How can sociology contribute to integrating service learning into Academic curricula?

Abstract

This article argues that sociology can make a unique contribution to the integration of service experiences into the academic content of courses across the curriculum. By virtue of its theoretical, conceptual, methodological and pedagogical legacies, sociology contributes to an understanding of the potential and promise of community service for academic inquiry. The article describes a unique venture in which an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students designed a major and minor in Public and Community Service Studies using service learning pedagogy. [E]ducation is a dialectic of life and mind, of body and spirit, in which the two are inextricably bound together. Neither acknowledges how awkward this makes it for a liberal arts university at once to serve and challenge society, to simultaneously “transmit” fundamental values such as tolerance, responsibility, and love of learning and to create a climate in which students are not merely conditioned by what is transmitted (transmission tends toward indoctrination). Such a university must stand apart from society in order to give students room to breathe and grow free from a too-insistent reality. At the same time, it must stand within the real world and its limits in order to prepare students for real lives in a society that, it they do not mold it to their aspirations, will mold them to its conventions. Benjamin R. Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone1992: pp. 208–9