Students’ educational experiences of theory and practice: scale and emotion in university community engagement

In the educational context of university-community engagement, how do students experience and understand the relationship between theory courses and applied courses that engage communities? Our analysis reveals that students reflect on this relationship as a scalar mismatch between the work of social theory and the work of engaging with local communities, which produces emotional effects ranging from cynicism, distrust, and guilt, to hope, empowerment, and empathy. Our findings have implications for both pedagogy and research. We argue that foregrounding emotions in theoretical courses might help bridge the gap students perceive between theory and practice by connecting emotions involved in learning through theory (epistemic emotions) and fieldwork (empirical emotions). We also argue that the imperative of university-community engagement construes courses that impart substantive disciplinary knowledge in particular ways and hence needs to be examined by sociologists of higher education as a locus of knowledge claims about theory and practice.