I have experience and expertise in best practices for service-learning, community-engaged learning, community-engaged scholarship, and community-university partnerships. Successful community-engaged instruction and learning require alignment, reciprocity, reflection, and commitment (ARRC)
Alignment: Community engagement between the university and community requires that there is alignment between the goals of each stakeholder group (e.g. faculty, community partners, students, etc.). From the university’s perspective, alignment ensures that the partnership can yield applied learning. From the community partner's perspective, alignment helps to ensure that the partnership yields positive impacts on the goals of the organization.
Reciprocity: Community-engaged pedagogy must prioritize reciprocity and a relational approach in partnership building. Drawing on critical sociology, this aspect of community-engaged pedagogy reflects the need to ensure a balance in power where all stakeholders contribute to the design, implementation and evaluation of the partnership in a shared-ownership model.
Reflection: Reflection is also a key component of successful community-engaged pedagogy. As students learn about and engage with the community, those experiences must be tied to course content through a reflective process that yields a greater understanding of the diversity in human experiences and social contexts.
Commitment: Finally, as we work toward a more just, sustainable, and inclusive society, community-engaged pedagogy requires commitment to the partnership over time as opposed to archaic helicopter approaches to community engagement.