The Project on Integrating Service with Academic Study, or ISAS, was started in 1989 and marks the shift in the work of Campus Compact from promoting community service on college and university campuses — service outside the curriculum — to emphasis on service that is integrally connected to course content in a wide variety of disciplines. With its curricular focus, ISAS is primarily concerned with the needs of faculty who adopt service-learning as a teaching methodology and seek to deepen its practice in their courses, in their department, and at their institutions.
A lesson of the early 1990s, a time when there was increasingly widespread adoption of service-learning, was that individual faculty members, no matter how committed to rethinking teaching and learning in their courses and redesigning their curriculum, were limited in their ability to deepen and expand the practice of service learning. One barrier they faced was related to faculty roles and rewards: unless the administration, particularly chief academic officers (CAOs) — provosts, deans, and chairs — were attuned to the interests and needs of faculty who wanted to incorporate community-based public problem solving into their courses and actively addressed the re-writing of promotion and tenure guidelines on their campus, eliminating disincentives for faculty by broadening notions of scholarship, then service-learning was not going to take root at an institution. Similarly, no single faculty member, no matter how proficient in incorporating student service experiences into the course content, is able to maintain long-term partnerships with agencies and individuals in a community, something that requires the establishment of trusting relations and formal obligations. Community partnerships, like the issue of addressing faculty roles and rewards, requires an institutional response, and often necessitates a structure such as an office of community service, a mechanism that can assist faculty in making connections to a community and maintain relationships with community partners beyond the parameters a course or a semester. As wider institutional issues emerged out of the engaged pedagogy of service-learning, the work of ISAS encompassed a wider framework of service-learning within an engaged campus.
Within this framework of the adoption and institutionalization of service-learning, the primary constituency of ISAS is faculty. At the same time, in order for faculty to successfully integrate service into their courses, ISAS also works with chief academic officers to create a hospitable academic environment for faculty who adopt service-learning. Additionally, ISAS directs its attention to community service directors, those who staff the community service office, since they are essential in making resources available to faculty, to coordinating curricular and co-curricular service, bridging student affairs and academic affairs, and brokering partnerships in the community. ISAS also works with students focusing on their capacity as agents of change on the campus and in the community and as a potent force on campus for assisting in the incorporation of service-learning into courses and into the institutions. Finally, ISAS is concerned with the interests and needs of community partners both as service providers and as educators who are essential collaborators in transforming communities, curriculum, and institutions as of higher education.
ISAS undertakes a range of activities targeted toward faculty, CAOs, CSDs, Students, and community partners. In some cases, activities may address the needs of multiple constituencies; for example, Introductory Institutes require campus teams that include both faculty and CSDs; Engaged Department Institutes require campus teams that include faculty, CSDs and community partners. Simlarly, publications may have a primary audience of faculty but may also be a valuable resource for CSDs, CAOs, or community partners.
