In this article, we detail our findings from a case study of three instructors as they newly implemented service-learning pedagogies into their first year writing classes. Drawing on the instructors' perspectives as part of a larger programmatic assessment, we demonstrate that a service-learning curriculum can broadly foster learning outcomes for…

Assessment and evaluation practices within honors programs have attracted considerable attention within the honors academic community, e.g., the spring/summer 2006 volume of the "Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council." Calls for carefully created and constructed assessment activities within honors programs have met with mixed…

The authors describe a graduate capstone accounting class as a basis for building communication skills desired by both accounting practitioners and accounting faculty. An academic service-learning (ASL) component is included. Adopted as a required class for a master of science degree in accounting at two universities, this course supports…

Service learning discourses have often addressed questions of representation through reciprocity, asking what various participants receive from service learning community experiences. In the process of researching an article about reciprocity, a writing teacher found that reciprocity was often defined as an exchange of learning for some form of…

Argues teachers must learn how to conceptualize the connections between the academy and society in ways that student, administrators, and teachers find convincing. Provides practical as well as theoretical justification for teaching public-discourse writing in a first-year composition course. Discusses several service learning projects produced by…

Discusses how a writing/design (service learning) assignment in a technical writing class offered an opportunity to investigate differences and similarities in evaluation criteria between the classroom (instructors) and the workplace (clients outside academe). Finds considerable overlap between what instructors and clients emphasized, and large…

States that service learning educates students to volunteer their expertise for the benefit of society. Suggests that teachers of business and technical writing can apply this pedagogy by assigning students to write for nonprofits. Describes service learning's origins; proposes a rationale for it; explains sequential projects and teaching methods…

A composition instructor developed a course that has moral traction, a course intended to serve as a blueprint for students, a heuristic for enlarging social consciousness and effecting social change. On the first day of class, the instructor introduces the "fundamental theme" of poverty and a schedule of assignments/activities that…

Describes a "distant service learning" unit in a first-year composition course in which students wrote for a nonprofit organization in the classroom. Discusses program activities in relation to the first-year composition curriculum, program activities and the nonprofit organization, classroom implementation and assessment (including scoring guide…

Like most Americans, young people today yearn to play more active roles in community life. According to a recent study, there are two roadblocks to effective citizen empowerment: lack of knowledge and training that could help people connect with each other, and a dimmed belief that individuals can make a difference. In an effort to address these…

It is difficult for a student to understand small group communication and the role communication plays in making an experience a positive or negative one until he or she is actually involved in small group experience. Such goes the argument for experiential learning in the classroom. By incorporating a service-learning component into the…