Strategic Directions for Service-Learning Research: A Presidential Perspective

Discusses service learning research, emphasizing: why institutions are interested in service learning; service learning to promote community involvement; college presidents\u27 role in promoting service learning; creating the capacity for change; and a research agenda. Emphasizes how much can be gained from communication between higher education researchers, program managers, and campus leaders, with the scholar/president as the bridge between them

Seeking More High-Quality Undergraduate Degrees: Conditions for More Effectively Working with Policy Makers

Our nation’s colleges and universities have always sought to prepare their graduates for life and work in their own era. The pressures we face today, both from outside the academy and within the higher education community, are complex, interlocking, and hard to manage. Some of these challenges require us to rethink what it means to be educated in today’s world and to explore ways to provide a coherent and meaningful educational experience in the face of the turbulence, uncertainty, and fragmentation that characterizes much of higher education today

Thriving in the 21st Century by Tackling Wicked Problems

More than 20 years ago, I was a member of a leadership roundtable in Portland, Oregon, that was working on achieving the ambitious goal of 100 percent graduation rate from high school. In the course of our deliberations, we finally asked ourselves why young people were dropping out of school. After listening to a number of experts talk about retention, we thought to ask ourselves, “What would the young people themselves say?” To find out, we invited a group of young high school dropouts and high school student leaders to an afternoon conversation. The experts had talked about various strategies and structures to promote retention. They discussed incentives for faculty and teachers and changes in the definition of roles and responsibilities; they talked about infrastructure; they talked about curricula. The kids told us that what really mattered was that every one of them wanted at least one adult who cared about them, who kept track of them, and who listened to them and expected a lot of them. The truth dawned on us—all those infrastructure and policy suggestions were really about creating conditions for kids and adults to connect in a meaningful way—for young people and adults to share something vital and very real—something they could work on together. The lesson applies as much to higher education as it did to K–12

Community-Engaged Scholarship in ffigher Education: An Expanding Experience

Higher education in this country has always been expected to serve the public good. Sometimes, the emphasis is on preparing educated citizens or practitioners in especially critical fields and how public service can deepen and enrich learning and prepare students to lead purposeful, responsible, and creative lives. Sometimes the focus is upon institutions themselves as major intellectual and cultural resources for a community. In this paper, based on the keynote presentation at the Community Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative\u27s invitational symposium, the author explores four levels of engagement: the individual, the academic community and its concepts of scholarship, the institution and its relationships with its immediate community, and the role of higher education within a large network of interactions that define a region of innovation

Technology as a Mirror

IN CYBERSPACE instructors are more exposed, vulnerable, and less able to retain a veil of superior knowledge and expertise that has given scholars a sense of identity. We can, however, deepen our understanding, authentically practice the disciplines that we love, and enter new relationships to the learners who entrust themselves to our care. This I learned from faculty I consulted at the University of Vermont. And this is how technology can influence--and further--the aims of education

Public Scholarship: Making Sense of an Emerging Synthesis

This concluding chapter, written by a national leader in higher education, reflects on public scholarship from a perspective beyond Penn State and argues that public scholarship promises to strengthen “that special form of public decision making that we call democracy.

Expanding and Sustaining Partnerships

The Community Outreach Partnership Centers (COPC) Program requires adaptations in the university environment. We must examine and reinterpret (1) the roles and responsibilities of faculty; (2) the design of the undergraduate curriculum; (3) the structures of the university that create the capacity and support to sustain different working relationships with the community; and (4) our definitions of success and quality

Reading the Community: Helping Students Learn the Process

Colleges and universities in the 21st century will thrive through extensive collaborations with other higher education institutions and with communities with which they have special affinities. These relationships will create an educational environment that promotes deeper learning and student success, while generating knowledge that can be put to good use in improving the sustainability of local and global communities, and the diversity and strength of the economy. This paper will explore ways to engage students in the life of their communities while they take an active role in addressing challenges that affect local culture, health, economic stability and the environment. To do this, students must develop the ability to learn how to enrich their experience in the neighborhoods where they live by paying attention to aspects of life in their community that they normally would not notice; that is, to “read the community.

Preparing the Way for Reform in Higher Education: Drawing Upon the Resources of the Community-at-Large

Higher education is being asked to pay more attention to student learning and to contribute to the enhancement of the social and economic conditions of the community it serves. As a result, educational institutions will no longer be self-contained Community members and organizations have become not only critical partners inframing the goals and intentions of the educational reform movement, but they also have assets that must be tapped by educational institutions that wish to implement change and respond to social need

Large-Scale Institutional Change to Implement an Urban University Mission: Portland State University

In response to calls for accountability and effectiveness, public universities are reviewing their missions and are adopting measurable mission-specific goals. An emerging distinctive institutional type is the urban university, an institution characterized by the nature and extent of its responsiveness to the research and educational needs of complex metropolitan regions. This paper concerns the national environment for organizational change, a model for change, and a case study of one urban university that has pursued comprehensive and systemic change in its academic and administrative environment to direct resources to the support of its distinctive urban mission