Examines the theoretical bases of academic service learning, with particular attention to John Dewey's contributions. Conceptualizes the service learning movement as part of an ongoing, and still unsuccessful, effort to "de-Platonize" and democratize American higher education in articular and American schooling in general. (Author/MSE)

Using the example of an online service learning course, makes a case for the inclusion of service learning in higher education and the ability to do so seamlessly by using new communication technologies. (EV)

As a pedagogy for citizenship, academic service learning offers students the opportunity to experience and reflect on how citizens organize to bring their communities and their country closer to democracy. The three-course Democracy Project at Swarthmore College (Pennsylvania) illustrates how this approach can be developed within a college…

Discusses how service learning can promote the development of a "caring self" in college students by drawing on the ideas of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and contemporary critical theorists. Links this caring self to democratic citizenship and uses students' narratives to illustrate how it develops through service learning contexts.…

Top issues in service learning research include how service learning enhances subject matter; defining expected outcomes; identifying the processes of effective service learning; faculty involvement; effect on educational institutions; institutional policies, practices supporting/enhancing service learning; nature of effective community…

Explores academic service learning as an innovative pedagogical model capable of transforming traditional teaching and learning practices. Notes that faculty undertaking this challenge can expect initial resistance from students, periodic self-doubt about their teaching accomplishments, and colleagues' skepticism, but also renewed student…