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221 Beyond Tomorrow: Charting a Long-Term Course toward Community Impact in Local Public Education Mary Beckman and Joyce F . Long An important reason for “going public” is to improve the “public” with whom universities and their constituents are engaged. Although service learning and community-based research (CBR) have at least an implicit aim to do just that (Ehrlich, 2000; Parks Daloz, Keen, Keen, & Daloz Parks, 1996; Peters, 2005), many who are involved in all manner of higher education community engagement voice the concern that effects on communities simply do not get enough attention. Critics of common modes of higher education community engagement argue that initiatives are disjointed and driven by university or college and faculty interests rather than by the social challenges in need of remedies (Stoecker & Beckman, 2009). The coalition, one word used to describe a form of community-campus collaboration that is growing in popularity (Gillies, 1998; Roussel, Fan, & Fulmer, 2002), seems promising for addressing some of the limitations of service learning, CBR, and other modes of higher education community involvement (Bayne-Smith, Mizrahi, & Garcia, 2008; Minkler, 2002). One aim of this chapter is to present an example of such a model, the Education Collaborative Group (ECG) in South Bend, Indiana. This group’s story highlights how civic engagement that involves undergraduates, faculty, and community partners in CBR emerged and gained momentum over time toward addressing pressing social and academic concerns in the local public education community. The second aim of the chapter is to push a step beyond what the ECG has already done, by interrogating its activities with an emerging framework explicitly intended to enhance the community impact of university civic engagement (Stoecker, Beckman, & Min, 2010). While the education collaborative has been admirably successful on some levels, it will be argued that its efforts can become more effectual by applying this alternative approach. We M A R Y B E C K M A N A N D J O Y C E F . L O N G 222 begin our discussion by examining the limitations of dominant modes of universitycommunity engagement. Limitations of Current Community-Campus Forms of Engagement Typically, service-learning courses emerge from a faculty member’s agenda. A professor wants to teach a course in his or her discipline, such as economics of poverty. He or she then seeks ways to engage students in the local area as an element of the class. Frequently, this requires the professor, or some mediator such as might be found in a campus service-learning center, to form a connection with a nonprofit organization, so students can make a contribution while also gaining real-world knowledge to take back to the classroom and integrate with their readings, writing assignments, and class discussion. In the example of an economics of poverty class, students may volunteer at a center for people who are homeless. While the students are presumably fulfilling a request of a local organization, the engagement of the students would not happen if the faculty member did not initiate the effort. Community-based research, as a form of service for undergraduates in service-learning classes, requires students to address questions that come from a community partner, just as organizations where students serve through service-learning classes identify the work that students will do in their organizations. In a CBR class, the community partner is, ideally, involved in various ways in the actual research process. And the typical CBR class, like the traditional service-learning course, is developed out of the faculty member’s teaching or research interests. Not surprisingly, other forms of university civic engagement tend to be similarly oriented toward aims of the higher education institutions (Stoecker, Beckman, & Min, 2010). Another indicator of the primacy of the academic community’s agenda in its civic involvement is the fact that very little evaluative work within the world of service learning has examined the effects of student contributions in communities. Instead, most of the evaluation literature in this content area has focused on the outreach’s effects upon students rather than linking student efforts with long-term documented changes in the community sphere. One literature review that examined published articles during the five-year period from 2005 to 2009 (Beckman, Penney, & Cockburn, 2010) discovered that service learning’s reported influence was primarily associated with general learning gains in students (e.g., Frazer, 2007; Paoletti, 2007; Scales, 2006), student attitudes (e.g., Brown, 2007; Dukhan, 2008; Keen, 2009), student development (e.g., Borden, 2007; Johnson, 2007; Joseph, 2007), or effects...

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