Faculty: Service Learning
What is Service-Learning?
According to Learn and Serve America's National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, “Service-Learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.”
There are four distinct parts to Service-Learning:
- The service opportunity must connect to class objectives.
- The service opportunity must address a need identified by the community.
- Reflection activities are incorporated in order to facilitate learning.
- The partnership with the community organization must be mutually beneficial.
Benefits of Service-Learning
Service-learning has many benefits and not just for the community partners. The following section, compiled by staff at the University of Toledo, highlights the benefits to community partners, the college, students, and faculty.
- Participation in education-related service enhances the student’s:
- college GPA
- general knowledge
- knowledge of field or discipline
- aspirations for advanced degrees
- Service-learning students were more likely to agree that they performed up to their potential in a course.
- Students in service-learning sections report they “learned to apply principles from [the] course to new situations” and “developed a set of overall values in [the] field.”
- Service-learning courses engage all learners.
- Service-learning provides authentic assessment opportunities.
- Involvement with service-learning identifies new areas for research and publication.
- Service-learning experiences promote awareness of current societal issues as they relate to academic areas of interest.
- Service-learning enriches and enlivens teaching.
- Service-learning correlates positively with increasing student retention.
- Service-learning provides a unique opportunity for collaboration with the surrounding community.
- Service-learning allows the university to be seen as a part of the greater community.
- Community organizations rated students highly for providing valuable services to the organization and for being important to organizational operations.
- Community organizations believe student volunteers can provide as vital a service as their community volunteer counterparts.
- Community organizations feel that the benefits of working with college student volunteers outweigh the costs.
- Community organizations’ most common suggestion for improvement was to expand service programs.