Gender mainstreaming is portrayed as the next step in the global gender equality landscape and has been widely adopted internationally in a variety of governments and political organisations. However, the radical potential of gender mainstreaming to transform organisations has not been fulfilled. In this article, I explore three paradoxes which are inherent in the intent, implementation and institutionalisation of gender mainstreaming. I argue that we cannot fully understand these global paradoxes without a better understanding of local experiences which underpin them in the everyday working lives of those people involved in advocating gender mainstreaming. Using results from an institutional ethnography of the implementation of the Gender Equality Duty by gender mainstreaming advocates in the Scottish Executive, I show that bureaucratic practices, fossilised norms and the continued reliance on soft measures to promote mainstreaming are reflections at the local level of barriers to the advancement of global gender mainstreaming. By taking seriously the local practices and knowledge of those who do gender mainstreaming, we can reflect on the inherent tensions within gender mainstreaming that prohibit its ability to truly transform the gender landscape at both the local and global level.

Publicly engaged scholarship (PES) has emerged as a powerful force, yet institutional policies and cultures have often inhibited its acceptance in the academy. This article considers the benefits of PES for higher education as well as the obstacles to its enactment. It identifies the college level as a critical site for change and offers a rubric for institutional change agents to use to assess support for community engagement at the college level and identify avenues for further progress. The authors also grapple with tensions inherent in promoting PES at institutions that have historically served as agents of domination and oppression.

he importance of understanding the community college as a vital aspect of the higher education landscape has never been more needed, nor more difficult. The American community college is a unique higher education institution greatly influenced by many internal and external forces. Community colleges are open-access institutions drawing a diversity of students including those who are first-generation and underprepared, face socioeconomic challenges, have personal immigrant histories, seek employment or transfer pathways, and/or are nontraditional learners with complex work and family demands. Many community college faculty members are not doctorally prepared, are part-time faculty, and possess fewer pedagogical tools than university faculty. Externally, community colleges are considered responsible for the health and economic stability of their area and for regional efforts to remediate existing educational achievement gaps. The complex nature of community colleges and their students have a direct impact on the successful persistence and completion of students (Cohen and Brawer 2008). In this chapter, we suggest that service-learning can be leveraged within this dynamic setting and we focus on practices that students and faculty use to help navigate the complexity of the nontraditional student experience specifically.

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This month, challenge your students to explore a version of the classic tableseating problem.