Engaged Scholars : Next-Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education (original) (raw)

Transforming higher education through and for democratic civic engagement: a model for change

Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning, 2015

Twenty years ago, reflecting on the possibilities for service-learning (SL) to help re-envision higher education, Zlotkowski (1995) considered the question, “Does service-learning have a future?” and concluded “nothing less than a transformation of contemporary academic culture,” a transformation of higher education institutions into “engaged campus[es],” was required for an answer in the affirmative to be assured (p. 130). In the intervening two decades, the term “engaged campus” has moved to the very center of national conversations about the future of service-learning and community engagement (SLCE); and much work has been done to describe the characteristics of such a campus. How, though, does such transformation of academic institutions happen? And, what does “institutional transformation” mean in the realm of SLCE? We suggest that for community-campus engagement to flourish in the future, SLCE practitioner-scholars should inquire into these questions and design our work in lig...

Review Essay: Engaging Higher Education; Purpose, Platforms, and Programs for Community Engagement

Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning

As I opened Engaging Higher Education: Purpose, Platforms, and Programs for Community Engagement, I found myself wondering, as I did when I began writing my own Service-Learning Essentials (Jacoby, 2015), whether we really need another book on community engagement. It did not take much in the way of reflection to conclude that, yes, we still do need them in general and Marshall Welch's book in particular. We need them in very different ways from the ways we needed them when I started up community service learning at the University of Maryland (UMD) in 1992. What a difference a quarter century makes! Then, at least in my experience, there was not much in the way of intentionality. We were not terribly clear about the real, ultimate purpose of our work, the platforms we needed to put in place so we could go about it, nor what programs we should be implementing. My story is a case in point. Take yourself back for a moment to the spring of 1992, when the first Clinton-Bill-was running for president. He was talking about a program that would engage college students and young adults in community service in return for an educational stipend. The program, of course, became AmeriCorps. This prompted the then-President of the University of Maryland, William E. Kirwan, to ask the then-Vice President of Student Affairs (my boss, the venerable William L. "Bud" Thomas, Jr.) whether there was any of this "community service" going on at Maryland. Bud responded that he didn't think there was much, and they both concluded that we should be doing "something." As for me, I was the Director of the office of Commuter Affairs, running the campus bus system, helping students find off-campus housing, and organizing multiple programs to engage students in campus life. one morning in May, 1992,

Publicly engaged scholars: Next generation engagement and the future of higher education

Partnerships : A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, 2016

It is a new day in academia, and Publicly Engaged Scholars: Next Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education is here to tell the story. An outgrowth of the New Generation Engagement Project, a working group organized under the New England Resource Center for Higher Education, the book presents a diverse cadre of individuals who are upsetting the proverbial applecart (a.k.a. the academy) and transforming – as Nadinne Cruz notes on the back cover – long-held conceptions of what we call “the work.”