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"Randy Stoecker has been "practicing" forms of community-engaged scholarship, including service learning, for thirty years now, and he readily admits, "Practice does not make perfect." In his highly personal critique, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement, the author worries about the contradictions, unrealized potential, and unrecognized urgency of the causes as well as the risks and rewards of this work. Here, Stoecker questions the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of the core concepts of service learning: 1. learning, 2. service, 3. community, and 4. change. By "liberating" service learning, he suggests reversing the prioritization of the concepts, starting with change, then community, then service, and then learning. In doing so, he clarifies the benefits and purpose of this work, arguing that it will create greater pedagogical and community impact. Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement challenges--and hopefully will change--our thinking about higher education community engagement"--

When we present ourselves as doing research that is participatory and action oriented, are we meeting either of those goals? An analysis of 232 concept applications sent to the Sociological Initiatives Foundation community-based research funding pool shows that most proposed research emphasized neither participation nor action. Grassroots community members, or organizations controlled by them, were rarely involved at the crucial decision stages of research, and instead limited to participation in collecting data. In addition, most research was proposed to produce papers, presentations or websites, rather than directly support action. The article provides a theoretical analysis of why participation and action are crucial and a set of reommendations for how to move toward research that is more participatory and integrally connected to action.

It was 2008, early in the presidential campaign season. Everyone was talking about whether a woman or an African American would be the Democratic party nominee for president. And then they began talking about community organizing. In the early days of the Democratic primary we learned that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had connections to it. Clinton had written her undergraduate thesis on the famous community organizer Saul Alinsky. Obama had actually done it in Chicago through the Gamaliel Foundation, one of the national faith-based community organizing networks.

Those of us attempting to develop truly equal partnerships with communities and community organizations, using the method of community-based research, encounter many barriers. These barriers revolve around who sets the schedule, who determines the labor pool, who controls the product, and who gets the funding. In this article, a case study shows how those barriers exert themselves, and evaluates the success of strategies to challenge those barriers. It ends with a set of recommendations for changing university overhead policies, developing university quality control practices, refining the university IRB process, institutionalizing a flash seminar structure, and training community members to control the research relationship.

AbstractThis paper explores the influences of the Internet on the practice of community organizing. There are continuing questions over the scale of community organizing—how much to focus on the local versus the global—as well as over the models of social action—whether to organize institutions or individuals, use conflict or cooperation tactics, and other questions. This paper assesses whether the growing involvement of the Internet in community organizing has any influence on those questions. It looks at the early days of the Internet in community organizing, with particular attention to the free software movement, the Zapatista rebellion, the Communications Decency Act, and the early anti-globalization movement. The analysis of those cases shows that the Internet has influenced the scale of community organizing, allowing for a much better link between local and global efforts. The Internet has not, however, ushered in new effective models of organizing.

Interest in participatory research has exploded over the past decade. Academics seem to follow three approaches in participatory research: the initiator, the consultant, and the collaborator. After discussing the approaches, this article argues that doing the research is not a goal in itself but only a means. Participatory research is actually part of a larger community change project that is dependent on four roles: "animator," community organizer, popular educator, and participatory researcher. Determining how the academic will fit in the project (as initiator, consultant, or collaborator) requires addressing three questions: What is the project trying to do? What are the academic's skills? and How much participation does the community need or want? The answers to these questions will vary according to how organized the community is.