Pope Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum" is considered one of the first major works to introduce Catholic social thought on a global level. A key message undergirding "Rerum" is the concept of supporting the needs of others, leading to empowerment and self-sufficiency. The purpose of this study was to create a list of…

Background: Little is known about how students engage in ethical decision-making, especially when designing in messy, real-life contexts. To prepare ethically competent engineers, educators need a richer understanding of students' ethical decision-making throughout the course of the design process. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study examines students'…

Learning approaches that support students' awareness of real-world issues and provide opportunities for taking action will lead to true transformation of education.

In the literature on citizenship education, frequent references are made to Dewey. However, educationalists do not always interpret him correctly. To provide some counterbalance, I explain Dewey's views on education and democracy. I base this, not only on "Democracy and Education", but also on 17 articles that Dewey wrote after…

While literature on research methods abounds, little attention has been given to understanding how qualitative researchers and their approaches to research (i.e., the researcher's stance) shape what we know about global service-learning (GSL) and how we come to know what we know about GSL. Researchers often uncritically adopt a particular research…

The current situation in education in the United States of America (USA), with an emphasis on high-stakes testing and privatization, calls for a counter-discourse revealing what is sacrificed by these educational policies and what forms of education are needed to prepare future teachers to engage their students in effecting social justice. We draw…

In the winter of 2010, as the professor of an introductory Gender Studies course in a Canadian university, author Ilya Parkins was involved in a community service learning project centered on the memorialization of women murdered in her university's local community. In this article, Parkins considers what limited this project, which was so…

In recent years, there has been a dynamic shift in the role of the university student through the creation and promotion of experiential learning opportunities on campuses across the country. Many post-secondary programs now include co-op placements, practicums, or internships where students can apply theoretical knowledge to real-world settings.…

The workforce in the United States is becoming more diverse. To help students prepare to work and live in a diverse society, the author developed a lower-division course called "Communication Ethics and Diversity." After this course, students should be able to: (1) define diversity and communication ethics; (2) understand a variety of…

Reflection is a key component of service learning, but research shows that in order to maximize learning, the reflection must be of high quality. This paper compares the affordances of three different models of written reflection in engendering students' higher-order thought processes. Student reflections were compared across axes of guided versus…

All over the world, educators are recognizing that creating a school culture and climate that genuinely engages and supports all students is essential to increasing students' achievement and preventing students from dropping out. Research supports the view that schools must encourage students to express themselves--clearly and often--and be places…

In recent years, many professional writing teachers have turned to service learning to achieve a number of important pedagogical goals. In addition to offering practical experience outside the classroom, service learning provides students with an "understanding of the community as well as a sense of their social and civic responsibilities." For…

Faced with the facts of economic inequality, the wealthy are confronted with a particular set of moral, social, and political questions, not least of which is the question of how to preserve a sense of being a "good" human being. In the case of justifying privilege, the problem becomes how to position oneself as being uniquely able to enact a…

This study explores the utility of CBSL (community based service-learning) projects as a teaching method of ethics which this process supported by online communication tools in order to enhance progress of service learning and ethical development of undergraduate students and gather data during the research process. This study consists of an…

Mark Van Doren, the noted literary scholar, once remarked, "The college is meaningless without a curriculum, but it is more so when it has one that is meaningless." Many current critics of undergraduate curricula in America assent to the crucial need for programmatic renewal in our colleges and universities. They bemoan the cookie-cutter…