Accepting the Challenge: A Case Study in Pedagogical Inquiry

Higher education has been criticized for not fulfilling its democratic purpose—that is, to prepare students for citizenship, not just careers. Longo and Gibson (2016) argue that “as access to higher education has increased, many colleges and universities ironically have become more detached from their public missions,” leading to the increasing separation between learning and social purpose (p. 61). Many schools and departments have already begun the hard work of reevaluation and critical reflection in response to such criticism and are helping to reinvent American higher education (Hartley & Hollander, 2005). Three such examples are communication programs featured as case studies by AAC&U in Civic Learning in the Major by Design because they have incorporated civic and social responsibility requirements into their major (Carey, 2017)