Pre-Conference Workshop

Are We Walking on the Same Path? Aligning Student Learning Goals with Community Partner Outcomes to Sustain Reciprocal Community-University Partnerships

Drawing on the conversation begun in The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning (Stoecker and Tryon, 2009), this workshop will equip participants to build bridges and increase the quality of their impact on campus and community. Reciprocity and engagement "with" communities are hot topics in service-learning circles. However, creating and sustaining successful service-learning partnerships can be a frustrating process for faculty, staff, students, and nonprofit staff. The relationships are multi-dimensional, dynamic, and often developed with high expectations and low-to-no resources. As a result, they may actually do more harm than good. The presenters, who have experience with service-learning projects as both nonprofit executives and university instructors, will engage participants in reflection and incorporate scholarship and examples of successful ongoing campus-community partnerships to reframe and retool engaged learning relationships.

Co-Presenters

Chris McCauley, Executive Director of the David Mathews Center for Civic Life

Kristina Scott, Executive Director of the Alabama Poverty Project

Last Updated: October 14, 2013