Hopeful Engagement: The Sentimental Education of University-Sponsored Service Learning

Abstract

The arrival and widespread adoption of service learning, an educational philosophy with roots in progressivism and pragmatism, is easily among the most significant developments in American higher education over the last 20 years. In a foundational definition, service learning joins practical service work with traditional pedagogical models to create “a form of experiential education [requiring reflection and reciprocity] in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs together with structured opportunities intentionally designed to promote student learning and development” [Jacoby, Service-learning in higher education: Concepts and practices, 1996, 5]. The expansion of the service-learning model reflects the growing influence of what has been termed, following Ernest Boyer, a “scholarship of engagement” (Boyer, Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate, 1990; cf. Butin, The Review of Higher Education 29(4): 473–498, 2006). As service-learning programs and centers have proliferated across the landscape of higher education––from liberal arts colleges and universities to professional accreditation programs and trade schools––research on the implementation, institutionalization, and impact of service learning has become an important area of investment for scholars in education, psychology, and public policy. Perhaps not surprisingly, this research tends to be both quantitative in nature and conducted at a high degree of abstraction. Many scholars are (justifiably) invested in measuring outcomes of service learning in order to prove the pedagogical worth of service learning and to design more effective programs (Butin, Service-learning in higher education: Critical issues and directions, 2005; Butin, Service-learning in theory and practice: The future of community engagement in higher education, 2010; Eylerand Giles, Where’s the learning in service-learning?, 1999; Jacoby, Service-learning in higher education: Concepts and practices, 1996). Research designed with these goals in mind tends to rely on survey data to document general trends, a methodological choice that necessarily constrains both the researchers’ ability to perceive nuance and the survey respondents’ capacity to express it in the first place.