Service Learning
Definitions
How does one define "service learning"? The popularization of service learning and its widespread adoption by educational institutions has produced a wide variety of definitions. Educators, administrators, faculty, and researchers involved in those learning initiatives have tried to provide their own definitions of the term, often by comparing it to better-known and less controversial activities, such as volunteerism and community service.
One of the best, most concise and encompassing definitions of service learning comes from Communications for a Sustainable Future, a University of Colorado-based educational organization. "At its heart," they write, "service learning is a form of experiential learning that employs service as its modus operandi" (1999, p. 1). The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) offers a more specific definition of service learning as an "instructional methodology [that] integrates community service with academic instruction as it focuses on critical, reflective thinking and civic responsibility" (1999, p. 1).
The government-sponsored Commission on National and Community Service (CNCS) offered one of the most widely accepted definitions of service learning. As quoted in Belbas, Gorak, and Shumer, the National and Community Service Act of 1990 states that service-learning programs provide an educational experience
- under which students learn and develop through active participation in … thoughtfully organized service experiences that meet actual community needs;
- that is integrated into the students' academic curriculum or provides structured time for a student to think, talk, or write about what the student did and saw during the service activity;
- that provides students with opportunities to use newly acquired skills and knowledge in real-life situations in their own communities; and
- that enhances what is taught in school by extending student learning beyond the classroom and into the community and helps foster the development of a sense of caring for others.
(quoted in Belbas, Gorak, and Shumer, 1993, p. 1)
Several other authors have stressed the reciprocal link between community and school. Furco, for example, developed an experiential education typology or spectrum that classifies service learning, community service, volunteerism, field education, and internships according to two main criteria: intended beneficiaries of the activity, and emphasis on service and/or learning (1996, p. 2). While internships, for instance, tend to benefit primarily the provider (i.e., the student) and focus on learning, volunteerism, at the other end of the spectrum, tends to focus on service and benefit the recipient (i.e., the community organization). According to Furco's typology, by integrating service and learning and benefiting both providers and recipients equally, service learning achieves a "happy median" in the scale he devised (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Distinctions among Service Programs (Furco, 1996, p. 3)
Furco's typology is mirrored by the distinctions Kraft makes between service learning and volunteerism, and between service learning and community-based learning:
Volunteering alone generally is differentiated from service learning by having an emphasis on service without a formal, structured learning component. Community-based learning also involves learning that occurs out in the community through outdoor education, field trips, internships, but it generally does not involve any service component. (Kraft, 1996, p. 133)
To further differentiate traditional community-based experiences from service learning, Eyler, Giles, and Schmiede (1996) emphasized the crucial role played by critical reflection in service-learning courses when they reported that
students who had not been engaged in programs with reflective components were most likely to focus on the affective, the personal and the empathic dimensions of the experience. The students who were engaged in critical reflection incorporated these dimensions … but were much more likely to report also a better sense of application of ideas to social problems and a transformed understanding of the problem and issues surrounding it. We are persuaded that reflection is the glue that holds service and learning together to provide educative experiences. (p. 16)
But even if we agree with the general definition of service learning as an instructional methodology that combines community participation with content-based class discussion and critical reflection, we still have to ask: What are the philosophical underpinnings or justifications for service learning?
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