Can Service Learning Foster a Social Responsibility Among Students?—A Didactical Analysis and Empirical Case-Study in Business Education at a German University

Abstract

Due to the recent global economic crisis, the role of business education is becoming more urgent and concepts related to social responsibility are gaining recognition as essential elements in business education. One open question is how can business education contribute to sensitising future managers into acting responsibly? Service learning is often attributed to the potential to promote social responsibility and citizenship skills among students. Service learning can be described as a teaching tool that is characterised by students giving service to the community and having a learning experience. The key goal of this chapter is to have a look at service learning as a teaching tool from a didactical point of view. In the first part, we provide an overview about the potentials of service learning and show the didactical and learning theoretical foundations of this approach. Based on that, we present several empirical studies on service learning in business education and aim to demonstrate that cognitive development and understanding of social responsibility can be promoted through service learning. However, having an effect on the sense of responsibility is mostly dependent on the didactical design. Service learning can be described as a context-sensitive concept; therefore, an implementation in German business education needs a contextual adaption. To address this, in the second part, we present a case-study to design and to implement service learning in a German faculty of Business Administration and Economics. We evaluated this service learning arrangement through a qualitative survey. As one result of the survey, it can be shown that the didactical adaption of the service projects and the reflection about the service activity through the students are relevant design criteria for service learning.