Service Learning

Service learning has been considered one of the most promising innovations in educational reform movement.  The general purpose of this book is to determine if there is a relationship among the perceptions of university students regarding community service learning and its impact on leadership.

In the text, several types of community projects that emphasize service learning are discussed.  These projects include literacy-based community service learning and traditional service learning experiences.  Service Learning is the integration of community service with the academic content of coursework that has been identified by educators as a practice that will develop civic responsibility in today’s youth, a goal articulated in many university mission statements.  While there has been rapid growth in the use of service-learning research in the past ten years, more information is needed to improve the understanding of service learning as pedagogy on college campuses.  This book explores the process of integrating the service experience with classroom learning in college service-learning courses from the literature reviewed.

The results replicate and extend findings from earlier research.  Participation in service-learning courses was found to facilitate at least four types of student outcomes.    These are a greater sense of personal efficacy, an expanded awareness of the world, a heightened understanding of personal values, and an increased level of engagement in the course.  According to the students, these outcomes came about primarily through the use of structured reflection and critical analyses of social issues.

This text contributes to our understanding of service learning by providing direct empirical evidence of the efficacy of reflection as a key component of service learning and has been justified primarily on theoretical grounds.  It also demonstrates the importance of integrating structured reflection into service-learning courses to assist students in making the connection between their service experience and the academic course material.

The book  demonstrates the impact that service learning can make on higher education and society, not only as a pedagogy that enhances students’ cognitive and affective development, but also as an important and useful tool to prepare our college and university students to meet the demands of the future and become leaders of the future.

IMPACT OF SERVICE LEARNING

The problem the study investigated was the impact of service learning on the leadership potential of college and university students.  Service learning offers a communication with someone.  It brings together academia and the surrounding community service, to encourage communication across the lines of marginality.  Service learning may be defined as follows: Service-learning is a form of experiential education in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs together with structured opportunities intentionally designed to promote students learning and development. (Jacoby, 1996)

Specifically, the study sought to determine the goals in service learning.  These goals were:

1. To enhance student learning by joining theory with experience and thought with action,
2. To enhance self-esteem and self-confidence in students ,

3. To give students the opportunity to do important and necessary work,

4. To increase the civic responsibility of students,

5. To expose students to societal inadequacies and injustices and empower students to remedy them.

My special focus is on college and university students.  I also focus on how student leadership is impacted through service learning.  Service learning means different things to different people.  At minimum, there is a traditional form that emphasizes providing charitable services, and there is a new, academic form that emphasizes applying classroom concepts and skills in the community.  Both are now sufficiently well developed in the service learning literature that it appears that neither will displace the other.