Service Learning

With contributions from leading experts across disciplinary fields, this book explores best practices from the field's most notable researchers, as well as important historically based and politically focused challenges to a field whose impact has reached an important crossroads. The comprehensive and powerfully critical analysis considers the history of community engagement and service learning, best teaching practices and pedagogies, engagement across disciplines, and current research and policies - and contemplates the future of the field. The book will not only inform faculty, staff, and students on ways to improve their work, but also suggest a bigger social and political focus for programs intended to seriously establish democracy and social justice in their communities and campuses.

The authors explore three broad areas of service-learning research and practice that reflect broader discussions of the role of pedagogy in today's educational reform efforts: Teacher Education, Crossing Boundaries: Deepening Relationships in Service-Learning and New Paradigms/Conceptual Frameworks.

Service-Learning Essentials is the resource you need to help you develop high-quality service-learning experiences for college students. Topics include: Determining what service-learning opportunities institutions should offer How to engage students in critical reflection in academic courses and in cocurricular experiences Best practices for developing and sustaining mutually beneficial campus-community partnerships Integrating service-learning into the curriculum in all disciplines and at all levels, as well as various areas of student life outside the classroom Assessing service-learning programs and outcomes The dilemmas of service-learning in the context of power and privilege.

This book offers a broad overview of many issues related to assessment in higher education, with specific application for understanding the impact of service-learning and civic engagement initiatives. Student assessment is covered in chapter 3.

This is a practical guide to designing, teaching, and coordinating service-learning courses, and for developing reciprocal community partnerships and community-based research through a lens of equity that addresses the endemic racial, social, economic, and environmental disparities across society. The text provides a comprehensive framework for developing both in-person and on-line service-learning, with a chapter on virtual delivery of courses that integrates the principles and practices described throughout the book.*** Informed by the literature of critical service-learning, critical race theory, intercultural communication theory, and social-constructivism, this book attempts to deconstruct the assumption of the preeminence of academic knowledge to reconstruct a new operational paradigm of equity-centeredness that validates community capacity to guide faculty in their redesign of service-learning curriculum, activities, collaborations, and scholarship It offers a rich compendium of ideas and examples from which faculty and practitioners can select exercises and elements to incorporate or adapt for their courses, whether designing short-term engagements or extended service-learning programs.

Randy Stoecker has been "practicing" forms of community-engaged scholarship, including service learning, for thirty years now, and he readily admits, "Practice does not make perfect." The author worries about the contradictions, unrealized potential, and unrecognized urgency of the causes as well as the risks and rewards of this work. Stoecker questions the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of the core concepts of service learning: 1. learning, 2. service, 3. community, and 4. change. By "liberating" service learning, he suggests reversing the prioritization of the concepts, starting with change, then community, then service, and then learning. In doing so, he clarifies the benefits and purpose of this work, arguing that it will create greater pedagogical and community impact.