Urgency and Opportunity in Difficult Times: Elevating Voices and Widening the Circle of SLCE Leadership

Welcome to the third in an ongoing series of special sections in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (MJCSL) devoted to sharing the work of the Service-Learning and Community Engagement Future Directions Project (SLCE-F DP). This special section marks the second anniversary of the project. In this essay, we, the five curators of the SLCE-F DP, both introduce the thought pieces that comprise this special section and share our team’s critical examination of the project’s history and our sense of its own best future directions

Research-led placements in politics : a new approach?

The 'scholarship of engagement', derived from work undertaken by the Boyer Commission in the US, emphasises the possibilities of enhanced undergraduate learning through research, yet in the UK this idea is less developed. Moreover, although the study of politics and international relations lends itself well to the use of placements to develop this model of learning, there are few examples of this in the UK. This article presents findings from a major research project, the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics, examining the ways in which placement learning can affect the student experience