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Faculty

President Harroz speaking to new faculty at NFO 2023.

What is community engagement?

Service-learning defined community engagement is the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.

What is curricular engagement?

Curricular engagement includes institutions where teaching, learning, and scholarship engage faculty, students, and community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration. Their interactions address community-identified needs, deepen students’ civic and academic learning, enhance community well-being, and enrich the scholarship of the institution.

What is service-learning?

Service-Learning is a structured learning experience that combines community service with preparation and reflection. Students engaged in service-learning provide community service in response to community-identified concerns and learn about the context in which service is provided, the connection between their service and their academic coursework, and their role as community members.

What is the difference between community service and volunteering?

Volunteering focuses on the benefits to the service recipients. The students receive some benefits by learning more about how their service makes a difference in the lives of the service recipients, but there are no specific learning objectives. Service-learning is integrated into and enhances the academic curriculum of students engaged in service, or the educational components of the community service program in which the participants are enrolled. Service-learning provides structured time for thoughtful planning of the service project and guided reflection by participants on the service experience. Overall, the most important feature of effective service-learning programs is that both learning and service are emphasized.

Is service-learning a new idea?

The practice of service-learning dates back much further than the term itself, beginning with educational movements and social change in the late 1880s. The intellectual foundations of service-learning in the United States trace back to the early 1900s with the work of John Dewey, William James, and others who promoted models of “learning by doing,” and linked service to personal and social development. The term “service-learning” was coined by two educators in 1967 to describe the combination of conscious educational growth with the accomplishment of certain tasks that meet genuine human needs.

How do I start a service learning project?

There are several resources to help you investigate and start a service-learning project. OU’s Program for Instructional Innovation in the Center for Teaching Excellence assists teaching faculty and organizational units to provide educational programs of the highest possible quality and would be a good place to start. 

For resources to help design your service learning course.  

Principles of Good Practice for Service-Learning Pedagogy

  1. Academic credit is for learning, not for service.
  2. Do not compromise academic rigor.
  3. Establish learning objectives.
  4. Establish criteria for the selection of service placements.
  5. Provide educationally sound learning strategies to harvest community learning and realize course learning objectives.
  6. Prepare students for learning from the community.
  7. Minimize the distinction between the students’ community learning role and classroom learning role.
  8. Rethink the faculty instructional role.
  9. Be prepared for variation in, and some loss of control of, student learning outcomes.
  10. Maximize the community responsibility orientation of the course.

[Howard, J., Service-Learning Course Design Workbook, 2001, pp. 16-19].

Connecting with Community Partners


Types of partnerships:

One Faculty/Staff Member, One Community Partner

One Student Organization, One Community Partner

One Campus Partner, Multiple Community Partners

Multiple Campus Partners, One Community Partner

Community Engagement Office Partnering with Many Community Partners

Place-Based or Issue-Based Partnerships 

Steps to Developing a Partnership:

  1. Learn all you can about potential partners through online, media, and personal sources.
  2. Carefully consider the nature of the commitment you are willing to make.
  3. Start early.
  4. Take the time to get to know one another as people, always remembering that communication is key.
  5. Determine whether there is compatability.
  6. Ask the right questions.
  7. Stay in touch.
  8. Ascertain how you will know the degree of the success of your partnership.
  9. Celebrate success.

Jacoby, Barbara. 2017 Service-learning essentials: questions, answers, and lessons learned.  Jossey-Bass.

Creating and Maintaining Partnerships Toolbox

Connecting Communities with Colleges and Universities

Phases of partnership development
Because partnerships are constantly changing, community engagement needs to be examined
in relation to the different processes of a partnership project’s development and reviewed on a regular basis. It has been suggested that there are up to twelve different phases involved in partnering. These have been drawn together into five broad phases in which review processes (monitoring and evaluation) are implicit within each.**

  1. Scoping: researching the contextual case for partnership and drawing on relevant prior experiences. Selecting partners by identifying incentives for working together, analysing the strengths and weaknesses of potential contributions and the value and risks of working together.
  2. Initiating: establishing the ground rules for collaboration. Agreeing on core principles, objectives and goals, the different roles and responsibilities that will be undertaken as well as appropriate partnership structures.
  3. Implementing: ensuring the engagement of all partners and monitoring that tasks are being carried out as agreed. Developing and reviewing management and decision-making structures and using appropriate systems for communication, accounting, reporting, conflict resolution etc.
  4. Consolidating: strengthening and refining methods for working together effectively. Building appropriate structures and mechanisms for the partnership to ensure longer-term commitment and continuity and reinforcing wider societal linkages.
  5. Sustaining/terminating: making decisions about what should happen after a partnership has completed its activities. Agreeing on an appropriate conclusion or developing further work.

*These include scoping, identifying, building, planning, managing, resourcing, implementing, measuring, reviewing, revising, institutionalising and sustaining or terminating. See Tennyson, R. (2004) The Partnering Toolbook, IBLF, London, p4

**These phases are not intended to demonstrate a linear progression of how a partnership model should develop as they may overlap and/or occur at different times during a partnership’s development.

From Stott, Leda and Tracey Keatman. May 2005 Tools for Exploring Community Engagement in Partnerships.

Community Based Research


Community engaged research is a collaborative process between the researcher and community partner that creates and disseminates knowledge and creative expression with the goal of contributing to the discipline and strengthening the well-being of the community.

Engaged Scholarship toolkit

This toolkit will help:

  • To add clarity to the meaning and conceptualization of community-engaged scholarship in a research university context;
  • To provide a rationale for why to do it and resources on how to do it well;
  • To provide tools and assistance for faculty at research universities to document engaged scholarship for reward and promotion (i.e., how to get credit for it); and
  • To provide tools and assistance for enabling the assessment of engaged scholarship (i.e., for faculty reward and promotion).

Calleson D, Kauper-Brown J, Seifer SD. Community-Engaged Scholarship Toolkit. Seattle: Community-Campus Partnerships for Health, 2005. 


Assessing student learning outcomes

For the deepest learning to occur, reflection must be an ongoing component of the service learning course or program. 

Forms of reflection:  Speaking or oral reflection; writing; activities (reflection through action); media and artisitic creation. 

  • Step 1: State your learning outcome.
  • Step 2: Introduce the concept and practice of critical reflection.
  • Step 3: Design a reflection strategy to achieve the learning outcomes.  
  • Step 4: Engage the students. 

For examples of critical reflection see:

Service Reflection Toolkit (PDF)

Course/Issue/Theory/Client Focused Questions

Models of Engagement at Research Universities


University of Connecticut 

Our mission is to assist faculty, students, and communities reach their goals in mutual collaboration.

Service Learning is a pedagogy that promotes the formation of collaborative, sustainable partnerships between the university and the community. Faculty members and students work together with community partners to identify solutions to society's most pressing issues; food justice, social equality, health disparities, homelessness, economic and small business development, education, climate change, transportation systems, and clean, sustainable energy and air systems.

Michigan State

Outreach is a form of scholarship that cuts across teaching, research, and service. It involves generating, transmitting, applying, and preserving knowledge for the direct benefit of external audiences in ways that are consistent with university and unit missions.

Provost’s Committee on University Outreach (1993)
University Outreach at Michigan State University:
Extending Knowledge to Serve Society

University of Michigan

Our mission is to cultivate and steward mutually beneficial partnerships between communities and the University of Michigan in order to advance social change for the public good.

Based upon this mission, our vision is for inclusive democracy; thriving, diverse communities; and equity and social justice.

Edward Ginsberg Center, University of Michigan

University of Iowa

At the University of Iowa, we define outreach and engagement as collaboration between faculty, staff and students and diverse external groups in mutually beneficial partnerships that are grounded in scholarship and consistent with our role and missions of teaching, research and service. The following programs are a collection of the university's outreach and engagement initiatives. We are working with the university community to collect and verify additional outreach and engagement programs.

Montana State University

The Office of Student Engagement (OSE) provides and facilitates student engagement opportunities for MSU students through a variety of programs, events, services, and activities. We are THE HUB for students interested in connecting with their fellow Bobcats through student government, student organizations, programs and events, and engaging in service to the community.

University of Tennessee-Knoxville

We facilitate service-learning partnerships across a multitude of academic disciplines and community sectors. We do this by supporting faculty in the design of quality, reciprocal service-learning courses that help “move the needle” on issues affecting our local, state, national, and global communities.

 Weber State University

The Center For Community Engaged Learning, formerly the Community Involvement Center established in June 2007, is a strategic partnership between Academic Affairs and Student Affairs that provides both curricular and co-curricular community engagement opportunities for campus constituents in partnership with local community organizations. Students, faculty, staff, alumni and community partners come to the CCEL to create connections and opportunities to give and grow through learning and experience, and to build a community that thrives.

The main mission of the center is to engage students, faculty and staff members in service, democratic engagement, and community research to promote civic participation, build community capacity, and enhance the educational process.

TRUCEN-The Research Universities and Civic Engagement Network

In recent years, increasing numbers of colleges and universities have engaged in innovative efforts to reinvigorate and prioritize civic engagement and involvement in their surrounding communities. Recognizing research universities’ potential to provide leadership on this issue, Campus Compact and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University created The Research University Civic Engagement Network (TRUCEN).
A select number of universities were invited to join TRUCEN including the University of Oklahoma. Members had to be existing Campus Compact members and designated ” very high research universities,” by the Carnegie Classification. Members also had to be committed to strengthening and advancing civic and community engagement at research universities.

TRUCEN’s goal is to share existing reserach, collaborate on new research projects, provide resources, gathering national data on community engagement. The group meets on an annual basis to continue exploring ways to advance civic and community engagement among research universities and other institutions of higher education and to generate additional models and resources to support this effort.

TRUCEN RESOURCES:

New Times Demand New Scholarship

The statement, endorsed by the entire group, argues that research universities’ exceptional faculty, students, financial resources, and research facilities position them to contribute to community change relatively quickly and in ways that will ensure deeper and longer-lasting commitment to civic engagement across higher education.

New Times Demand New Scholarship II: Research Universities and Civic Engagement:

TRUCEN report on four critical areas: 1) engaged scholarship, 2) scholarship focused on civic and community engagement, 3) educating students for civic and community engagement, and 4) advancing civic engagement within and across research universities. Report also includes models from participating research universities.

Assessing Community-University Partnerships

Reciprocal partnerships between the university and community can build substantial outcomes for both partners.  How do we know our impact and improve our mutually beneficial partnerships?  It is important to consider impact and sustainability as we design and develop partnerships and provide opportunities for feedback through shared decision making and assessment. 

Ask your community partner to fill out our evaluation here

How to do Community-Academic/University Partnerships Well

Supporting University-Community Partnerships through Shared Governance and Assessment (pdf)