Overview of Service Learning

What is Service Learning?

Service learning combines service objectives with learning objectives with the goal of changing both the recipient and the provider of the service. Service learning combines 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.

Service learning is more than service alone. For example, if school students collect trash out of an urban streambed, they are providing a service to the community as volunteers; a service that is highly valued and important. When school students collect trash from an urban streambed, then analyze what they found and possible sources so they can share the results with residents of the neighborhood along with suggestions for reducing pollution, they are engaging in service learning. In the service-learning example, the students are providing an important service to the community AND, at the same time, learning about water quality and laboratory analysis, developing an understanding of pollution issues, learning to interpret science issues to the public, and practicing communications skills by speaking to residents. They may also reflect on their personal and career interests in science, the environment, public policy or other related areas.

Service learning combines SERVICE with LEARNING in intentional ways. This is not to say that volunteer activities without a learning component are less important than service learning, but that the two approaches are fundamentally different activities with different objectives. Both are valued components of a national effort to increase citizen involvement in community service, and at every age.

The National Commission on Service-Learning in its recently issued report entitled Learning in Deed: The Power of Service-Learning for American Schools, offers a definition of service learning that incorporated the most essential features common to service learning across the country. According to the commission, service learning is different from volunteerism in that it is "a teaching and learning approach that integrates community service with academic study to enrich learning, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities."

In 1990, adapted from the National and Community Service Act of 1990, the Corporation for National and Community Service conception of service learning said that it

• promotes learning through active participation in service experiences;
• provides structured time for students to reflect by thinking, discussing and/or writing about their service experience;
• provides an opportunity for students to use skills and knowledge in real-life situations;
• extends learning beyond the classroom and into the community;
• fosters a sense of caring for others.

Because of its connection to content acquisition and student development, service learning is often linked to school and college courses and inspires these educational organizations to build strong partnerships with community-based organizations. Service learning can also be organized and offered by community organizations with learning objectives or structured reflection activities for their participants. Whatever the setting, the core element of service learning is always the intent that both providers and recipients find the experience beneficial, even transforming.

Characteristics of Service Learning

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. According to the National Commission on Service-Learning, 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;
• works at all ages, even among young children.

Service-learning is not

• 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;
• compensatory service assigned as a form of punishment by the courts or by school administrators;
• only for high school or college students;
• one-sided: benefiting only students or only the community.