What Is Academic Service-Learning?

Characteristics of Academic Service-Learning

• Community service serves as the vehicle for the achievement of specific academic goals and objectives.

• It provides structured time for students to reflect on their service and learning experiences through a mix of writing, reading, speaking, listening, and creating in small and large groups and individual work.

• It fosters the development of those "intangibles"- empathy, personal values, beliefs, awareness, self-esteem, self-confidence, social-responsibility, and helps to foster a sense of caring for others.

• It is based on a reciprocal relationship in which the service reinforces and strengthens the learning, and the learning reinforces and strengthens the service.

• Credit is awarded for learning, college-level learning, not for a requisite number of service hours.

How is Academic Service-Learning (AS-L) different from community service, internships, cooperative education, etc.?

• Academic Service-Learning uses community service as the vehicle for the attainment of students' academic goals and objectives.

• Community service fills a need in the community through volunteer efforts. AS-L also fills that need, but it uses that need as a foundation to examine our society, our future, and ourselves. Additionally, AS-L provides students with opportunities to use newly acquired skills and knowledge in real-life situations.

• AS-L identifies in advance, and tracks, specific learning objectives and goals (as well as the intangible ones).

• Students perform a valuable, significant, and necessary service that has real consequence to the community.

• The goal of the service is to empower students and those being served.

• The needs of the community dictate the service being provided.