Community of Scholars Educating for Political Engagement, (A)

California Campus Compact (CACC) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching first conceived the Service Learning for Political
Engagement Faculty Fellows Program in the autumn of 2006. The idea was to bring together a diverse group of faculty, eventually 23, from across California representing disciplines from engineering and English to agriculture and Asian American studies, from small and large colleges, as well as public, private, and faith-based institutions. These faculty, starting in the summer of 2007, would participate in a two-year effort to define political engagement, explore what their definitions meant for planning service learning projects, and assess their students' learning with an eye towards implications for refining instruction geared towards greater political engagement. This article discusses the rationale for the project, the project's goals, how the scholarly community was created, the dilemmas of creating the community, and next steps.