Literature Review

Beyond the planning disciplines (Forester, 1989; Forester, 1999), adult and continuing education scholars have devoted the most explicit attention to PPT (e.g., Bracken, 2011; Caffarella, 2002; Caffarella & Daffron, 2013; Sork, 2000). Rather than comprehensively reviewing this literature, we summarize the theoretical dimensions of PPT that are most relevant to SLCE administrator planning orientations, including that from within SLCE scholarship.

Attention to planning grew out of a recognition that planning models “treated power and politics as noise that gets in the way of good planning” (Cervero & Wilson, 1994, p. 251). This assumed gap between power and politics, on the one hand, and good planning, on the other, creates an artificial distance between planners and the social structures within which they act. In this gap, planning models have proliferated that present planning as a linearly sequenced form of managerial work, requiring primarily technical knowledge and skill. Although these models do not prohibit acknowledging practical and ethical dilemmas in planning work, they tend to neglect planning’s sociopolitical, relational, and ethical dimensions (Sork & Buskey, 1986; Sork & Käpplinger, 2019) and thereby generally fail to account for “what actually happens in practice” or “provide a guide to action” (Cervero & Wilson, 2010, p. 83).

In contrast, Cervero and Wilson (1994, 2006, 2010) defined program planning as a social process involving the negotiation of personal and organizational interests in the context of structured power relations. They contend that a central question all planners must ask themselves is how their program will affect and be affected by their broader context(s)—in other words, how to plan responsibly. To fully account for what constitutes being responsible—the planner’s ethos—entails that planners have conceptual tools to navigate the messiness inherent across planning contexts. In addition to responsibility, Cervero and Wilson (1994) identified three other concepts that account for “the world that planners experience” (p. 253). These included: “the capacity to act (power) because of position and participation in relatively enduring social and organizational relationships, and specific sets of concerns and motivations (interests) that planners and others bring to the table about what should be done” (Cervero & Wilson, 2010, p. 83). The third dimension—and the principal activity of planners—is negotiation, “whereby they come to agreement, whether consensual, conflictual, or some combination thereof, about what to do depending upon who represents which interests and who has the power to act” (Cervero & Wilson, 2010, p. 83).

The concept of the “planning table,” coined by Cervero and Wilson (2006), illustrates one-way planners’ practices involve all four dimensions (responsibility, power, interests, and negotiation). As a hermeneutic device, the planning table focuses attention on who is and is not at the table, what individuals/organizations bring to the table, how issues are brought to the table, and who has authority to make decisions related to collaborative activities and direction setting. The work of negotiation is discernible through the decisions and actions that planners make in the context of partnership work. For example, in the face of varying pressures and opportunities, does the planner choose to concentrate authority for agenda setting in their own hands, send an email soliciting agenda items from partnership members, or hold time at the end of each meeting during which all present can co-determine priorities for the next meeting? To what degree do they perceive they have autonomy and authority to influence these decisions and follow through on them? Each action expresses tradeoffs that planners make among varying values and interests, as well as sources and uses of power. However, a practitioner’s explicit consciousness of the tradeoffs involved, the ways and degrees to which their efforts are or are not entangled with power relations and interests, or that their planning choices can affect relationships and results are not fixed. Planners’ approaches vary not only because of individual differences in style, experience, and/or sense of commitment (responsibility) but also because of how they conceive power, their relative awareness and acknowledgment of which sources of power and whose interests are negotiable (political astuteness), and the skills and relationships they bring to negotiation (influence and political savvy).

Put another way, the effects of programs that result from planning decisions (i.e., outcomes) are not only educational, but they are also political (Cervero & Wilson, 2006, p. 76). SLCE practitioners negotiate power and interests on at least two conceptual levels during planning (Cervero & Wilson, 1994; see Figure 1). At the first level, planners negotiate with bringing their own interests and power strategies into institutional and community contexts. These influence strategies include networking, bargaining, reasoning, appealing, and directing (Yang & Cervero, 2001). Practitioners must be shrewd about when to employ specific tactics. For example, an SLCE planner might recruit faculty by emphasizing engaged research over engaged teaching at an R1 institution (appealing) or offer enhanced resources (student assistants or stipends) to humanities faculty to collaborate with STEM faculty on anchor partnerships focused on the Sustainable Development Goals (bargaining). Relatedly, practitioners must balance their own interests with those of other program actors (negotiate between) during the planning process (Figure 1). This balancing of power is evident in how planners handle transparency and communication. For example, SLCE practitioners influence decisions about which languages or jargon to use in meetings, how to record and distribute notes, how long to store records, and who can access them. They also establish (or may avoid establishing) processes for resolving conflicts between partners, including who has input into these decisions and when.

Figure 1

Visualization of Ways Planners can Negotiate Power and Interests during Program Planning based on Cervero & Wilson, 1994.

At the second level, planners negotiate about interests and power relationships themselves (Cervero & Wilson, 1994, p. 257; see Figure 1). Their actions are both shaped by existing power relations and capable of transforming these relationships. For instance, SLCE practitioners can create holding environments through community agreements and consensus-building decision models, which help redistribute power between community and academic partners (Davis et al., 2017; Garcia et al., 2024).

Cervero and Wilson (2010; Wilson & Cervero, 2010) distinguished among three traditions of PPT: conventional, deliberative, and critical. Conventional program planning emerges from within the techno-rational tradition. Planning involves a series of technical steps or procedures (i.e., identifying goals, setting objectives, and developing activities) that are replicable and transferable across contexts. Following logical steps is the primary task of planners. Those rooted in this tradition prioritize mastery of the technical dimensions of planning. Decision-making power (agency and authority) in conventional planning tends to be concentrated in the hands of the leader(s), and the presumption is that responsible planning is modular, efficient, and scalable. A well-designed program in one context should work well in any context. Within a conventional approach, social and political factors that might influence program quality are not considered; rather, they constitute background “noise.” Hence, Cervero and Wilson do not address the role of negotiation in the conventional tradition.

Deliberative approaches to planning incorporate limited consideration of sociopolitical contexts. Planners acknowledge that power dynamics and competing interests can influence program quality, relationships, processes, and outcomes. These planners value reflective practice and create opportunities to negotiate with and between interests by convening periodic opportunities to gather input from stakeholders. They organize planning spaces in which the organizer(s) gather practical wisdom from collaborators and interest groups at key points, allowing for plan adjustments based on situational constraints. However, despite their heightened awareness of diverse interests beyond their own that may enable or hinder planning success, planners operating within the deliberative tradition retain centralized decision-making authority. In addition, the underlying logic of conventional planning continues to inform design considerations and outcomes. Deliberative planners’ conception of responsible planning, shaped by their values, perceived agency, and understanding of power and positionality, privileges the individual planner’s role as the ultimate arbiter in setting program direction and implementation. While this concentration of power can enhance practicability—moving projects from deliberation to concrete action, especially amid complex dynamics among interest groups with varying interests—it simultaneously can impede efforts to transform planning relationships and disrupt traditional hierarchies (negotiating about the context). The deliberative approach facilitates tangible outcomes but effectively limits stakeholder influence to implementation refinements rather than fundamental power redistribution.

Critical planning theories view planning as a social process where individuals and groups negotiate power and interests within and between organizational settings to effect social change. In this tradition, planning is only as strong as the degree of trust stakeholders have in the individuals/organizations involved and in the process itself. Therefore, planning cannot be reduced to a linear set of steps or procedures. Although courses, projects, and partnerships have life cycles, each context and each planning space is unique—informed by distinctive values, interests, and differences in power and authority among contributors. Practitioners who draw on this tradition believe that social, political, and economic forces need to be explicitly accounted for in planning. They recognize that these forces influence the trust stakeholders have in the process—who participates, how they participate, and the adaptability of partners. Critical planners recognize that power is both an enabling and a constraining force. Although nested in structures, power is an emergent dimension of relationships as much as a capacity individuals can invoke. Planners in this tradition see planning activities and relationships as sites of negotiation to foster democratic participation, to mitigate inequities, to find common interests, to draw on the complementary assets of diverse stakeholders, and to facilitate distributed leadership of programs and associated processes, relationships, and outcomes. They develop planning processes and structures that support negotiating with and between interests and foster environments that transform the conditions of planning relationships (negotiate about). Dialogue, reflection, and deliberative decision-making are underlying principles that guide how decisions are made, exemplified by “nothing about us without us.”

Sandmann et al.’s (2009) seminal article specifically tied PPT to SLCE. They noted a systematic lack of attention to planning in SLCE, specifically, the absence of theory informing it or being generated from it. They asserted PPT’s value as a theoretical framework to strengthen practice and guide research “because contextual and relational factors are central to planning SL[CE]” (p. 18). Using a case study design with data from three graduate-level courses, the authors developed the Service-Learning Program Planning Model (SLPPM) to guide faculty SLCE course planning.

Since the publication of the SLPPM (Sandmann et al., 2009), few studies have explicitly engaged with PPT in SLCE. This is not to say that constructs salient to this topic are lacking in scholarship in the field. There are studies that have examined power (e.g., Sharpe & Dear, 2013), reciprocity (e.g., Dostilio et al., 2012), communication (e.g., Dumlao, 2018), and conflict (e.g., Janke & Dumlao, 2019; Prins, 2005) in partnership practice. Terms such as “co-create,” “design,” and “lead” are sometimes used to describe planning work but with a great deal of variation in meaning. “Planning” is rarely identified as a central construct, including in places one would expect it to be, such as in the recent competency frameworks developed to support professionalization in SLCE (e.g., Dostilio, 2017; Tryon & Madden, 2019; Weiss & Norris, 2019). In the field-wide competencies for CEPs, “Cultivating High Quality Partnerships” is listed among the six competency areas identified in the framework (Dostilio et al., 2017, p. 51); however, planning is not listed among the knowledge, skills, abilities, dispositions, or critical commitments that define this competency area. Nor is it included in other competency dimensions in the framework where one might anticipate specific references to it to have relevance (e.g., Administering Community Engagement Programs, Leading Change within Higher Education, Facilitating Student Learning and Development, Facilitating Faculty Development and Support). Another study identified this gap in the CEP competencies. Atiles (2018), advocating for the integration of Cooperative Extension professional competencies into those for CEPs, noted that planning is commonly included in extension competency frameworks internationally. Although Atiles did not see program planning explicitly in the CEP framework, he noted it fit under the Facilitating Faculty Development and Support dimension.

The study reported here responds to the call from Sandmann et al. (2009) for the SLCE field to more explicitly engage with PPT. Although we did not draw on the SLPPM per se, we did pull from foundational scholarship that informed it, particularly Cervero and Wilson (1994; 2006; 2010). Our work centers on partnership planning contexts SLCE Administrators experience. The SLPPM was designed with faculty course planning specifically in mind, whereas the planning work of Administrators (as well as community Organizational staff and Students) may extend beyond individual courses to include more complex and numerous configurations of activities, collaborators, and partnerships. Administrators and Faculty occupy distinct social positions within institutional hierarchies. Administrators’ interests, autonomy, and authority often diverge from those of Faculty (O’Meara & Niehaus, 2009; O’Meara et al., 2013), such as in negotiating shifting institutional values, priorities, and fiscal constraints.

From a planning perspective, such variations between Administrators and Faculty interests are important to understanding the forces that inform the practice of each. We used the three PPT traditions, as synthesized by Cervero and Wilson, to examine Administrators’ perspectives and actions as they planned a partnership reflection activity.

Methods

The current study reports findings from a subset of data collected as part of a broader IRB-approved study funded by the Community Engagement Alliance (formerly Indiana Campus Compact) (Price et al., 2021). Because the broader study context is relevant to understanding the findings in this paper, we summarize necessary information here and direct readers to the published report for more details (Kniffin et al., 2023). Participants in that study were members of twelve community-campus relationships at five institutions and included nine Faculty, seventeen Administrators, eight Students, eight staff at community Organizations, one community Resident, and four participants who did not self-identify. All participants completed the Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale II (TRES II) Reflection Framework (Clayton et al., 2022), which includes three sections guided by the DEAL Model for Critical Reflection (Ash & Clayton, 2009) to describe, examine, and articulate learning regarding relationship quality. We also interviewed onsite planners from each campus before and after the reflection activity to gather information on their planning decisions and other feedback on the Reflection Framework. Herein, we refer to the Reflection Framework as the reflection activity. Our team designed the reflection activity as a collaborative tool; however, some sections (such as the embedded 10-item scale) can also be completed individually prior to collaborative sessions. Our larger project goals included learning directly from practitioners who were interested in using reflection to improve the quality of their relationships with the community. Although the reflection activity included a workbook with specific steps and prompts to guide all participants, onsite planners had latitude in coordinating it. This included deciding:

• who had the authority to make planning decisions (e.g., an individual, a representative body, everyone involved),

• who determined the local goals for the activity,

• who was invited to participate in the activity,

• who facilitated each step of the process (e.g., research team members, planners, participants),

• the participation modality and location used in each step (in-person, virtual, hybrid, on/off-campus),

• the timeline (e.g., expectations for how concentrated/distributed in time completing each section would occur, on which days, times), and

• the approaches to completing sections of the reflection activity (fully collaborative, a combination of individual and collaborative reflection).

The current study used a collective case study design (Creswell & Poth, 2024) involving multiple bounded cases (people or sites) to illustrate orientations to program planning, document variations, and seek themes through cross-case analysis. Each of the five institutions associated with the broader study served as a case. This paper focuses on two interviews conducted with each of the onsite planners: an initial pre-interview at the beginning of the planning process and a post-interview held approximately one week after the completion of the reflection activity. Interviews were designed to elicit evidence of each planner’s decision-making in coordinating and implementing the reflection activity.

Using purposeful sampling methods (Patton, 2015), researchers recruited planners through multiple channels: listserv announcements to the higher education SLCE community, direct invitations, and online webinars. The webinars served dual purposes: gathering feedback on a draft Reflection Framework and recruiting participants for the broader study. Seven participating planners were based at five institutions of higher education in the United States.

All the planners in this study identified themselves as Administrators, Faculty, or both (Table 1). Two sites each had two planners involved. Five of the seven planners were affiliated with centralized SLCE offices; another served as an academic department chair, and another was a faculty member with research interests in partnerships.

The broader study employed a research design that called for close collaboration between researchers and planners. In one case, a planner was both a member of the research team and a co-planner at the site. Additionally, two research team members had established professional relationships with planners at three sites from previous work. These connections enhanced rapport among planners and researchers, blurring traditional insider-outsider boundaries. While this arrangement supported more collegial and frank conversations, it may have added to tensions some planners experienced during the project, such as needing to balance the project end date set by the research team to meet grant deadlines with their own priorities, local schedules, workloads, and the availability of participants they wished to involve in the reflection activity.

The research team employed a semi-structured interview protocol to ensure consistency while allowing flexibility for follow-up questions. Before each interview, researchers asked planners to describe their institutional context and role in partnership work, current concerns and goals related to partnerships, and desired outcomes from the reflection activity. The protocol also addressed selection criteria for participants and their intended roles, strategies for convening partners, and planners’ own intended role(s) during the activity (e.g., participant, observer, facilitator, or scribe).

The post-interview process focused on comparing planners’ anticipated plans for the reflection activity with their actual implementation and results. We used the concept of planning orientation to analyze patterns in how planners approached and made sense of PPT through their decisions and actions. Planning orientations encompass practitioners’ internalized views about responsible planning, including their understandings of power dynamics and interests and how they read and respond to both.

During the post-interviews, researchers reviewed PPT traditions with participants both verbally and in writing. Planners were asked to identify their preferred planning approach within the PPT framework and provide their rationale for their selections. They then compared their ideal practices with their actual decisions in planning and implementing the reflection activity.

Two distinct aspects of planning orientation emerged from this analysis. Desired planning orientation referred to practitioners’ ideal approach to responsible planning. This encompassed to whom planners saw themselves as accountable during planning, whether to their own interests, institutional priorities, personal relationships, the production of public goods, or how they internally prioritized and sought to reconcile these competing accountabilities. It also included their understanding of and inclination toward building and wielding power considering their value claims (e.g., reciprocity, justice, equity, effectiveness, trust). Practiced planning orientation captured how planners actually implemented the reflection activity. This involved comparing their ideals with actions, analyzing the strengths and limitations of each PPT tradition they referenced, and reflecting on how they would negotiate similar circumstances when planning partnership reflection activities in the future.

Researchers conducted synchronous online interviews via Zoom and analyzed both audio recordings and written transcripts. After assigning pseudonyms to each planner, the research team analyzed responses for patterns specific to each individual’s interests and their positionality relative to partners involved. The analysis examined their power and influence strategies for organizing the reflection activity, as well as their awareness of and stances toward both institutional interests and those of their partners/participants. Researchers also focused on how planners made contextual decisions to negotiate power and interests in situ.

Descriptive and in vivo coding were used to organize the data categorically and then mapped to the three PPT traditions offered by Cervero and Wilson (2006; 2010). Contextual information for each case was coded to build profiles for each planner and to provide grounds for comparison. A subset of our team reviewed the transcripts to look for evidence of decisions made during the planning process and coded them into the four interrelated dimensions of planning practice per Cervero & Wilson (1994): responsibility, power, interests, and negotiation.

Finally, we coded for themes related to shifts between desired and practiced planning orientations, judgments about selected orientations, and reflections on the planning process. The planners’ practiced orientation versus desired orientation, as documented in the pre- and post-interviews, became the basis for within-case and cross-case comparisons. Analytically, desired and practiced planning orientations provided a mechanism to identify gaps between planners’ desires, their practice, and their experienced sources of dissonance. Because the conceptual, political, and moral dimensions that underlie planning are so often tacit and unstated, we assumed that planners may vary in their awareness of the broader assumptions underlying their actions.

Results

We begin this section by introducing each of the planners through a profile that illustrates their roles, standpoints, campus context, and goals for engaging in the reflection activity as well as descriptions of their desired planning orientations. We then present some of the ways planners negotiated the complexities of planning as they organized and participated in the reflection activity. These decisions are described in the context of Cervero and Wilson’s (1994) central concepts of planning practice. Finally, we examined the shifts between planners’ desired and practiced planning orientations, as described through planners’ reflections and the interpretations of the research team.

Discussion and Implications

A key takeaway from these findings is the added value of structured reflection on planning orientations to surface dissonance related to partnership practice and ideals. This dissonance highlights the tensions between how practitioners envisioned responsible planning of their reflection activity, the constraints they faced, and the tradeoffs they made during actual implementation. An empirical focus on planning orientations concretizes how the everyday actions and seemingly mundane logistical tasks planners enact may contribute to either reproducing or transforming partnership relationship dynamics. Digging into the minutiae of specific planning contexts helps reveal to participants a fundamental relationship: that planning is partnering, the embodiment of an ethos. Our study showed that understanding this relationship became clearer through detailed contextual analysis, even for those actively committed to and engaged in the broader partnership reflection project.

Our findings, while illustrative, have context-dependent limitations that may restrict their generalizability. The study drew participants from a broader research project, meaning recruited planners had both the capacity and interest to engage in a multi-part critical reflection process with stakeholders, characteristics that may not reflect typical community engagement offices or CEPs. Additionally, while pre- and post-interviews included questions essential to the broader study (Kniffin et al., 2023), not all these data directly informed the present analysis. Each planner’s profile represents a partial snapshot of the factors shaping their interests and planning context, potentially influencing our interpretations. We acknowledge that our interpretations may not fully capture the complexity or nuance of the planners’ experiences or views. Finally, the grant’s performance period imposed implementation timelines. However, these constraints closely resembled the academic year schedules that typically govern campus-based planners’ work.

Each planner engaged with their own agency and interests, working to negotiate both with and between contexts. This engagement was evident in the approaches of conventionally and deliberatively oriented planners like Julia and Laura. Both demonstrated awareness of power dynamics, though their recognition of power sources and interests in planning the reflection activity emphasized individual and institutional dimensions (such as role, authority, influence, and agency) and resources within their direct purview (including budget, materials, and people).

Julia emphasized her positional power and institutional authority in convening, directing, resourcing, and advancing the planning process. Her primary focus was on these formal structures, while giving less conscious attention to relational or network power, though she did leverage her collaborative relationship with Piper. Laura’s approach to planning the reflection activity drew upon her evolving read of community, campus, and departmental conditions, motivations, and dynamics. Her prior experiences in the partnership, both as a faculty member (active partner) and as department chair (sponsor/intermediary), informed her reading of interests and grounded her rationale for selecting a more directive approach to plan the reflection activity. Her decisions reflected her weighting of priorities—balancing her individual leadership style with her sense of accountability to diverse stakeholders—while envisioning this pilot activity as an adaptive model for integrating collective partnership reflection into departmental culture.

Laura’s decision-making is consistent with the deliberative tradition, while Julia’s choices contrast with Wilson and Cervero’s (2010) contention that conventional planners discount social context dimensions, including power, as background noise. The findings from this sample challenge this view. Wilson and Cervero’s contention does not account for internal dialogues that individual planners may have regarding their own sources of power and influence [and how to deploy them] or their conceptions of values like reciprocity (cf. Dostilio et al., 2012), dialogues that intentionally designed professional development can support SLCE planners to become more aware of and modify. Julia’s case invites further inquiry into how planner agency and negotiation function across planning traditions, partnership scales, and organizational leadership roles (e.g., O’Meara et al., 2013).

Inviting reflection on their desired and practiced orientations using the three PPT traditions prompted each planner to make visible sources of dissonance, to identify gaps, and to question the degree of integrity they observed between their partnership claims and planning actions. During the interviews, several planners tacked back and forth to situate their beliefs about their practice within a specific orientation versus their actual practice. Prompting planners to name an orientation was itself a disorienting experience. Some, like Amber, were able to reconcile their disorientation and clarify their stance and planning style. For those drawn to a critical planning orientation (i.e., Carmen, Felicia, Paula), reflection surfaced their ongoing struggles to enact democratic engagement principles given existing systems, structures, and constraints and how these are embedded in planning decisions and routines. It raised their awareness of specific instances in which disjunctures in their planning assumptions inhibited living their principles regardless of other factors. Furthermore, this type of examination may not happen spontaneously, which demonstrates the power of our intervention with CEPs to open avenues to alternative responses.

Determining how collaborative to be in a community-academic planning process presents an ongoing ethical dilemma. For example, all the planners cited scheduling concerns frequently as a practical consideration. Applying a planning orientation lens to examine their responses to scheduling issues helped planners see the ethical tensions inside very practical tasks like scheduling meetings, deciding how to administer surveys, and deciding where to hold meetings, including connecting these tasks to moral value claims like co-creation. Adams et al. (2024, p. 15–16) examine the “instinct to limit or temper invitations” out of concern “that merely extending an invitation to collaborate might put undue pressure on the recipient to sacrifice limited resources”; they conclude that “however well intentioned, it is fundamentally disempowering … [and] denies the individual the ability to make the decision for themselves.” Ethical complexities represent dialectical tensions that are structural and pervasive in community-campus relationships (Dumlao & Janke, 2012). SLCE planners regularly confront these complexities. One benefit of this exercise is strengthening commitment to act, as when Carmen decided to say “no, not now” to future opportunities.

Practitioner-scholars have given increased attention to strengthening professional development to support practitioners, particularly students, staff, and faculty, by attending to issues of reciprocity, mutual benefit, and power sharing in their partnership practices. One place this is clearly evidenced is in the work to develop fieldwide CEP competencies (Dostilio et al., 2017; Dostilio & Perry, 2017). Dostilio and Welch (2019) discussed the importance of CEPs coming to understand themselves as cultural beings in order to “effectively navigate, appreciate, and honor the cultural crossings of partnership work [that] requires being aware of [their] cultural contexts, personal and professional, and their inherent orientations, pressures, and goals” (p. 182). In our view, practitioner engagement with planning orientations is key to the work Dostilio and Welch describe and warrants further attention in CEP professional development to cultivate high-quality partnerships.

SLCE practitioners vary in their interpretations of the call to higher education’s public purposes (Butin, 2014; Hernandez, 2017). Although hierarchical systems and structures (e.g., technocratic, post-colonial) pervade community-academic partnerships, not all practitioners identify as activists or social justice change agents (Morton, 1995); stated in PPT terms, not all SLCE planners locate themselves within a critical orientation, as evidenced in our study sample. Some practitioners may gravitate to “it depends,” remaining open and responsive to the specifics of the activity being planned, the relationships involved, and the context. “It depends” functions as both a practical stance and a political-moral position on planning accountability. Recognizing this dual nature can prompt new questions and reveal specific routines where practitioners can implement incremental changes to enhance partnership quality.

Although transformational partnerships may not always be the desired goal (Bringle et al., 2009), how might the field use desired and practiced planning orientations to support planners toward greater integrity and agency in their practice—meeting them where they are while fostering political astuteness and technical capacity for authentic partnerships? In support of this goal, and to elevate the value of planning orientations in SLCE work, our team is developing a planners’ and facilitators’ guide to accompany the TRES II Reflection Framework. The planning section acknowledges the value of planning as part of the reflection process, introduces each PPT tradition, and invites individuals to engage with the ideological underpinnings of planning. Through explicit engagement, we expect that practitioners will become more conscious of their orientations and better able to take strategic actions that better align their desired and practiced planning orientations with their commitments to authentic partnerships in the face of competing interests.

Conclusion

Sork and Käpplinger (2019) note that all planners oscillate between “conservative continuity and progressive change” in their practice and that attempting to achieve “a balance is more difficult than some might assume” (p. 43). The findings from this study illustrate the value that attention to planning orientations may hold for aiding practitioners to cultivate this balance in their daily work. This study reinforces prior calls (e.g., Sandmann et al., 2009) for additional research using PPT to analyze planning practices, including the mindsets, interests, and contexts of everyone involved, not only SLCE administrators (i.e., community organization staff, community residents, students, and faculty). We encourage further exploration and inquiry with structured reflection tools and related professional development interventions that attend to the conceptual elements of planning, inclusive of the full range of PPT traditions, as well as further inquiry devoted to planners and their planning orientations to encompass the full range of SOFAR partners as planners.

Author Note

The data for this article were part of a larger project to develop and study the TRES II Reflection Framework. This project was supported by a Research With and About Community Engagement Grant from Indiana Campus Compact (now Community Engagement Alliance) in 2021–22. We are grateful for their support of this research. We also want to thank each of the site liaisons who were the planners at the heart of this study. All are deeply committed community engagement professionals seeking, each in their own way, to advance the public purposes of higher education. We are indebted to them for their contributions of time, talent, and wisdom, particularly at a time when higher education institutions and communities were emerging out of the heart of the pandemic shutdown. Their willingness to convene and pilot the TRES II Reflection Framework with their SOFAR partners [i.e., the participants] has been indispensable in helping us refine the Reflection Framework and supporting materials. We extend our gratitude to Abby Kennemer, Alyssa Pier, and Lauren O’Hair for their contributions to transcribing the planner interviews and a special thanks to Alyssa for providing project coordination support for this phase of the TRES II research project. Additionally, we recognize the Indiana University Indianapolis Institute for Engaged Learning, which provided graduate funding for Alyssa as well as offered in-kind systems support.

Author Bios

Mary F. Price, PhD, is an independent practitioner-scholar and consultant. Most recently she served as the Director of Teaching & Learning at The Forum on Education Abroad and before that as the Director of Faculty Development at the IUPUI (now Indiana University Indianapolis) Center for Service and Learning.

Jasmina Camo-Biogradlija, PhD, is a senior researcher with the Education Policy Initiative at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Patti H. Clayton, PhD, is a practitioner-scholar and consultant (PHC Ventures); Practitioner-Scholar-in-Residence with NC Campus Engagement; and Senior Scholar with UNC Greensboro.

Lori E. Kniffin, PhD, is an assistant professor of leadership at Fort Hays State University.

Robert G. Bringle, PhD, is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Philanthropic Studies at Indiana University Indianapolis.

Haden M. Botkin is a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mary F. Price, mfprice67@gmail.com.