Volume 14, Issue 2 (2026) Theory and Practice: Service-Learning, Community Engagement, and Community-Based Research

The relationship between theory and practice is central to service-learning, community engagement, and community-based research. Theory offers frameworks for understanding learning, civic participation, and social change, while practice brings those frameworks into contact with the complexity of lived experience. Yet the relationship does not move in only one direction. Practice can test and refine theoretical understandings, but it can also reveal questions, relationships, and possibilities from which new understandings may emerge. In this sense, theory and practice might best be understood as being in conversation with one another.