The Roots of Service-Learning as a Basis for Advancing the Civic Mission of Community Colleges

Abstract

Democracy’s colleges. Originally referring to land-grant institutions and then claimed by community colleges as well (Ronan 2012), “democracy’s colleges” highlight what may be a primary tension facing many institutions of higher education today: how to fulfill—and perhaps integrate—the dual purposes of “doing the work of democracy” (i.e., preparation of students for civic life) and “equalizing opportunity” (i.e., widespread provision of the college education that is a gateway to employment and economic security) (Ronan 2012, 31). This tension may be particularly overt within community colleges, which educate approximately one half of the undergraduates in the United States (including a significant proportion of nonmajority and historically underserved undergraduates) and have a long history of providing widespread access to higher education and vocational training (American Association of Community Colleges n.d., “Community College Trends and Statistics”; Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker 2014). Therefore, both the potential for generating creative and effective approaches to navigating this tension and the stakes of doing so are high within the community college system. This book on service-learning in community colleges is an important step in the ongoing work to leverage service-learning as a strategy for deepening partnerships, nurturing healthy communities, enriching the civic work of faculty, cocreating high-quality civic learning and leadership opportunities with students, and transforming institutions. We provide an overview of service-learning in this context, examining its key role in institutional endeavors to hold fast to their civic mission—within community colleges in particular and higher education more generally—with an eye to what can be learned from community colleges as they use this pedagogy to advance and integrate these dimensions of their identity as democracy’s colleges.KeywordsCommunity CollegeCommunity EngagementCivic EngagementService LearnCivic EducationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.