Definitions and Research Base

The pages in this section overview the terms “community-engaged learning,” “participatory action research (PAR),” and “service learning.” The guide favors community-engaged learning and PAR over service learning and sees them both as supporting publicly engaged scholarship in social sciences, physical sciences, humanities, and professional schools such as education, business, design, law, and more. This kind of teaching can provide rich, deep learning for students and connect research to the real world situations and communities public universities should serve.

A Note About Justice

Before diving into the definitions and research base, a note about terminology. This guide uses the term “justice” as a shorthand for work committed to dismantling the systems and structures that rely upon and therefore perpetuate inequity, including white supremacy, settler colonialism, patriarchy, body normativity, heteronormativity, and more. That said, “justice” as a term can be read as white, liberal, “woke” speech, something that sounds good but has no real force behind it. In the collection Toward What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education (2018), editors Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang discuss the limitations of the term “justice,” including arguments against it. But they ultimately value it as the best option available, defining their usage thus: “People who use social justice as a signal for what their work engages with understand that inequities are produced, inequities are structured, and that things have got to change in order to achieve different educational outcomes. Social justice education is a choice away from pathology and linearity” (5). In that same spirit, this guide uses the term “justice” while also acknowledging its limitations and the debates around it.