Service Learning

Service-learning is an educational approach that combines learning objectives with community service in order to provide a pragmatic, progressive learning experience while meeting societal needs.

Service-learning involves students in service projects to apply classroom learning for local agencies that exist to effect positive change in the community. The National Youth Leadership Council defines service learning as "a philosophy, pedagogy, and model for community development that is used as an instructional strategy to meet learning goals and/or content standards."

Author Barbara Jacoby defines service-learning as "a form of experiential education in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs together with structured opportunities for reflection designed to achieve desired learning outcomes."

According to Biola professor Freddy Cardoza, Service-Learning is a "strategic and systematic approach used by schools and teachers to produce certain types of outcomes in their students.

As defined by Robert Sigmon, 1994:

In this comparative form, the typology is helpful not only in establishing criteria for distinguishing service-learning from other types of service programs but also in providing a basis for clarifying distinctions among different types of service-oriented experiential education programs (e.g., school volunteer, community service, field education, and internship programs).

Service-learning, as defined by Robert Sigmon, "occurs when there is a balance between learning goals and service outcomes." As follows, there are various methods of hands-on learning that fall into this category, these include:

The purpose of service learning is, in essence, 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." Volunteerism, community service, internships, and field education all exemplify, in some way or another, the core value of service learning, as all of them benefit the student as well as the one they served to an equal degree, the only difference being how material the benefit is. These methods also tend to focus on ensuring that the student not only serves, but learns something, whether it is interpersonal skills, work experience in their future field, or a change in how they view themselves and others.

In Service-learning: History, Theory, and Issues, Bruce W. Speck and Sherry Lee Hoppe say that John Dewey's writings on the active nature of understanding and the benefits of and conditions for participatory democracy “provide an early theoretical foundation for a pedagogy in which students cooperatively engage actual social problems”. In Building partnerships for service-learning, Barbara Jacoby writes that Service-learning "is based on the work of researchers and theorists on learning, including John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Kurt Lewin, Donald Schon, and David Kolb, who believe that we learn through combinations of action and reflection.”

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