What is Service Learning?

Connections
Faculty, staff, and community agency reps discuss potential service learning projects at the Campus-Community Connections seminar.

"Service Learning is a pedagogical method that engages students working in teams in the solving of real, community-based problems. Students are presented with problems and asked to seek authentic and viable solutions. Under faculty guidance, students use knowledge and skills to tackle these challenges and to be of service to their community. Students access knowledge, enrich their understanding of academic content, conduct research, and make connections among ideas, while seeking solutions to problems that represent real needs for their communities."

-from Problem Based Service Learning: A Fieldguide for Making a Difference in Higher Education. Rick Gordon, Ed. 2000: Education By Design.

Key Components of Service Learning:

  • Connected to course or curriculum
  • Organized around clear learning objectives
  • Meets real community needs
  • Provides opportunities for students to reflect upon their service experience

Potential Benefits of Service Learning:

  • Increases the relevancy of education to students 'living in a real world'
  • Enhances personalized education for students
  • Teaches positive values, leadership, citizenship and personal responsibility
  • Empowers students as learners, teachers, achievers and leaders
  • Invites students to become members of their own community
  • Encourages faculty to be innovative and creative in their teaching
  • Contributes to an institution's outreach efforts to the local community, the state and beyond
  • Increases campus-community collaboration and partnerships
  • Helps with community education
  • Teaches job skills and prepares students for careers after college
  • Contributes thousands of hours of service to people in need, non-profit agencies, private sector companies, non-governmental and governmental agencies