Service-learning is a teaching strategy that offers students opportunities to learn both in the classroom and in the wider world. This pedagogical tool provides students with chances to directly interact with local agencies and effect change in the community. Thus, service-learning holds the potential to broaden and significantly enhance the…

Community Service Learning (CSL) as a first year transition strategy into teacher education is a new concept not previously identified in either the CSL literature or the First Year in Higher Education literature. This paper reports on a study that investigated how first year preservice teachers experienced CSL and how this impacted on their…

The 2008 presidential election catapulted "community organizers" into the media fray and raised awareness about community organizing. At the University of San Diego (USD), a course teaching consensus organizing techniques to address community issues was instituted in 2004. The course incorporates traditional undergraduate students and…

Service learning is a promising practice, but like other instructional practices, it must be done well to produce positive outcomes. This author has found that following five "rules" of service learning will likely result in improved academic engagement and positive academic, civic, and social outcomes among students. Energy and collaboration…

The authors investigated the impact of 22 pre-service teachers' participation in a change-oriented service-learning project on their conceptions of citizenship as civic actors and civic educators. The goal of this project was to push students toward adopting more critically conscious and activist conceptions of citizenship as aligned with the…

Across the broad spectrum of disciplines and departments within higher education, it sometimes feels like there is little that unites them. They talk about silos, they bemoan divergent and fragmented efforts, and they refer frequently to "them" and "they," regardless of where they are on the organizational chart. However, there is one topic that…

Throughout the nation, training students for leadership roles is a primary cross-disciplinary bridge from coursework to career or from service learning to community service. Student leadership training has been linked to communication traits of goal setting, decision making, conflict resolution, concern for community, and increased understanding…

This study involved students enrolled in a first-year service-learning course and explored the relationship between service-learning, academic self-confidence, and integration into the college experience. Descriptive statistics and qualitative document analysis of participant-produced texts were used to depict the students' perceptions regarding…

Boyer's four forms of scholarship were detailed in his 1990 book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. In the 18 years since publication of that book, universities struggle with changing the promotion and tenure criteria to include all four forms of scholarship. Faculty members often focus on publications as they prepare for…

Applied learning refers to learning experiences that take place outside traditional classroom settings. Examples include study away, service-learning, undergraduate research, and internship/practica/clinical experiences. As these pedagogies have increased in frequency over the past twenty years, the number of outlets devoted to the publication of…

In this paper four final-year education students describe one aspect of their science pathway course, a place-based experience in an urban ecological setting. The aim of the place-based experience was to combine community service and science knowledge to focus on critical, reflective thinking and civic responsibility. The assessment task required…

Research on service-learning has focused mainly on student outcomes. However, this study addresses the transformative change that three faculty members from different disciplines experienced during a semester-long fellowship on service-learning as a pedagogical method. Through their personal reflections, the authors show how service-learning and…

In this paper, we maintain that sociologists should deliberately teach social responsibility as a means of fulfilling the promise that C. Wright Mills envisioned. A key aspect of the sociological imagination includes a sense of social responsibility, but that aspect is best learned through a combination of experience and academic knowledge.…

Prepracticum service-learning (PPSL) was investigated through a qualitative case study of a counselor education program. Participants were PPSL instructors, coordinators, and alumni of the selected program. As it relates to the counselor education program under study, this article illustrates perceived effects of PPSL on student counselors'…

This article describes a study about a service learning project at a small undergraduate university. We examined how professors and students became involved in service learning through course work and related activities. This study sought to find out why participation in service learning is low in post-secondary education science and mathematics…