Faculty Service-Learning Guidebook: Enacting Equity-Centered Teaching, Partnerships, and Scholarship

This is a practical guide to designing, teaching, and coordinating service-learning courses, and for developing reciprocal community partnerships and community-based research through a lens of equity that addresses the endemic racial, social, economic, and environmental disparities across society. The text provides a comprehensive framework for developing both in-person and on-line service-learning, with a chapter on virtual delivery of courses that integrates the principles and practices described throughout the book. The authors uniquely integrate the how-to of conducting service-learning with the theoretical foundations to enact effective, equitable, and inclusive community engagement.

Given this moment of enormous social inequality and divisiveness, the authors offer a new definition and set of educational principles that they characterize as Equity-Centered Community Engagement Excellence. These principles serve to guide academic and community engagement that is democratic, recognizes the voice and expertise of community partners, addresses the power imbalances between communities and academic institutions, and develops an educational experience that is potentially transformative and promotes civic responsibility.

Informed by the literature of critical service-learning, critical race theory, intercultural communication theory, and social-constructivism, this book attempts to deconstruct the assumption of the preeminence of academic knowledge to reconstruct a new operational paradigm of equity-centeredness that validates community capacity to guide faculty in their redesign of service-learning curriculum, activities, collaborations, and scholarship. It is based on the principles of:

• Student Agency (demonstrated as enhanced skills, knowledge, and motivation)
• Community Efficacy (recognition of community assets and capacity-building)
• Scholarly Advocacy (leveraging evidence-based research-based for equity-centered learning, serving, and social justice)

The authors offer examples of syllabi, lessons and assignments, reflection questions, evaluation rubrics, as well as an array of teaching tips that illustrate strategies for use in the classroom and in the field.

The book is addressed to faculty embarking on service-learning and to seasoned scholar practitioners looking for innovative ideas, as well as to campus administrators who coordinate community outreach or college student volunteer services, offering guidance on leveraging resources and fiscal support from external stakeholders. It is also designed to serve as a resource for professional development workshops and faculty scholar learning communities.

It offers a rich compendium of ideas and examples from which faculty and practitioners can select exercises and elements to incorporate or adapt for their courses, whether designing short-term engagements or extended service-learning programs.

Christine M. Cress is Professor of Educational Leadership, Higher Education Policy, and Community Engagement at Portland State University. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She has conducted professional trainings on curricular integration and the scholarship of service-learning at scores of colleges in North America, Europe, Japan, India, and Nepal. Earlier in her career, she was an academic and career adviser at Western Washington University, Whatcom Community College, and Northwest Indian College. For the last twenty years at PSU, she has directed Master and Doctoral degrees and a fully on-line Graduate Certificate in Service-Learning including facilitation of short-term international service-learning and COIL/Virtual Exchange classes in India, Japan, Morocco, and Turkey. Her cultural privilege is primarily northern European American with Cherokee (non-tribal affiliation) and Sene-Gambian heritage. She is a first-generation college student, adoptee and adoptive parent, and member of a multi-racial lesbian family. These myriad social positions influence her scholarship which addresses intersectionality, systemic oppression, and equity-centered education and community engagement.

Stephanie T. Stokamer is Associate Professor of Civic Engagement and Director of Applied & Experiential Learning at Pacific University, where she leads the McCall Center for Civic Engagement. With a doctorate in educational leadership from Portland State University, she has facilitated and administered undergraduate and graduate community-based learning programs since 2005. Her scholarship focuses on service-learning and civic engagement, particularly with respect to pedagogical practices and faculty development. She is an AmeriCorps*VISTA alum and former National Service Fellow for the Corporation for National and Community Service. Stephanie comes to this work as a committed ally and accomplice for social justice, with identities rooted in her experience as a cis-gender, heterosexual woman of Anglo heritage.

Thomas “Tommy” J. Van Cleave (he/him) is an Intercultural Communication Scholar and Faculty Development Consultant. He earned his doctorate in Postsecondary Educational Leadership from Portland State University where he coordinated a graduate degree in international civic engagement and taught graduate courses on curriculum development and community engagement. He has facilitated or co-facilitated immersive and international civic engagement courses throughout the United States and in India, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Italy. He is strongly influenced by his Latinx/Mexican family heritage and queer identity. He also recognizes his cultural privilege as a cis-male descendant of homesteaders with northern European roots who ‘settled’ West via the Oregon Trail. The confluence of identities, both marginalized and privileged, shapes his work in creating experiences that disrupt the status quo and encourage new and more just ways of knowing.

Joyce P. Kaufman is Professor Emerita of Political Science and Founding Director of the Center for Engagement with Communities at Whittier College. Since retiring from Whittier College in 2019, she has continued to engage with her various communities, both in the Eastern Sierra where she now lives, and with colleagues in Washington, D.C., including working with NGOs and community-based organizations to address and help mitigate community violence in the nation’s capital.