About This Journal
The VA Engage Journal promotes engaged scholarship by undergraduate, professional, and graduate students. The mission of the VA Engage Journal is to build our collective practical and intellectual capacities for meaningful community engagement by providing a forum in which students enrolled in colleges and universities across Virginia can share and reflect critically on their own community-engaged experiences, and can disseminate knowledge emerging from their engaged practice and research. The journal provides a forum for students to publish research studies (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods), reflection essays, profiles of practice, and reviews of current literature and engagement practice, all with guidance and mentorship from engaged faculty and staff. Any undergraduate or graduate student enrolled full- or part-time at a two- or four-year college or university in Virginia is eligible to submit an article. Submissions with multiple authors are welcome. The VA Engage Journal is published once annually. Submission window for volume 8: May 1 - September 3, 2019.
The VA Engage Journal was created in 2011 and hosted at the University of Virginia under the leadership and vision of Megan Raymond, University of Virginia; Drew Stelljes, The College of William and Mary; and Roberta Rosenberg, Christopher Newport University, in order to provide a forum for undergraduate students to publish community-engaged scholarship. After a hiatus in 2013, Sylvia Gale, the Director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond, became editor, and relaunched the journal on the Digital Commons platform with a new look and broader audience. With the work of a planning team consisting of faculty and staff across the Commonwealth, the journal has expanded to include the work of graduate and professional students, has reframed its areas of emphasis and now invites multimedia submissions. In July 2018, Steve Grande from James Madison University became editor.
The VA Engage Journal is an initiative of VA Engage, a network of universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia that are dedicated to their surrounding communities through many different community partnerships. VA Engage, in operation since 2008, connects these universities' community engagement offices in order to spread new ideas and resources to promote beneficial campus-community ties throughout the commonwealth. In addition to facilitating the operation of the Journal, the VA Engage Network hosts an annual meeting each fall and supports the William & Mary Active Citizens Conference.