Service-learning

Draft

Introduction

According to Morton and Troppe (1996:21), “Service learning is a form of experiential education, deeply rooted in cognitive and developmental psychology, pragmatic philosophy and democratic theory. It shares a common intellectual history with organizational development and participatory action research. Service learning is rooted, as well, in the formal and informal systems humans have developed to care for one another over time, ranging from individual spiritual practices such as charity, to voluntary associations meeting community needs, to human services institutions and welfare systems.”

Morton and Troppe (1996:21-22) refer to Kolb's experiential learning theory, but point out the experience as foundation for learning has much older roots. “service learning theory begins with the assumption that experience is the foundation for learning; and various forms of community service are employed as the experiential basis for learning. These ideas are not new, and can be traced back at least to John Dewey and Jane Addams, who advocated for similar ideas beginning in the 1890s.”

Service learning does not seem to be very popular because it requires the high investment required for project-based learning plus time needed to interact with a community. “Service learning is relatively uncommon, we argue, because of the general absence of institutional commitment to service learning by colleges and universities. Service learning is a relationship- and time-intensive pedagogy for both students and faculty. A sociology professor, in a recent interview, commented that his service learning course was "a peak teaching and learning experience for me and the students that had some positive impact on the community. But", he continued, "I don't know if I'll do it again soon". He was hesitant, he said, because service learning took more time than other forms of teaching and it was time away from his personal research and publishing.” (Morton and Troppe (1996:23).

Example

Thoms and Erylmaz (2018) describe the implementation of an applied computer science class, using the ELGG platform.

“A pedagogical approach grounded in active learning and one that aims to provide students with meaningful learning experiences is service-learning. As explored in [3], service- learning is a high-impact educational practice that provides students direct experiences with discipline specific concepts and with ongoing efforts to analyze and solve problems within the broader community. Pedagogically, service-learning begins with the assumption that experience is the foundation for learning and considers community service as an experiential basis for such learning (Morton and Troppe, 1996)” (Thoms and Erylmaz, 2018:497)

“While often above and beyond the demands of traditional classes, students are challenged with real-world problems and needs and are required to collaborate with classmates and partner organizations. These partnerships often result in rich relationships with community organizations. In reflective essays at the end of the semester, students indicated a strong bond with partners. [..] From the perspective of the computing field, interdisciplinary, service-learning courses present students with a perspective to organizational problem solving that they would rarely, if ever, experience in other courses. More so, many students did not realize the scope of the computing field and how it requires thinking and strategies from numerous disciplines to help solve real-world organizational problems.” (Thoms and Erylmaz, 2018:502)

Software

Any kind of open and flexible platform could be used, e.g. a wiki or a social platform like ELGG.

Bibliography

• Cohen, Jeremy and Dennis Kinsey: 1994, ‘“Doing Good” and Scholarship: A Service Learning Study’, Journalism Educator 48(4), 4–14.

• Kuh, GD. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

• Morton, K., Troppe, M. (1996). “From the Margin to the mainstream: Campus compact's project on integrating service with academic study,” Journal of Business Ethics, 15(1).

• Thoms, B., & Eryilmaz, E. (2018). Social Software Design To Facilitate Service-learning In Interdisciplinary Computer Science Courses. In Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - SIGCSE ’18 (pp. 497–502). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159572 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159572

• Thoms, B., Eryilmaz, E. (2014). “How Media Choice Affects Learner Interactions in Distance Learning Classes,” Computers & Education, v75.