This compact, accessibly written text prepares students for their experience of community-based learning. It is designed for students to read and reflect on independently or to foster discussion in class on their motivations and dispositions toward community engagement and service learning. It prepares students to work with diverse individuals, groups, and organizations that may be outside their prior experience. Faculty can use the book as a tool to deepen the educational experience of the course and enrich community engagement. This text is a guide to what’s involved in community-engaged learning, from understanding the pervasiveness of social, economic and environmental problems, to learning about how individuals and organizations in communities work to overcome them. Students will discover through a process of reflection how service connects to personal development and the content of their courses, builds their ability to engage with people different from themselves, and develops new life skills, all in the context of working with communities to overcome systemic injustice.Critical questions woven into each chapter prompt students to reflect on ideas and perspectives about social justice, community development, and their role in fostering them.The book concludes with case studies of students who have experienced the transformative power of community-engaged learning. The stories illustrate common themes inherent in the student experience, including listening to understand, challenging stereotypes, learning the nature of their role, and seeing the world through a new lens.A special feature of this book is the embedded QR codes that provide access, as students read the text, to online resources, and original and public videos that explore particular themes or perspectives more deeply. The authors also include text directed to faculty to provide ideas about framing their community-engaged course and integrating the book.

Transformational Learning in Community Colleges details the profound social and emotional change that nontraditional and historically underserved students undergo when they enter community college. Drawing on case study material and student observations, the book outlines the systematic supports that two-year institutions must put in place to help students achieve their educational and professional goals. The book offers guidance on how a renewed focus on student transformational learning can complement the skills curriculum, accelerate current reforms, and help lead to higher student success rates. "Chad Hoggan and Bill Browning have produced an excellent guide for assuring greater levels of success at the place community colleges and students meet at scale everyday: the classroom. It will provide community college academic leaders and faculty alike with a guide that will significantly improve student success in the classroom. This book is both timely and relevant as the classroom becomes the next frontier for community college reformation." --Kenneth L. Ender, professor of practice, The Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research, and president emeritus, William Rainey Harper College "Transformational Learning in Community Colleges makes a meaningful contribution to the literature on student success by addressing pressing challenges such as the need for coordinated efforts at the program level. Intended for practitioners in community colleges and career pathways training programs, this book focuses on the changes students experience in college and provides helpful real-life examples, case studies, and applied strategies for readers to use." --Meredith Archer Hatch, senior associate director for Workforce and Academic Alignment, Achieving the Dream Chad D. Hoggan is an associate professor of Adult, Workforce, and Continuing Professional Education in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University. Bill Browning is an independent consultant with a thirty-year career combining management roles in corporate training, a community-based nonprofit, community college, and workforce development policy and leadership training. Robert G. Templin, Jr. is professor of the practice at the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research at North Carolina State University and senior fellow of the College Excellence Program at The Aspen Institute.

Many American educators are all too familiar with disengaged students, disenfranchised teachers, sanitized and irrelevant curricula, inadequate support for the neediest schools and students, and the tyranny of standardizing testing. This text invites teachers and would-be teachers unhappy with such conditions to consider becoming critical educators - professionals dedicated to creating schools that genuinely provide equal opportunity for all children. Assuming little or no background in critical theory, chapters address several essential questions to help readers develop the understanding and resolve necessary to become change agents. Why do critical theorists say that education is always political? How do traditional and critical agendas for schools differ? Which agenda benefits whose children? What classroom and policy changes does critical practice require? What risks must change agents accept? Resources point readers toward opportunities to deepen their understanding beyond the limits of these pages.

This publication¿the latest report from AAC&U¿s Liberal Education and America¿s Promise (LEAP) initiative¿defines a set of educational practices that research has demonstrated have a significant impact on student success. Author George Kuh presents data from the National Survey of Student Engagement about these practices and explains why they benefit all students, but also seem to benefit underserved students even more than their more advantaged peers. The report also presents data that show definitively that underserved students are the least likely students, on average, to have access to these practices.

Rooted in the work of community – school collaborations, this text focuses on connecting the rigors of the classroom with the ambiguity of lived community experience. Community-Based Transformational Learning (CBTL) draws on the increasing evidence that course-learning conducted in an applied, community setting, can positively transform students' professional and personal identity and creates new ways of thinking and working in university courses and pre-professional experiences. To illustrate the different ways to successfully implement community-based learning, examples are provided of experiences integrated in courses across multiple disciplines across an American university whose mission is focused on teaching. Topics covered include refugee and immigration transition issues, incarceration and health needs with international examples of community experiences from Jamaica, Korea and Belize. Qualitative and quantitative data depict how these experiences impact students and each chapter presents how community engagement has been established as an effective approach in the different disciplines, including computer science and sports management. The authors demonstrate how CBTL experiences can be transformative when students are provided a chance to connect the academic commitment to community aims, but also provides suggestions for overcoming challenges and pit-falls in developing these experiences.

With calls for community colleges to play a greater role in increasing college completion, promising or high-impact practices (HIPs) are receiving attention as means to foster persistence, degree completion, and other desired academic outcomes. These include learning communities, orientation, first-year seminars, and supplemental instruction, among many others. This volume explores the latest research on: how student success program research is conceptualized and operationalized, evidence for ways in which interventions foster positive student outcomes, critical inquiry of how students themselves experience them, and challenges and guidance regarding program design, implementation and evaluation. This is the 175th volume of this Jossey-Bass quarterly report series. Essential to the professional libraries of presidents, vice presidents, deans, and other leaders in today's open-door institutions, New Directions for Community Colleges provides expert guidance in meeting the challenges of their distinctive and expanding educational mission.