This article investigates the theoretical link between two approaches to civic character education: Service Learning and the Just Community, given that the two share a strong democratic ethical component. Based on historical research and bibliographical review, we show that John Dewey's pragmatism forms a theoretical foundation of both approaches.…

The literature on student development cautions that social responsibility attitudes may stagnate or decline as students proceed through college. Given the importance of students' future professional obligations to society, identifying ways to reverse this trend is crucial. In turn, an important aim of this study, situated at a large public…

This study explores the relationship between service learning and moral development. During a phenomenographic examination of a service-learning project in the Midwest, researchers identified ways that participants conceived of justice. These conceptions were analyzed with a Neo-Kohlbergian approach to post-conventional moral thinking and mapped…

The extent to which sports build character is an increasingly contested topic, and scholarship has recently been focused on how coaches may (or may not) facilitate character development in their programs. Although existing literature examines coaches in youth sport and "big-time" college athletic programs, research on coaches in smaller…

The article proposes the 4-Es (namely Exposure, Explanation, Experience, and Evaluation) pedagogical model in empathy building that can facilitate moral development in students. This research reveals that the 4-Es pedagogy, which has been adopted in a university's service-learning course to study the living conditions of disadvantaged residents in…

For a service-learning course focusing on poverty, students from a Hong Kong university took a 12-day trip to engage in various poverty alleviation services in Cambodia. This course was border-crossing on five dimensions: (1) urban versus rural, (2) developed versus developing world location, (3) classroom versus practical and experiential, (4)…

With nationwide concerns about the declines in youth voting turnout across the United States, increased attention has focused on schools to promote "civic education," a broad curricular approach aimed at facilitating students' development of key civic knowledge, skills, and behaviors. However, less is known about how civic education…

This study examined differences in participants' perceptions of their Character Development, Leadership, and Environmental Service prior to and immediately following participation in a North Carolina Outward Bound School (NCOBS) course using the NCOBS Course Impression Survey (NCOBCIS). The three-fold purpose of this study was to confirm the…