Enhancing Community-Based Learning in Social Work Education Through a Social Marketing Approach

How do universities engage with local communities? How is a pedagogy of engagement introduced into a graduate professional degree? Are there any new approaches for linking campuses with communities? Is social marketing a useful approach when considering community engagement? The chapter aims to answer these questions by proposing a novel approach based on applying social marketing to the scholarship of teaching. Specifically, it draws on an example of a university graduate course in social marketing within a master's program in social work at an Italian university. The experience shows how a social marketing perspective helps social work students address social issues that face local communities through service-learning.

Structures, Practices, and Policies to Support Community-Engaged Scholarship at the Community College

This chapter illuminates the ways in which community colleges can develop and enhance their community-engaged scholarship (CES) to ensure they meet the needs of the local communities they are a part of. Indeed, community-engaged scholarship (CES) has been seen as a vehicle to support local communities by creating partnerships with postsecondary institutions to ensure research is conducted in a way that is mutually beneficial. The authors first explore the large corpus of literature regarding undergraduate research and then present a select number of community colleges that have been successful in incorporating undergraduate research projects. They then present how CES has been defined and how it has been implemented within a higher education context. They then proceed to introduce a CES conceptual model and explain how community colleges can utilize the model to support the institutionalization of CES programs. They conclude with recommendations for future research.

Preparing Critical Educators and Community-Engaged Scholars Through Participatory Action Research

Participatory action research (PAR) is a community-based form of inquiry conducted with individuals affected by an issue or problem being studied rather than about them. Rather than a method of inquiry, PAR is an epistemological stance towards knowledge and knowledge creation that is rooted in critical, emancipatory pedagogy. Because it is an orientation, rather than a discrete method, PAR is difficult to teach. Here the authors explore the experiences of both undergraduate pre-service teachers and doctoral students as they seek to reconcile PAR principles and practice with their personal and professional backgrounds. The purpose is not to present the best approach for teaching PAR in the university classroom; rather, it is a reflective exploration of the experiences of the authors' participants, which reveals rich insights into what it feels like to become researchers within the ‘culture' of formal higher education in the United States.

Global Pull of Community Engagement

This chapter discusses the CUNY Youth Ambassador Program, an undergraduate mentorship and leadership development program with an emphasis on global sustainability that focuses on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Goal Number 4: Quality Education. The creation and development of this program is one way two educators at the City University of New York responded to the global call for action on quality education, by initiating a collaboration with UNESCO to seed a movement of informed youth undergraduate advocates active in education spaces. This chapter showcases the framework and components of the CUNY Youth Ambassador Program and the aforementioned collaboration, as well as the experience and impact on the undergraduate students involved in this initiative.

Integrated Service Learning Strategies for Student Engagement

This chapter explores the synergies experienced when a required upper level undergraduate course (entitled Family in the Community) at a public research university adapted a service-learning model and directly connected students with serving community programs for youth. The experience of faculty and staff seeking to contribute to a university's strategic goals for transforming lives and communities through outreach and engaged scholarship is described and discussed. Service-learning pedagogy and practice at the subject university are reviewed before moving on to description and discussion of how the course structure and content was adapted to foster authentic engagement among students, community programs, and service recipients. Stakeholder experiences and perspectives are shared and explored, including the reflections of the service-learning students. The chapter closes with implications for integrated service learning as a tool for preparing students for meaningful and sustainable community engagement.

Administrative Perspectives on Implementing a Mandatory Engaged Scholarship Project With Doctoral Students

This chapter focuses on lessons learned from mandating community-engaged scholarship research projects for all doctoral students within a specific college of education prior to beginning their dissertations. Members of the administration of the college participated in semi-structured interviews that focused on capturing their thoughts about the 2 years in which a small group of faculty and students piloted the initiative. During the interviews, the administrators shared their perceptions and what they believed to be the varied reactions of both faculty and students who participated in the community engagement project. The chapter provides insights that may be useful for others wanting to initiate similar community engagement initiatives with doctoral students.

The Transformative Nature of Community Engagement in the Arts

Art educators have engaged in various community-engagement experiences with undergraduate classes for many years. In addition to the curricular reward, the authors have found that students are experiencing community in new ways through these opportunities. In this study, researchers used a mixed methods approach to carefully examine several key aspects of community work in afterschool programs in two community centers. First, the context was explored, and ethnography was used to describe experiences with art, community, and engagement in an area facing severe socioeconomic challenges. Outcome data from one site helped to link community work to at-risk student achievement on end of grade testing. Outcome data from the second research site suggests that resilience increased in students engaged in afterschool programming, perhaps through the incorporation of visual art. Last, university students' response papers were content analyzed to illustrate gains achieved through these opportunities.

Learners as Leaders

This chapter examines a collaborative process in which two student-led initiatives were used to help build capacity in students for publicly engaged work, thus building capacity for broader student public engagement. A set of foundational competencies and core skills emerged from this process, which situated a core team of five students and two administrators as collaborators in program planning and implementation. Through a reflective lens that examined the process, three broad competency areas emerged—project management, communication, and self-awareness—each encompassing a core set of skills. Through collective reflections, it became evident that the process itself provided a framework to highlight key competencies and essential skills that are critical for best practices in public engagement.

Service-Learning Volunteerism Reboot

How universities adapt SL varies almost as much as the number of universities that offer those programs as SL can vary from volunteerism to internships. Seventy-seven SL administrators participated in a survey on the perceptions of the U.S. colleges on the definition of SL activities. The survey results indicated the participants less likely consider an academic community engagement project as a SL when it is paid by the community partner. This chapter examines the importance of including funded community engagement scholarship in SL activities. Following the survey results, the chapter further addresses how funding from community partners may strengthen the definition of SL by introducing The Design Laboratory, The Lab, from Memphis College of Art as a case study. The Lab was a student-driven design agency that provided SL activities to the students and communities. Most of The Lab's SL activities were funded by the community partners.

Designing a Course for the Development of Community-Engaged Researchers in a College of Education

Community-engaged scholarship is a democratic approach to scholarship that seeks to identify and solve community-based problems. In this chapter, the authors, both faculty members within a college of education, describe the challenge of creating opportunities to prepare graduate students to become community-engaged researchers. In this chapter, the authors will explore the challenges related to designing coursework that successfully supports the development of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for successful community-engaged research. The authors present narratives that describe their transition into their college and describe how this organizational context influenced the manner in which they went about designing a course on community-engaged research. The authors then outline, in detail, a number of assignments developed for this research course. These assignments are presented as a resource for faculty who are developing courses that aim to prepare graduate students for community-engaged scholarship.