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Engaged scholarship provides students with opportunities to learn and practice skills within both the general community and underserved populations. These types of opportunities are needed in kinesiology programs which train many allied health and wellness professionals. This paper outlines different strategies that were used to create service-learning opportunities in kinesiology undergraduate classes. Using frameworks established by national organizations (e.g., League of American Bicyclists, American Fitness Index), students have an opportunity to apply concepts of how community, policy, and the environment impact physical activity and public health. These activities help students gain experience by interacting in a professional setting; building skills for data collection, community engagement, and public speaking; and apply content from coursework to real-world situations.

Community engagement is commonly imbedded in the ethos of institutions of higher education and has been identified as a High Impact Practice for student learning and retention. The Sustained Engagement Experiences in Kinesiology (SEEK) program at the University of La Verne is a curriculum-wide approach that moves students through four stages of community engagement: Respect, Participating with Effort, Self-Directions, and Leadership. The stages are developmentally sequenced across the curriculum and provide opportunities for learners to move from passive participants to active engagement scholars. The engagement experiences serve to enhance students’ abilities to transfer what they learn in the classroom to real-life problems, foster an asset-based approach to community engagement, and facilitate a transition from surface-to deep-learning.

Some commentators have suggested that the embrace of “identity politics” has gone too far and that we are now in a putative postidentity moment. Within the academy this argument has been articulated from two divergent positions. The first derides identity politics as a move away from materialist concerns. The second, more conservative, position argues that identity politics is at fault for being over-political, for reading politics into every aspect of knowledge production. I argue that identity is in fact a necessary, although not sufficient, precondition for any effective oppositional politics. I further suggest that these arguments are themselves evidence of the articulation of (white, male, and heterosexual) institutional power within the academic field of (sport) sociology. As an alternative, I argue for the renewal of a critical public sport sociology that draws upon and extends the cultural studies tradition of committed and engaged scholarship.