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Service-Learning
Running head: SERVICE-LEARNING
Service-Learning
Randall E. Osborne and Oren Renick
Texas State University-San Marcos
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Service-Learning
Service-Learning
Service-learning is a process that can and needs to be revised constantly. As such, a prescriptive plan for how to engage in service-learning is more of articulating best practices. These practices will need to be refined by faculty members to: (a) fit the needs of a particular course, department, or program, (b) meet the needs of students, (c) provide the most beneficial service to the agency, organization, or individuals being served, (d) maximize student learning, and (e) generate a product that provides those being served and the students engaging in the service with a sense of closure.
Before attempting to delineate these “best practices”, however, it is important to clarify what is meant by “service-learning.” Bringle and Hatcher (1997) defined service-learning as a:
type of experiential education in which students participate in service in the community and reflect on their involvement in such a way as to gain a further understanding of course content and of the discipline and of its relationship to social needs and an enhanced sense of civic responsibility (p. 153).
For example, imagine that you want students in a course on emotional disorders in childhood to gain an applied understanding of these disorders. To accomplish this, you might place students in a local community center and in a local mental health association with programming for children. The placement, itself, however, does not guarantee that students will gain the deeper understanding of course content, the broader appreciation for the discipline, or an enhanced sense of civic responsibility. Nor does the placement itself guarantee that the service they provide will meet an identified community need. One of the authors (RO) of this chapter taught such a course. The author approached the two agencies, described the content of the course, culled from the agency supervisors unmet needs of each agency, and discussed possible service projects students could complete that might address those needs.
The community center discussed a goal they had to improve youth perceptions of authority figures. One group from the course designed a project that placed community authority figures (police officers, judges, teacher, etc.) at the agency for evening activities with the youth. The authority figures led these activities in plain clothes. At the end of the semester, the authority figures came to the wrap-up session wearing their uniforms. The result was overwhelming: Many of the children could not believe that police officers or judges were real, everyday people who actually cared about them. This experience assisted students in seeing the concept of labeling and stigma from a very real perspective.
Another example from this same course involved the local mental health association which had purchased a videotape series on helping youth understand the implications of addiction. The association intended the videotapes to be used by local teachers, but the videotapes went unused. The student group interviewed local teachers and discovered that teachers did not use the videotapes because they did not come with prepackaged teaching materials; the teachers felt uncomfortable in teaching the material without guidelines. Students developed teaching packets and made hand puppets representing each character with which children could interact while the teacher discussed the video. The teaching materials became so popular that the local mental health association was given a grant by the state to develop similar materials for all other associations in the state.
Several national service-learning best practice documents are available including the Wingspread Principles (Honnet & Poulsen, 1989) and the work of Jeffrey Howard (1993). Simply put, the Wingspread Principles outline best practices for service-learning programs, and Howard’s principles outline best practices for faculty to utilize in service-learning courses.
Best Practices for Service-learning Programs
The Wingspread Principles of Good Practice (Honnet & Poulsen, 1989) suggested that an effective service-learning program:
1. engages people in responsible and challenging actions for the common good;
2. provides structured opportunities for people to reflect critically on their service experience;
3. articulates clear service and learning goals for everyone involved;
4. allows for those with needs to define those needs,
5. clarifies the responsibilities of each person and organization involved;
6. matches service providers and service needs through a process that recognizes changing circumstances;
7. expects genuine, active, and sustained organizational commitment;
8. includes training, supervision, monitoring, support, recognition, and evaluation to meet service and learning goals;
9. insures that the time commitment for service-learning is flexible, appropriate, and in the best interests of all involved; and
10. is committed to program participation by and with diverse populations.
Academic institutions assumed the responsibility for many of these components. Nonetheless, faculty wishing to incorporate service-learning into psychology courses should consider them as long-term goals allowing service-learning to become part of the campus culture. Several of these best practices, however, can and should be incorporated into the development of individual service-learning courses. Number two is an excellent example. Faculty must think about the course in which service-learning is to be included and develop assignments that provide students with multiple opportunities for guided reflection.
Best Practices for Service-learning Courses
Howard (1993) articulated best practices for service-learning courses. Some of these reflect the best practices for programs but are more easily applicable at the course level. Students’ service experiences and course learning can be best integrated when faculty:
1. ensure that academic credit is for learning, not for service;
2. do not compromise academic rigor;
3. set learning goals for students;
4. establish criteria for the selection of community service-learning placements;
5. provide educationally sound mechanisms to harvest the community learning (methods for reflecting on what is being learned);
6. provide support for students to learn how to harvest the community learning (support for engaging in the necessary reflection on what is being learned);
7. minimize the distinction between the students’ community learning role and the classroom learning role;
8. rethink the faculty instruction role (faculty do not always “lecture”);
9. prepare for uncertainty and variation in student learning outcomes; and
10. maximize the community responsibility orientation of the course.
Several of these characteristics are more philosophical in nature. Most faculty set learning goals for students. The task with service-learning, then, is to think about developing service experiences that provide the greatest opportunity for students to focus on those goals. From our perspective, one of the most important of these “best practices” is reflection. Bringle and Hatcher (1995) remind us that "reflection" must be (a) intentional, (b) related to the experience, and (c) connected to particular learning objectives. Faculty can reflect on the relationship between the service-learning projects and the development of their courses using the same principles.
Bringle and Hatcher (1995) summarized the criteria for the good practice of reflection. Effective reflection activities:
(1) link experience to learning;
(2) are guided;
(3) occur regularly;
(4) allow feedback and assessment; and
(5) foster the exploration and clarification of values.
Assignments in service-learning oriented courses that foster systematic and frequent reflection of the experiences as they relate to learning objectives will strengthen the very skills we value for our psychology majors. If we expect students, for example, to be able to understand a psychological issue from more than one perspective, our reflection assignments must require them to explore an issue arising from the
service-learning experience and to explore it from multiple perspectives. One method might be to assign students a reading on the different perspectives in psychology (e.g., psychodynamic, humanistic, behavioral, cognitive, neurobiological, and sociocultural). You can follow this activity with an assignment that requires students to select some issue they are confronting in their service-learning experience and ask them to describe how someone operating from two or three of the perspectives would describe the nature of that issue.
Eyler, Giles and Schmiede (1996), provided a useful rubric for developing reflection activities: faculty should remember the four Cs of reflection: (a) continuous, (b) connected, (c) contextualized, and (d) challenging. Reflection that is continuous requires students to reflect on the experience before, during and after the experience. Reflection that is connected, links the reflection to the course content and the course learning goals. Reflection that is contextualized is given a framework. Imagine, for example, that a faculty member is teaching abnormal psychology and has required students to do a service experience at a state hospital. Rather than just asking about the impact of labeling, she might ask students the following question: “Based on your service-learning experience and the individuals you met, why is it important to understand the impact of labeling on the individual being labeled?”
Finally, well-designed reflection activities are challenging. Such activities should push the student to consider difficult issues, to address those issues from multiple perspectives, and to explore contradictions and inconsistencies. Well-designed reflection activities move students beyond the simple cognitive levels of knowledge and comprehension and require them to integrate the experiences with their learning at the analysis and synthesis levels.
Summary
Though there are clearly many aspects of service-learning that we could address in this chapter, research suggests that two of the most important elements to the successful development, implementation, and outcome assessment of a service-learning experience in a course are: (a) setting clear learning goals that are linked to course content, and (b) developing continuous, connected, contextualized, and challenging reflection activities. Well-designed reflection allows students to demonstrate their competency with respect to learning goals and to maximize the benefits reaped from the service-learning experience.
In addition, well-designed reflection activities allow faculty to fulfill most of Howard’s (1993) principles of good practice. Designing reflection activities also forces a faculty member to reflect on learning goals, to focus on the learning and not just the service, to provide methods by which students can maximize their learning, minimize the distinction between the community and learning roles, and to rethink the faculty instruction role. Designing reflection activities enhances the effectiveness of instruction and assists the faculty member in making students more active in their own learning.
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Service-Learning
References
Bringle, R., & Hatcher, J. (1997). Reflection. College Teaching, 45, 153-158.
Bringle, R., & Hatcher, J. (1995). A service-learning curriculum for faculty. Michigan
Journal of Community Service Learning, 2, 112-122.
Eyler, J., Giles, D., & Schmiede, A. (1996). A practitioner’s guide to reflection in
service-learning: Student voices and reflections. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt
University Press.
Honnet, E., & Poulsen, S. (1989). Principles of good practice for combining service and
learning. A Wingspread Special Report. Racine, WI: The Johnson Foundation.
Howard, J. (1993). Community service learning in the curriculum. In J. P. F. Howard
(Ed.), Praxis I: A faculty casebook on community service learning (pp. 3-12).
Ann Arbor, MI: OCSL Press.