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  • The Scholarship of Community Engagement: Advancing Partnerships in Spanish and Portuguese
  • Josef Hellebrandt (bio) and Ethel Jorge (bio)

This Special Focus Issue of Hispania on “The Scholarship of Community Engagement” is both a celebration and an opportunity to reflect on our practices and accomplishments. We can be justifiably proud of how far we have come since Edward Zlotkowski, former senior scholar at the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), challenged us in 1999 to consider incorporating community partnerships into our language teaching. A membership survey in April 2012 conducted by the authors and facilitated by the AATSP indicates that there is a discrepancy between the way we think languages should be taught and the way they are currently being taught. Eight hundred five people (representing approximately 10% of the AATSP membership) responded to the survey. Of those, 75% said that some form of community engagement (CE) should be an important component of language teaching, but only 55% actually incorporated CE or service-learning (SL) experiences into their classes. Thus, in addition to celebrating our significant achievements to date, this volume is designed to encourage and assist more of our members to bring their classrooms and communities closer together, while also attempting to contribute to current discussions about the state of language teaching in the United States and beyond and to advance the scholarship of community engagement. The contributions that are part of this Special Focus Issue offer examples of diverse practices and portray our collective efforts to explore community-based and SL approaches to language education, to meet some of the challenges of our times, and to participate in the general discussion about language instruction at the national level. It is our hope that there will be useful information here for faculty who are experienced in community-engaged teaching and learning as well as those who are considering these approaches for the first time.

There have been numerous articles published about CE in many disciplines, and an emerging presence in languages other than Spanish, such as French (Thomas 2005), German (Mueller 2007), and Japanese (Heuser 1999). This volume is an attempt to take the current pulse of CE and SL in language teaching in relation to the following topics: an overview of the state of thinking at the programmatic level, the role of language learning and CE as part of the humanities tradition, the diversity of CE models applied to teacher education programs, heritage speakers, national and transnational/international programs, translation, and course design. We hope the articles will spur discussions around models and practices of SL and the scholarship of community engagement.

1. Context

Although the philosophical roots of CE can be traced to John Dewey and Paulo Freire, we start our timeline in 1985 with the creation of Campus Compact, which now represents [End Page 203] “a national coalition of almost 1,200 college and university presidents—representing some 6 million students—who are committed to fulfilling the civic purposes of higher education” (Campus Compact). Then, in 1994, the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning began publishing research, theory, and pedagogy articles related to academic SL in general. In 1996, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) presented its Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century with the strategic goal standards we refer to commonly as the “five C’s,” one of which is “Communities,” bringing the language curriculum in line with earlier attempts to incorporate CE into other disciplinary areas. Almost universally agreed upon as the most difficult to address, this fifth “C” lays out two objectives. The first (5.1) says students should “use the language both within and beyond the school setting,” and the second (5.2) says they should “show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment.” The ACTFL standards have provided crucial guidelines for language professionals for the past couple of decades. Although the “five C” areas (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities) are interconnected, it is the fifth’s emphasis on students’ “participation in multilingual communities at home and around the world” that is the focus of this issue.

These standards provide a common base for revisiting our...

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