Critical Commitments to Partnership in Global Service-Learning

In addition to many global disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, institutions of higher education within the United States were forced to move classes online and put a pause to many initiatives. Areas that were particularly affected by the pandemic were education abroad and global service-learning (GSL) programs. As GSL programs resume operations with partners around the world, there exists an opportunity to redefine partnerships with the goal of reciprocity at the center (Bartleet et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2016; Grain et al., 2019). In this study, authors conducted interviews with partner organizations in a GSL program at a large, public university in the Midwest. Through this work, the authors developed a set of guiding questions to help GSL scholar-practitioners relaunch their programs with the goal of reciprocal partnerships.