Meta Mendel-Reyes
Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning through ServiceBerea College, Kentucky
Dr. Meta Mendel-Reyes is Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning through Service (CELTS) and Associate Professor of General Studies at Berea College, Kentucky. After graduating from college in her home state of California, she spent fifteen years as a labor organizer, including four years with migrant farmworkers. In 1988, she returned to graduate school athe University California at Berkeley, receiveing her Ph.D. in Political Science in 1992. Her dissertation won the 1993 Leo Strauss Award from the American Political Science Association for the Best Dissertation in Political Philosophy.Since 2000, Dr. Mendel-Reyes has taught and directed the center for service-learning and student-led community service at Berea College. Berea, the first interracial and coed college in the South, serves only low-income students, primarily Appalachians and African-Americans, who each receive a full-tuition scholarhship and work 10-15 hours a week. At Berea, service-learning has enabled Dr. Mendel-Reyes to share both of her own educational experiences: as an academic and as a community activist.
Dr. Mendel-Reyes is the author of Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1995), and several articles and chapters on service-learning and democracy. Her current work includes co-authoring the chapters, “Building Campus Support for Service-Learnning,” in Andrew Furco and Barbara Moely, eds., Empowering Stakeholders for Service-Learning Institutionalization in Higher Education, and “’We’ll Understand It Better By and By’: A Three Dimensional Approach to Teaching Race Through Community Engagement,” in Stephanie Evans et al, eds, African Americans and Community Engagement (both forthcoming).
