Civic Engagement and Service Learning
Civic engagement and service learning are important pedagogical approaches that combine academic instruction with meaningful community-based projects. They foster critical thinking, leadership and moral development.
The Office of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement helps faculty integrate service and civic involvement into their courses, offers training for teaching service learning and serves as a resource to students interested in community service opportunities.
Service learning is a pedagogy that combines community-based learning with academic courses and involves ongoing reflection on the experiences. It is an educational approach that places equal emphasis on enhancing student learning and meeting community needs.
Unlike traditional internships, which are often not directly connected to the curriculum of students who do them, service learning courses are primarily connected to course objectives and provide a structured experience for learning that allows the deepening of disciplinary knowledge and community awareness.
Civic engagement is the practice of promoting the well-being of citizens and communities by building accountable, reciprocal relationships grounded in equity. It also incorporates critical reflection as the primary means for generating, deepening, and documenting learning (Ash & Clayton, 2009).
Civic engagement and service learning provide a framework for students to engage with their community, challenge sociocultural norms, and learn about their own values. They also promote the development of self-awareness and initiative, as well as critical thinking skills.
They can serve as the basis for academic courses in a variety of disciplines. They are often most closely tied to social science and pre-professional courses (such as education, psychology, or business).
Many of these service projects involve direct service to individuals. This includes tutoring, serving meals, walking foster dogs, or helping a refugee family.
Another type of service project can be more course-specific and involves exploring a specific problem or issue in the community. For example, a group of students may work together to clean up trash in the local river.
The idea of combining academic learning with real-world experiences is one that educators have been trying to adopt for years. In the process, they have discovered that service learning can be a powerful tool for improving educational outcomes and making students more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses.
Civic engagement and service learning benefit students in many ways. They foster a greater appreciation for cultural diversity, promote equity for disproportionately impacted groups, increase extrinsic motivation, and help students learn to work together in a variety of settings.
In a service-learning class, students are required to complete a community service project related to the course subject area. The project is usually a culminating activity that links personal experience with interpersonal development and reflection on critical knowledge gained during the learning period.
Students may be required to perform service that is directly related to the course or the experience may be indirectly related through a community organization. Examples of direct service include tutoring, serving meals, or volunteering at a nursing home.
Service learning can be used in any discipline, including social science, pre-professional courses, or a variety of other classes. It typically includes critical reflection and involves the full participation of the student and community members as educators, co-learners, and cogenerators of knowledge (Jameson Clayton Jaeger 2011; Sigmon 1996).
One challenge of service learning is the lack of resources in many small communities. This means that community agencies cannot afford to provide a full-scale service program, and they also often have very limited infrastructure that can be leveraged by a rural community college.
As a result, there is a need to find new ways to engage students in meaningful civic activities. This has prompted a movement among students and faculty to move higher education’s community-outreach strategy beyond the traditional model of service.
To meet this need, service learning can be enhanced in academic courses to incorporate the full participation of both students and communities as co-educators, co-learners, and co-generators of knowledge. This can be a valuable way to deepen students’ academic, social, and emotional skills and heighten their civic awareness.
