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

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.

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 anl3&