Service Learning as Practice and Pedagogy

Service learning is most often touted as a vehicle for creating and reinforcing civic-minded citizens and generating democratic responsibility among our students while serving and empowering communities. Equally as important, service learning is pedagogy. Service learning track participants discussed ways to develop the best practices and pedagogies, focusing on both the outcomes we hope to achieve through a variety of applications of service learning, and on the necessary components—or ingredients—that comprise service learning as a method of instruction. Papers covered a broad range of inter-related themes including service learning at large research universities, research-as-service projects, the impact of service learning on student health, the challenges inherent in assessing active forms of learning, and engaging youth with political humor. Participants were equally as diverse and included faculty and administrators from large universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and public high schools.

Highlights and Major Themes

Professors, administrators, students, and community agencies are drawn to service learning, in part, because it has seemingly transformative potential—for the lives of our students, for the quality of classroom instruction, for the livelihood of the communities in which we live and work. Service learning is frequently connected to changing, or at least rethinking, political attitudes and behavior and political efficacy. Although track participants brought to the conference varying degrees of confidence in service learning as a method for reshaping democratic citizenship, most agreed that service learning can catalyze academic and self-development and promote broader notions of social responsibility by fostering links between communities and college/university campuses. Yet, service learning enterprises vary dramatically. What factors mediate the transformative potential of service learning? Our discussion highlighted a number of themes.

On the most basic level, the potential of service learning is mediated by a series of practical obstacles that college and university institutions must negotiate. These include logistical obstacles, such as time, transportation, and staffing constraints; curricular obstacles, such as supervision, grading, and syllabus concerns; and student-centered obstacles, including free-rider problems and resistance to value conflicts encountered in service learning assignments. Institutional support for service learning necessarily varies—a full-time permanent staff, for example, is not a realistic option on many campuses. Nonetheless, there may be creative ways to use existing resources (for example, work study students or VISTA volunteers) to help overcome practical obstacles, particularly those related to time, coordination, and staffing needs. Perhaps most importantly, service learning needs to be institutionally recognized as an important model of pedagogy. Colleges and universities themselves play a role in shaping the civic and political possibilities of service learning by structuring access to institutional resources and rewards.

Service learning is a resource-intensive pedagogy, particularly at the level of an individual class, yet its benefits are cumulative. The degree to which service learning is integrated across the curriculum is important in ensuring that service learning is part of a coherent undergraduate education rather than an isolated experience. This raises a number of practical concerns including coordination of graduation requirements, course sequencing, the wide availability of service learning courses, and transcript notation. Indeed, when service learning is integrated across the curriculum it is more likely to comprise an important part of faculty-student relations, aiding in the recruitment, retention, and overall well-being of our students. Many schools have begun experimenting with strategies to help foster this kind of integration—for example, service learning scholarships and leadership certificates and awards.

Similarly, the transformative potential of service learning may be mediated by the degree to which it is valued by, accessible to, and meaningful for community partners. In their presentation about community-based learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Virginia Sapiro and Mary Rouse identified what may very well be the bottom line of successful service learning endeavors: partnerships. Service learning is by definition a series of partnerships between the college/university and community or governmental organizations; it is important to make sure that all partners can, and do, enjoy benefits at a reasonable cost. To be sure, service learning does impose a cost on community agencies—they train, supervise, and, in some cases, evaluate students. Institutional support from colleges/universities and the ability for community agencies to communicate their own needs are both critical in balancing this cost with valued gained. Conversely, the partnerships that define service learning should recognize that colleges and universities have much to gain from community agencies. Colleges and universities exist in, not apart from, communities. Several track participants suggested that community agencies ought to be full partners in designing and specifying the intended pedagogical purposes of service learning projects; others suggested that community partners can participate in student evaluation and assessment of learning outcomes. By the same token, partnership is a two-way street and community partners need to commit to a relationship that does not exploit students but rather recognizes that students' service also is part of their educational goals.

Of all the factors that mediate the outcomes of service learning—and also perhaps the degree to which service learning is institutionally supported—none seems as problematic as assessment. Empirical evidence on the short-term impact of service learning remains mixed. Indeed, it is possible that service learning does not have a meaningful impact on students' political attitudes and behavior, leading to some interesting tensions within our discipline. Several track participants expressed concern that, in addition to mixed evidence, without careful design the practice of service learning may have an inherent political bias, discouraging the kinds of collective mobilization that are required for genuine political change. In the end, service learning may be, as one participant put it, “a leap of faith.” It is important to recognize the limitations of short-term assessment; most quantitative assessments, for example, lack adequate control required in experimental design. Nonetheless, assessment questions are important to the extent that they are connected to the distribution of scarce resources. The need for longitudinal studies in the area of assessment is clear.

The complexities of assessment are linked to important questions about best practices: Should faculty apply to the appropriate college/university curriculum committee or academic council for a service learning course designation? What criteria should be considered for a service learning designation? Should partisan activities be considered service learning activities? What is the model of education that we seek to advance through service learning? What are the intended learning outcomes and goals of service learning? When there is a conflict between the pedagogical goals and the reality of service learning, how is that conflict managed? At a minimum, assessment prerogatives should encourage careful reflection about intended learning outcomes and the methods and techniques we employ to measure them. A separate issue related to assessment comes in how peers and administrators assess the performance of instructors engaged in service learning projects for the purpose of tenure and promotion. Not only is service learning an especially labor intensive form of teaching, depending on its design, it can blur the boundaries between teaching, research, and community service.

Lessons Learned

If there was one claim that received universal support among track participants, it was the notion that service learning cannot work without adequate institutional support, a devoted infrastructure, and the commitment of ongoing resources to long-term goals. In brief, service learning has to be taken seriously by colleges/universities and community organizations. It needs to be well-funded and well-supported. This suggests not only the need to recognize service learning as an important model of pedagogy at the institutional level, but also to ensure that faculty who undertake service learning enterprises are not unduly burdened in light of ongoing professional obligations including teaching, research, and service. On some campuses, adequately recognizing and rewarding faculty who undertake service learning may require shifting campus culture and rethinking tenure and reward structures.

The need, as articulated by Track Six participants, for strong institutional support for service learning was followed by a second, collectively accepted belief in the need for high-quality service learning courses. High-quality service learning endeavors demand other commitments in addition to adequate institutional support: dedicated time obligations on the part of faculty, staff, community partners, and students; long-range planning needs; and deliberate reflection about desired learning outcomes in relation to service learning pedagogies in the discipline of political science. The best service learning enterprises are explicitly linked to the political science curriculum; this is, in part, what sets service learning apart from other forms of service.

Frank conversation about the intended outcomes of service learning is important for a realistic appraisal of its possibilities—and limits. It is easy to over-romanticize engaged forms of learning, particularly those that occur in the context of a single course. This was a third lesson learned. For example, it may be unrealistic to expect a single 15- or 16-week service learning project to alter students' major values. At best, service learning may shift particular behaviors and attitudes, or change some of the factors that mediate those values. Nor is any service learning project without some degree of unpredictability. It is important to be realistic about what we can expect students to learn, and what we can expect to communicate through a single, or even several, service learning endeavors.

Thus, the final lesson discussed in the service learning track was the need to make explicit the assumptions surrounding our practice of service learning. These include assumptions about our students, often and perhaps unfairly generalized around common socioeconomic experiences; assumptions about our discipline and its relation to particular methods of research; assumptions about our communities and their needs and assets; assumptions about the impact of experience on self-development; and assumptions about the potential for service learning to lead to particular learning outcomes.

Lingering Questions and Suggestions for the Future

Several additional themes were raised that require further conservation. These are offered here briefly, not in the way of conclusion, but rather as potential topics of discussion for next year's conference.

All participants involved in service learning enterprises—college/university staff, community agencies, students, faculty—need access to meaningful training and education about the pedagogy and practice of service learning. Some institutions, such as the Morgridge Center for Public Service at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Loyola University Chicago's Magis Service-Learning Initiative, have developed model training resources. Many other institutions, unfortunately, offer little in the way of service learning training. Track participants expressed a clear interest in developing and sharing access to training resources and possibly workshops, through venues such as APSA's web page on service learning (www.apsanet.org/section_246.cfm) and the new Journal of Political Science Education. We also discussed developing innovative, low-cost methods for sharing experiences, such as faculty-to-faculty and student-to-student mentoring relationships. The terrain is ripe for writing and publishing research on service learning.

Service learning is perhaps inherently interdisciplinary, yet its application is frequently limited to the social sciences and, within the discipline of political science, to subfields within American politics. This is a second theme for future discussion. Multi-disciplinary service learning seems especially promising; the need to develop globally and internationally-oriented service learning is necessary. Likewise, while many track participants have experienced working with community agencies, as a group, we have less experience building collaborative relationships with students as agents in the design, implementation, and practice of service learning.

Looking forward to the 2006 APSA Conference on Teaching and Learning, Track Six participants suggest adding poster sessions to the European-style workshop format that was the heart of this year's conference. Poster sessions would be especially useful for showcasing practical applications of engaged forms of learning and would give conference attendees the ability to view a variety of service learning projects in diverse settings, while freeing up more workshop time for conversation and in-depth discussion of theoretical concerns.