Service-Learning in Theory and Practice

This book offers a comprehensive rethinking of the theory and practice of service-learning in higher education. Democratic and community engagement are vital aspects of linking colleges and communities, and this book critically engages the best practices and powerful alternative models in the academy. Drawing on key theoretical insights and empirical studies, Butin details the limits and possibilities of the future of community engagement in developing and sustaining the engaged campus.

"Dan W. Butin is the kind of critical friend every service learning advocate should excitedly embrace. This book is intellectually honest, theoretically sophisticated, and deeply impassioned. Butin embodies the kind of 'scholarly criticality' that anyone interested in moving the field forward should cherish. This book will shake your assumptions about service learning in all the right ways." - Joel Westheimer, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada

"This book is a deeply critical, reflective forum for considering questions related to where service-learning has come from and where it is going or ought to go. As such, it provides practitioners with an invaluable asset with which to inject a deeper criticality to theoretical and strategic debates and relate more collegially with the rest of the academy. I have felt for some time that to promote such reflection, service-learning needs a shake-up. Butin's path-breaking book is just what the doctor ordered." - Tim Stanton, Stanford University School of Medicine, USA, and co-author of Service-Learning: A Movement's Pioneers Reflect on its Origins, Practice, and Future and Engaged Scholarship Toolkit for Research Universities and Their Faculties

"Dan W. Butin's Service-Learning in Theory and Practice: The Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education was published just as the service-learning movement reached an important milestone . . . Butin's text serves as a good source for engaging stakeholders in a process of inquiry and a pedagogy of out that just might prove transformative from the inside out." - Teaching Theology and Religion

DAN W. BUTIN is the Founding Dean of the School of Education at Merrimack College, USA.