Revitalizing the Land Grant Mission in the South: One University's Path to Civic Engagement via Community Schools

This chapter illustrates some of the tensions encountered by faculty and administrators at the University of Tennessee who are trying to encourage their southern, land grant university to be more socially responsive and transformational in its approach to student learning and civic engagement and are finally having some success. The authors look at how the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT) and its University Assisted Community Schools (UACS) provide a model for effective service-learning for UT students and resources for communities in need. It will show how the theories developed at the Chicago School helped shape the model for UACS and how the original purpose of land grant institutions also supports the premise for UACS and other modes of civic engagement. The chapter concludes with a connection back to the cultural tensions that arise in the context of UT, service-learning, and civic engagement.