scholarship on intercultural competency and support the notion that student participants in international service-learning are exposed to experiences that lead to valuable extrospection and introspection and that foster complex understandings of self and ideology.

Educators often treat community service and diversity as distinct areas. The author argues that educators should seize upon the intersection of these two areas in order to strengthen students’ capacity to engage with each.

Choosing a career is one of the most important decisions college students face. However, little academic work exists to help students evaluate the ethical implications of different career paths. This interview with Will Crouch, an Oxford University student, explores his controversial work on the ethics of career choice. He argues that to pursue a career as a professional philanthropist is ethically preferable to work in the charitable sector.

This article examines the current growth statistics of international graduate student populations in the United States in order to present trends in international student mobility. Although many scholars suggest the United States is facing a decrease in future international student demand, recent studies seem to challenge this theory. This article identifies factors in international student decisions influencing these trends and concludes with considerations for how student affairs and services practitioners can better serve international students in light of these considerations, arguing that leaders should take a greater role and more proactive approach to serving this subpopulation to aid in their short transition.

The author argues that the excessive desire for a teacher’s or mentor’s feedback is not exclusive to the current “iGeneration.” She suggests that one of the responsibilities of educators is teaching students to be less hesitant to make their own judgments. She then calls upon current teachers and administrators to model reasonable self-reliance to their students, especially given the current pedagogical weight of models, examples, and precedents and the scholastic impulse to describe even creative impulses as “right” or “wrong.”