Student volunteering is currently being promoted through the Higher Education Active Community Fund, which runs to August 2004 and may be extended further. This development of higher education's "third mission" has strong links with the government's agenda for citizenship and the active community. This initiative appears to have taken…

Service-learning is an educational practice that has been used successfully in many disciplines, and is defined as "a credit-bearing, educational experience in which students participate in an organized service activity that meets identified community needs and reflect on the service activity in such a way as to gain further understanding of…

"Social capital" describes the strength of community as measured by the connections and levels of trust among its members. These connections are both formal and informal and the benefits include better health and better academic achievement. In this article, the author proposes two types of experiments to determine whether the…

This study examines the effects of the Community Action service learning project, part of the Learn and Serve America program, on gifted adolescents and their community. Using a case study design, the author investigates this service learning project grounded in creative problem solving. The importance of service learning to the participants is…

This article examines how out-of-school time programs can promote youth involvement in civic action by focusing on four interrelated programmatic strategies: establishing organizational readiness that fosters engagement; promoting youth-adult partnerships; engaging youth as leaders and decision makers; and involving youth in research and…

Service learning aims to promote academic learning and meet community needs. When students interview elderly residents in a nursing home about their experiences during World War II, they gain eyewitness historical information and provide company to persons who otherwise may have few visitors. Such situations are designed to be "win-win." Students…

"Lumina Foundation Lessons" is an occasional publication in which the foundation shares the results of its grantees' work on strategies to improve the persistence rates among Indiana's underserved college freshman and sophomore populations. This issue, the first in the series, contains the following articles: (1) Summer Transition…

This study examined reports and programs from across the state, the nation and from international sources to gather a broad selection of published and unpublished environmental education research. A variety of sources were used, such as the internet, interviews with key informants and experts in the field of environmental and sustainability…

The modern character education movement emerged in the 1980s as a consequence of growing parental and public concern for moral drift, or what sociologist James Davison Hunter referred to as "the death of character." This public anomie was captured in these words from Sanford McDonnell, chairman emeritus of McDonnell Douglas and chair of…

Policymakers sometimes view arts education and experiential learning as distractions from the goal of enabling all students to master rigorous content standards. The three school programs described in this article, however, demonstrate that content standards can be integrated into engaging, motivating curriculums based on the arts and authentic…

A model service learning course for elementary teaching credential candidates is described. Preservice teachers taking a required university reading methods course studied scientifically-based reading instruction and volunteered in Los Angeles Unified School District classrooms during reading instruction time. Service learning experiences were…

This article presents results from an evaluation of service learning in statistics courses for master of social work students. The article provides an overview of the application of a community-based statistics project, describes student feedback regarding the project, and illustrates some strengths and limitations of using this pedagogy with…

This essay describes service learning as a space for civic dialogue. In the project-oriented course discussed below--an oral history of a south-side African-American neighborhood in Chicago--civic dialogue took shape when middle class students from a range of backgrounds at the Illinois Institute of Technology interviewed residents of different…

Interdisciplinary groups of students learned screening tools for substance use and practiced skills of brief intervention while serving needs of a local free clinic.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and implementation of community-based, service-learning field projects by 30 health professional faculty fellows of Project MAINSTREAM, a faculty development program on substance abuse. The fellows worked together for two years in 10 Interdisciplinary Faculty Learning Groups (IFLGs), which…