Learning at the Edges: Challenges to the Sustainability of Service Learning in Higher Education

Abstract

Service-learning in higher education has gained increasing attention in recent years, but at most universities it remains an activity that is largely peripheral to the dominant concerns of the institution. Service learning has generally been defined as coursework that places undergraduates in community-service activities and relates those activities to academic content. In principle, service-learning courses engage students in activities that involve service of some sort to the neighboring community and provide the occasion to reflect on their participation in those activities, thus connecting service to classroom instruction. In this way, service learning both extends learning beyond the classroom and brings the real world into the classroom. In practice, however, because of the manner in which service-learning programs have been established at many universities, primarily from higher administrative units, the tendency has been for service-learning programs to become marginalized. That is, they take place outside the academic mainstream of campus life — in many cases, outside traditional academic departments — and enjoy relatively little departmental or institutional commitment. This tendency represents a serious challenge to the long-term sustainability of universities’ servicelearning partnerships with schools and community organizations. In this article, we attempt to make both practical and theoretical contributions to the literature on service learning. On one hand, we focus pragmatically on the sustainability of service learning efforts, given the institutional culture of the university. On the other hand, we also examine service learning through the lens of sociocultural theory, as a form of learning through apprenticeship. Our intent is to understand the multiLearning at the Edges: Challenges to the Sustainability of Service Learning in Higher Education