Mani Hull

Changing education outcomes with service learning

Professor Carolyn Hughes, Professor Sharon Shields, and doctoral candidate Mani Hull recently won a grant to expand Hughes' mentoring project to increase service learning opportunities at Tennessee's community colleges.

They will use the three-year grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service's Learn and Serve America program to create the Tennessee Academic Civic Engagement Program (TACEP) at the Center for Child and Family Policy in the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies.

"We have three objectives for this grant. The first is to conduct high school mentoring and outreach to at-risk youth at three high-poverty, low-performing high schools in North Nashville," Hull said. "The second is to help community college faculty integrate service learning into their (curricula). The third objective is to create the Tennessee Campus Compact, a state entity that will leverage resources and promote academic service learning, community service and civic engagement statewide."

Mani is a doctoral candidate in higher education leadership and policy and is the Director of TACEP and Tennessee Campus Compact. She is currently working to get state legislation passed to institute a service learning component in higher education at all state colleges and universities.  Her research study is "Promising Practices of State Campus Compacts: An Exploratory Study."

Mani Hull

• ED.D., Higher Education Leadership and Policy
• Undergraduate Institution: B.A., University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
• Hometown: Perak, Malaysia
• Career Goal: Establish service learning in curricula throughout the state of Tennessee
• Favorite Thing to Do in Nashville: Walking Radnor Lake with my husband