Service-Learning as an Intellectual Movement: The Need for an "Academic Home" and Critique for the Community Engagement Movement

 This chapter argues for a reconceptualization of the service-learning movement as an intellectual movement in order to reconnect to and expand upon its vision of meaningful connections between colleges and communities and the notion of a scholarship of engagement. This, in turn, necessitates the development of an “academic home”—i.e., academic programs such as majors, minors and interdisciplinary programs—and the concomitant critique and debate that flourishes within such academic contexts. This chapter thus details how service-learning can be understood as an intellectual movement, provides the theoretical grounding for viewing the academic department as the key unit of analysis within higher education, and concludes with an example of how such an academic home can foster and sustain productive critique that can strengthen the community engagement movement.