The Challenge of Short-Term Service-Learning

Metropolitan Universities, 2021

Research on community impacts from service-learning has been scarce, yet this area is worth exploring in order to understand how and why service-learning can make a difference. The current research sought to validate a conceptual framework (Lau & Snell, 2020), which categorizes the impacts of service-learning on community partner organizations (CPOs) and on end-beneficiaries. Under the framework, impacts on end-beneficiaries can arise directly from service-learning interventions, but can also arise indirectly as a result of impacts on CPOs. For the research, semi-structured, one-to-one or focus group interviews were conducted with 13 CPO representatives, seeking their perceptions of positive and negative impacts of service-learning. Most described impacts were positive, including, for CPOs: achieving project goals to further the CPO’s mission; augmenting resources of the CPO; and gaining knowledge, insights, ideas and techniques. These positive impacts for CPOs appear to reflect thr...

Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 2008

This article reports the findings of in-depth interviews with sixty-seven community organization representatives about their experience with service-learners. We found that partnerships have much room for improvement in several key areas: communication and relationship-building, managing and evaluation of students, and cultural competency, as well as the challenge of short-term service-learning.

Author Barbara Jacoby draws on her extensive experience, and on an ample body of prior research, to produce an informative publication. Organized in a question-and-answer format, Service-Learning Essentials provides answers to dozens of questions about service-learning—particularly about its history, nature, purpose, use, scope, and future. In each of the nine chap¬ters, there are six to 13 questions (many with subsidiary questions) and answers, complemented by references to additional informa¬tion sources and a short summary.

1994

2010

Problematizing Service-Learning offers readers a chance to become familiar with the work of a number of emerging service-learning scholars as well as to renew their acquaintance with some already well established figures. As the editors, Trae Stewart and Nicole Webster, make clear in their preface, their goal in putting together this collection of 15 articles on a range of service-learning topics was to “problematize” service-learning by questioning “knowledge that is often taken for granted” and offering “new perspectives and subsequent actions” (xiv). To a considerable extent their volume succeeds in doing this although many chapters deal with issues that have been explored elsewhere. The book is divided into five parts: (a) Expanding Frameworks; (b) Complexities in Situating ServiceLearning; (c) Youth Development, Voices, and Perspectives; (d) Otherness and Inclusiveness; and (e) Challenges and Concluding Remarks. Some parts, such as the third and the fourth, represent fairly coh...

2019

During the last two decades, the knowledge base regarding the benefits and burdens for all stakeholders in service learning has expanded. However, service-learning research has neglected to address the foundation of the pedagogy, its definition, and stakeholders’ perspectives on the meaning of service learning. The current research addresses this deficiency through the use of focus group methodology to explore how community partners, specifically, define service learning. By recognizing the community voice, we hope to empower all those engaged in service-learning pedagogy to communicate understandings, experiences, and expectations to develop beneficial service-learning partnerships.

International Journal of Case Method Research Application, 2006

This paper presents one expert's views on the required components of successfully designing and implementing an interactive teaching pedagogy called service-learning. The paper is largely drawn from an interview with Barbara Holland, a respected pioneer and international advocate for service-learning and university-community engagement. The paper aims to provide interested faculty with both a better understanding of what service-learning is as well as an overview of the student, faculty, community partner, and institutional motivations and commitments related to service-learning program success.

Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 2019

Although there have been growing concerns on how service-learning can accentuate the power differences between the server and the served, service-learning can foster transformative partnership by recognizing the contributions each can offer for a better society. Using participant observation and discourse analysis, this case study examines the perceptions of third-year undergraduate students of a health-related degree in a Philippine-based Jesuit university about their school–community collaboration in a primary healthcare setting. Despite apprehensions at the start of service-learning, students saw themselves confronted with the challenge to overcome personal barriers from authentically encountering the urban poor, whom they served in the community. However, establishing transformative partnership in service-learning was not without its share of dilemmas. Such findings can contribute to discourses on service-learning, informing practitioners how to support social transformation in ...

2019

I express my gratitude to my dissertation committee for their time and their thoughtful contributions throughout the process. I am grateful to Dr. Dan Hart for his early encouragement of my research interests in civic engagement and for his skepticism that has kept me questioning. I am thankful to Dr. Michael Hayes for his timely advice along my path. I especially want to thank Dr. Paul Jargowsky for his guidance and encouragement as I worked through the proposal and research, for methodological training, and for offering career advice. I have enduring great respect for his contributions to my scholarship and inspiration to push the envelope in research on service-learning and community engagement. I also want to share my appreciation to a few professors at Rutgers-Camden that helped me along my way. I appreciate Dr. Stephen Danley for his advice and his criticism, I am a better scholar because of my collaborations with him. I thank Dr. Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn for teaching me the skills in data management that facilitated this dissertation work and for encouraging me to publish early in my graduate career. I thank

2010