The potential for service-learning.

In recent years there has been an unprecedented degree of public examination and criticism of the American higher education system, with its knowledge-generation status, funding supports, instructional practices, and curricular offerings coming under vigorous critical scrutiny. The upshot of this barrage, however, is not cleanly or uniformly targeted, as administration, faculty, staff, and even students can be found on all sides of a growing discomfort with the traditional role of the academy and its utility in the postmodern era. It appears that many of higher education's cherished truisms and sacrosanct assumptions about the very core enterprise of teaching, knowledge, and learning are on the block.

The intent of this special issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly (AEQ) is not to address the debate directly, but to acknowledge its presence as a backdrop to some positive developments that touch on a goodly share of the university's mission and modus operandi in America. According to many scholars, the problems college graduates will face in the future will not be organized according to the categories of traditional academic disciplines, and the solutions will cross borders of discrete categories of research and study. This prediction has encouraged many educators to reconsider the mission of American education and see how it can better fit the fast changing world picture, a world that will be more globally oriented. Our schools and universities need to move beyond training young people for specific tasks; education must enable students to think critically and act deliberatively in a pluralistic world.

This alternative approach demands a different kind of learning and thus, a different set of beliefs about teaching. In education's traditional paradigm, instructors teach by lecturing; a student is expected to learn by listening to the teacher and then completing sets of exercises about the information communicated. As the 21st century unfolds, our educational curriculum must be rethought, revitalized, and renewed. If fragmentation--or lack of interconnection--has been one of the chief characteristics of traditional American education, we must now begin to provide opportunities for students to see problems in context rather than as small units independent of the whole. The potential for service-learning (i.e., service that is intrinsically tied to teaching and research and that aims to bring about community improvement) in an interdisciplinary framework to expand the walls of the classroom, link the subject matter from diverse academic disciplines in relevant and meaningful ways, and reconfigure the design of educational programs in higher education offers much for future researchers and practitioners to explore.

This issue of AEQ features articles that examine diverse approaches to the design and implementation of service-learning projects in a variety of interdisciplinary contexts and settings. Several authors also discuss research and evaluation frameworks for service-learning in higher education. We invite the reader to consider the implications for the large and growing body of research findings on academically-based service learning to contribute to the dialogue on the academy's mission in the 21st century.

Dr. Judith Hope Munter

Assistant Professor, Critical Pedagogy and Multicultural Education

University of Texas at El Paso