Exploring Cultural Dynamics of Self-Other Relations: University Faculty and Students Engage in Service-Learning with Refugees

Service-learning may serve as a new scholarship of engagement, in which service-learning and other forms of civic engagement are intrinsic to the faculty roles of teaching, research, and professional service. Involvement in community-based research allows close faculty-student collaboration and reduces the traditional boundaries between research universities, small teaching institutions, and community colleges (Speck & Hoppe, 2004). More importantly, civic engagement once embedded in the very core of the mission and nature of higher educational institutions has the "potential for addressing a crisis of community, the crisis that signifies social, political, intellectual and moral fragmentation" (Hoppe, 2004, p. 147). This paper was conceived largely because of the deep concerns with the questions regarding the role of the faculty in fulfilling the mission of their university and the place of service-learning within the academic curricula and the university's mission and strategic goals.