Community Engagement Findings Across the Disciplines: Applying Course Content to Community Needs

This book is a reference for administrators and educators at institutions of higher learning who are thinking about taking serious steps to link their educational mission to helping their surrounding communities. Various research findings across the disciplines in higher education about integrating community engagement in traditional coursework are presented. This book provides a multi-disciplinary and multi-method approach to both incorporating and studying the effects of community engagement (service learning) in the curriculum. Multiple departments, from Kinesiology to Sociology, as well as various types of classes (undergraduate, graduate, online, face-to-face, traditional, international) are represented here. Both qualitative and quantitative work is included. Methods involved include interviews, case studies, reflections, and surveys. One chapter also uses longitudinal data collection to address the overall effect of engaging in community engagement during the undergraduate college experience. If you are not sure how to study the effects of community engagement on students at your university, this book is for you.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter 1: Community Engagement Effects Across the Disciplines: Impacts on Political Efficacy, Engagement, and Apathy Heather K. Evans Chapter 2: Transformative Education for Students At-Risk: Intervention through Service-Learning Barbara Greybeck, Judy Nelson, and Richard C. Henriksen, Jr. Chapter 3: A Qualitative Study of Perceptions and Experiences of Online Victim Services Academic Community Engagement: Graduate Student Reflections Mary M. Breaux and James G. Booker Chapter 4: The Impact of a Service Learning Project Involving Pre-Service Teachers Working with Incarcerated Youth John Kelly, Colin Dalton, and Diane M. Miller Chapter 5: Empowering Teachers for Linguistic Diversity: In Search of Professional Dispositions Mary A. Petrón and Baburhan Uzum Chapter 6: Using a Consumer Satisfaction Survey with Clients Receiving Child-Centered Play Therapy Denise Peterson, Yvonne Garza-Chaves, and Rick Bruhn Chapter 7: International Service Learning: Experiences of Mainstream Preservice Teachers Teaching EFL in Naples, Italy Burcu Ates and Yurimi Grigsby Chapter 8: Learning Beyond the Classroom: Online Service-learning Jin Young Choi Chapter 9: Academic Community Engagement Research in Kinesiology: Undergraduate Students’ Attitudes toward Individuals with Disabilities Jihyun Lee,José A. Santiago, Seung Ho Chang, and Justin A. Haegele About the Editor About the Contributors Index

About the Author :
Heather K. Evans is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston State University. Her research interests include political engagement, elections, public opinion, and political communication.

Review :
This highly-useful volume presents information from studies of the effectiveness of service-learning on undergraduate and graduate college students enrolled in both seated and on-line courses. Contributors used a variety of qualitative and quantitative research designs to investigate the impact of service-learning on a range of outcomes, including mastery of course content, inter-cultural competence, awareness of social injustices, professional identity formation, individual empowerment, and civic and political engagement attitudes. As several authors note, civic engaged learning is not a panacea for political apathy and civic disengagement. However, the authors demonstrate that well-designed and effectively-taught service learning classes can promote the development of dispositions, skills, and motivations that likely will increase students’ future political engagement and civic participation. With Community Engagement Findings Across the Disciplines, editor Heather Evans and an outstanding collection of authors offer diverse and pertinent examples to guide the development of research and scholarship about service learning’s impact on students, from high school through grad school. This book fills numerous gaps in the field, including examples of service learning in underrepresented fields, with special populations, with online students, and utilizing a range of qualitative and quantitative assessment approaches. This book will be a resource for both faculty service learning practitioners who wish to assess the impact of their pedagogy on students, as well as administrators seeking to institutionalize service-learning on their campuses. This book illustrates the importance of the next generation of scholarship on community service as an important bridge between student learning and campus-community partnership. Research-based approaches like those presented here, that employ service to broaden and deepen student learning outcomes while also enhancing the interdependence between colleges and their community, are on the cutting edge of higher education innovation. By explicitly addressing the civic role of students in their community and the centrality of civic education to all disciplines, the authors provide important insights both for specific disciplines covered, but also encourages creative adaptation across curricular boundaries. The future of citizenship is best understood as taking place everywhere--not just in one or two academic disciplines--and this book helps us to understand how and why we need such approaches in every academic program, major, or training.