Adding a service learning element to one's course requires thought and consideration. Some helpful resources from the University of Tennessee Knoxville will provide more information on constructing a project with an organization in your community, developing student learning outcomes, and planning your course to accommodate a service learning component in you course. The Service Learning Course Design Guide and the Service Learning Course Workbook work together to provide information on service learning and to help you create your own project. When planning a service learning project, the Ten Principles of Good Practice for Service-Learning Pedagogy will provide context and insight into how service learning will effect a course. The principles offer advice on how to implement service learning into classes, structure projects, prepare the participants of the projects and more.
While service learning’s benefits are numerous, not every class is compatible with the service learning model. However, this link provides a list of possible service learning projects by major to determine if service learning is a wise choice for your course.
The links above show many possible projects--but the potential service learning opportunities are limitless!
Here are a few links to sites with sample syllabi:
The Measure of Service Learning by
This work is a resource for programme evaluators and researchers who want to inform the practice of service learning. It advocates the use of multiple-item scales, presents the rationale for their use, and explains how readers can evaluate them for reliability and validity.
Social Work and Service Learning by
Service learning and social work education comprise an exciting, yet underutilized, partnership. This book represents the first comprehensive overview of this active and empowering approach to learning in social work. Both educators and practitioners will discover conceptual and practical guidance for developing productive community-based projects. Often envisioned as located at the midpoint on a continuum from volunteer work to internship, service learning combines the opportunity to serve with the opportunity to learn. It offers community agencies a chance to collaborate with academic colleagues to meet identified community needs, frequently with an explicit social justice dimension. The contributors illustrate how service learning facilitates students' understanding and interacting with community members as partners, not clients. Service learning encourages students to use critical thinking skills to reflect on their work and its implications. This combination of study-action-reflection in conjunction with course content is highly effective.The book explores its subject from several perspectives. The first section serves as a conceptual and theoretical orientation to service learning in social work. The second section offers models that illustrate many ways of implementing service learning across the components of the social work curriculum. The final two parts of the book focus on evaluation and service learning in the broader context of civic engagement.
Student Self-Evaluation by
For several decades, college teachers have been asking students to engage in self-evaluation, to reflect on their academic work and describe and evaluate it in writing. Student self-evaluation is both a process--consisting of acts of reflecting, composing, and writing--and a product, a writtten document. Student self-evaluation does not obviate the need for student exams and papers, crucial indicators of student mastery of material or complexity of thinking. Rather, student self-evaluation supplements and complements that information by asking students to describe in their own words their learning and its value to them. This writing, and the conversations that faculty members and students have about it, can be instructional, illuminating, and at times transformative. Student self-evaluation is primarily a learning strategy, but it is also a promising assessment approach: while enriching learning for students, it also can help teachers and institutions learn about student learning. This volume introduces the many forms of student self-evaluation in undergraduate teaching settings and describes how student self-evaluation creates connections between learners and learning, knowers and the known, and the self and the mind. This is the 56th issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Teaching and Learning.
Student Learning Outside the Classroom by
Explores the issue of institutional productivity and student learning outside the classroom. Reviews the conditions that can foster a climate where out-of-classroom experiences can contribute to greater educational productivity.
Practice and Service Learning in Occupational Therapy by
While this book is based primarily on experiences of occupational therapy practice education in South Africa, it aims to have international appeal as key principles of practice and service learning are drawn from the differing scenarios covered. Based on qualitative research, some of the book s chapters describe issues faced by students in complex practice situations and highlight educational strategies for promoting socially responsive professional development. They show how students engage with the personal and professional challenges of working in a multicultural society and how situated learning can enhance their resourcefulness in meeting the needs of individuals, groups and communities. The book is divided into three sections: The first, on the practice education agenda, establishes the academic rationale for various forms of practice learning within an occupational therapy curriculum. The second section examines the learning opportunities offered by different practice contexts and highlights mechanisms for developing the professional identity of students. The final section, on enhancing potential, reviews mechanisms that may be used for supporting students in the field, and ends with a look at the future of practice education and how it might develop in response to social and international drivers.
