What and Why?

Service-Learning combines service objectives with learning objectives with the intent that the activity change both the recipient and the provider of the service. This is accomplished by combining service tasks with structured opportunities that link the task to self-reflection, self-discovery, and the acquisition and comprehension of values, skills, and knowledge content. According to the National Commission on Service-Learning Links to academic content and standards. Involves young people in helping to determine and meet real, defined community needs.Is reciprocal in nature, benefiting both the community and the service providers by  combining a service experience with a learning experience Can be used in any subject area so long as it is appropriate to learning goal An episodic volunteer program An add-on to an existing school or college curriculum Logging a set number of community service hours in order to graduate One-sided: benefiting only students or only the community

The distinctive element of service-learning is that it enhances the community through the service provided, but it also has powerful learning consequences for the students or others participating in providing a service. Service-learning is growing so rapidly becausewe can see it is having a powerful impact on young people and their development.

Why Do Service-Learning?

Service-Learning experiences:

• Are positive, meaningful and real to the participants. fInvolve cooperative rather than competitive experiences and thus promote skills associated with teamwork and community involvement and citizenship.Address complex problems in complex settings rather than simplified problems in isolation.

• Offer opportunities to engage in problem-solving by requiring participants to gain knowledge of the specific context of their service-learning activity and  community  challenges, rather than only to draw upon generalized or abstract knowledge such as might come from a textbook.
• As a consequence of this immediacy of experience, service-learning is more likely to be personally meaningful to participants and to generate emotional consequences, to challenge values as well as ideas, and hence to support social, emotional and cognitive learning and development.
  
  

  As a result, service-learning offers powerful opportunities to acquire the habits of critical thinking; i.e. the ability to identify the most important questions or issues within a real-world situation.Promote deeper learning because the results are immediate and uncontrived. There are no "right answers" in the back of the book. (from: Eyler & Giles, Where’s the Learning In Service-Learning,San Francisco: Jossey Bass).

Differences between volunteerism, internships, fieldwork, and service-learning

• Volunteerism

Volunteerism is the engagement of students in activities where the primary emphasis is on the service being provided and the primary intended beneficiary is clearly the service recipient. According to James and Pamela Toole, the term volunteerism refers to "people who perform some service or good work of their own free will and without pay" (Toole & Toole, 1992). The inherent altruistic nature of volunteer programs renders them as service focused, designed to benefit the service recipient. A prime example is a school-based program in which student volunteers occasionally or regularly visit the local hospital to sit with Alzheimer patients who need some company. The primary intended beneficiaries of the service are the Alzheimer patients (the service recipients), and the focus of the activity is on providing a service to them. Although the student-volunteers may receive some benefits from the experience (e.g., feeling pleased with themselves) as well as learn something in the process, these outcomes are clearly serendipitous and unintentional. As the hospital visits of the student volunteers become more regular and as the students
begin focusing more on learning about Alzheimer's disease, the program moves toward the center of the continuum to become more like community service (or even servicelearning).

• Community service

Community serviceis the engagement of students in activities that primarily focus on the service being provided as well as the benefits the service activities have on the recipients (e.g., providing food to the home- less during the holidays). The students receive some benefits by learning more about how their service makes a difference in the lives of the service recipients.
As with volunteer programs, community service programs imply altruism and charity. However, community service programs involve more structure and student commitment than do volunteer programs. School-based community service programs might include
semester-long or year-long activities in which students dedicate themselves to addressing a cause that meets a local community (or global) need. Recycling, hunger awareness, and environmental improvement are all forms of community service causes around which students have formed organizations to formally and actively address the issue. While the students' primary purpose for engaging in the service activity is to advance the cause, their engagement allows them to learn more about the cause and what is needed to be done to ensure the cause is dealt with effectively. As the service activities become more integrated with the academic course work of the students, and as the students begin to engage in formal intellectual discourse around the various issues relevant to the cause, the community service program moves closer to the center of the continuum to become more like service-learning. On the opposite side of the continuum lie internship programs.

• Internships

Internships programs engage students in service activities primarily for the purpose of providing students with hands-on experiences that enhance their learning or understanding of issues relevant to a particular area of study. Clearly, in internship programs the students are the primary intended beneficiary and the focus of the service activity is on student learning. Students are placed in internships to acquire skills and knowledge that will enhance their academic learning and/or vocational development. For many students internships are performed in addition to regular course work often after a sequence of courses has been taken. Internships may be paid or unpaid and take place in either for profit or nonprofit organizations. For example, a political science, major might engage in an unpaid summer internship at a city hall to learn more about how local government works. Although the student is providing a service to the city hall office, the student engages in the internship primarily for his/her benefit and primarily
for learning (rather than service) purposes. Similarly, a legal studies student may have a paid summer internship that allows that student to learn more about how a law firm operates. The student?s primary motivations for partaking in the program-to learn legal
skills and make some money-are clearly intended to benefit himself/herself. As both these students place greater emphasis on the service being provided and the ways in which the service recipients are benefiting, the closer the internship program moves toward the center of the continuum and becomes more like field education (and service-learning).

• Field Education

Field Education programs provide students with co-curricular service opportunities that are related, but not fully integrated, with their formal academic studies. Students perform the service as part of a program that is designed primarily to enhance students' understanding of a field of study, while also providing substantial emphasis on the service being provided.
Field education plays an important role in many service oriented professional programs such as Social Welfare, Education, and Public Health. In some of the programs, students may spend up to two years providing a service to a social service agency, a school, or health agency. While strong intentions to benefit the recipients of the service are evident, the focus of field education programs tends to be on maximizing the student's learning of a field of study. For example, students in Education programs may spend up to one year as student teachers to hone their teaching skills and learn more about the teaching process. Because of their long-term commitment to the service field, students do consciously consider how their service benefits those who receive it. However, the program's primary focus is still on the student teachers' learning and their overall benefit.

• Service-Learning

Service-learning programs are distinguished from other approaches to experiential education by their intention to equally benefit the provider and the recipient of the service as well as to ensure equal focus on both the service being provided and the learning that
is occurring. To do this, service-learning programs must have some academic context and be designed in such a way that ensures that both the service enhances the learning and the learning enhances the service. Unlike a field education program in which the service is performed in addition to a student's courses, a service-learning program integrates service into the course(s). For example, a pre-med student in a course on the Physiology of the Aging might apply the theories and skills learned in that course to providing mobility assistance to seniors at the local senior citizen center. While the program is intended to provide a much needed service to the seniors, the program is also intended to help the student better understand how men and women age differently, how the physical aging of the body affects mobility, and how seniors can learn to deal with diminishing range of motion and mobility. In such a program, the focus is both on providing a much-needed service and on student learning. Consequently, the program intentionally benefits both the student who provides the service and the seniors for whom the service is provided. lt is this balance that distinguishes service-learning from all other experiential education programs.
(adapted from "Service-Learning:A Balanced Approach to Experiential Education" by Andrew Furco)