In the Zone This Month: April 2009
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It’s All about the Hyphen:
The Essential Connection between Service and Learning
by Golden Jackson
It’s more than doing something for someone. It’s thinking about how issues affect other people, about addressing root causes rather than just providing a short-term service. (student participant in a service-learning project)
President Obama’s education plan calls for expansion of service-learning at both the K-12 and college levels. Effective service-learning in elementary, middle, and high schools gives students a strong foundation from which to deepen and broaden their service experiences in college.
Service-learning has been touted as an effective enhancement to student learning—fostering leadership, self-efficacy, problem solving, critical thinking, and ability to work in groups. To achieve this higher level learning, students must be able to connect their observations and reactions to the service experience to academic content in the classroom.
The connection is essential for development of the ability to integrate threads gained from reading, classroom discussion, observation, and action. Making connections provides gateways leading to opportunities for developing leadership, analyzing problems, proposing strategies, and trying out ideas. Effective service-learning helps students develop integrative thinking and problem-solving skills.
This understanding does not just happen—service projects and reflection have to be intentionally planned to help students move to more integrated meanings. At Ohio State, we use the hyphen between “service” and “learning” to remind us that our job is to design courses and experiences that help students connect the the two.
Service-learning has been touted as an effective enhancement to student learning—fostering leadership, self-efficacy, problem solving, critical thinking, and ability to work in groups.
Student involvement in community service through service-learning courses has developed at Ohio State over the last 10 years. Currently, more than 70 courses in 13 colleges are offered. At Ohio State, service-learning is defined as a form of experiential education characterized by student participation in an organized service activity that is connected to specific learning outcomes, meets identified community needs, and provides structured time for student reflection and connection of the service experience to learning. The Service-Learning Initiative (http://service-learning.osu.edu) provides resources ranging from course development workshops to funding to online discussions to support faculty seeking to integrate community service in their teaching and research.
Golden Jackson is Program Director of the Service-Learning Initiative and associate professor, College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University.
