This project is overseen by the Pennsylvania/New York Campus Compact Consortium:
Transforming Institutions through Service-Learning in the Academic Disciplines Program, funded by the Corporation for National Service and Community Service Learn and Serve America Program.
The project brings together faculty from the related disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning from four institutions, two in New York City and two in upstate cities. Through faculty retreats and outreach to students, peers, and community-based organizations, the project seeks to expand the quantity and quality of interdisciplinary service-learning courses and activities within each of our institutions, as well as to expand collaborative service-learning projects within and between institutions and throughout the disciplines.

The project responds to fundamental needs and opportunities for education in our disciplines, charged with shaping, improving, and maintaining the communities we live in. First, we need to establish interdisciplinary collaboration and modes of working together to address communities’ concerns. Second, educational programs need to reflect the interdisciplinary reality of practice—especially when it comes to working with under-resourced communities whose needs do not fit neatly into discrete fields. Third, the disciplines require appropriate standards and measures of evaluation for assessing the effectiveness of these collaborations.

In Year 1 (2007) the project team members began to probe common challenges and lessons learned in their own experiences with service-learning in architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. Team members benefited from the dialogue that the network affords, while individually each sustained his/her demonstrated commitments to engaging students and community partners in collaborations that benefit under-resourced communities. Current activities through the end of Year 1 involve undertaking and completing an online survey with faculty in the Northeast. Concurrently, the team is developing a review of literature related to service-learning in design and planning. The team held a symposium at City College in New York City on April 4-5, 2008. The symposium was entitled, "Erasing Boundaries—Supporting Communities Service-Learning in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning," and profiled peer-reviewed papers by 40 academics in the design and planning fields. The papers will become the basis for a book or journal publication.

The main goal of this project is to examine challenges and identify best practices for conducting and expanding participation in meaningful service-learning activities within the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning that help strengthen communities, leading to recommendations for implementation at participating institutions and throughout the disciplines. The project responds to fundamental needs and opportunities for education in the design and planning disciplines, which are charged with shaping, improving, and maintaining the communities in which we live. Professional programs in architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning often incorporate community-based projects as a form of applied research or experiential learning for students, combining academic theory and practice. However, the challenge lies in developing strategies and practices of engagement and tools for evaluating the quality of these experiences to ensure that they fully meet the intent of service-learning, in terms of the students’ learning outcomes and the needs of the community partners. This project aims to qualitatively strengthen the effectiveness of partnerships between academic design disciplines and the communities with whom they work.

Community-University Partnerships