Successful Service Learning: A Matter of Ideology

Abstract

Service is a form of experiential education in which students learn and develop their skills and understanding through active participation in thoughtfully organized service that is conducted in and meets the needs of communities (National and Community Service Trust Act, 1993). It is based on the pedagogical principle that learning and do not necessarily occur as a result of experience itself but as a result of a reflective component explicitly designed to foster and development Oacoby, 1996, 6). Interest in service is growing among public service educators. This is not surprising.The goals of service are often congruent with the missions of Master of Public Administration programs and the objectives in courses on civic engagement or political activism. The benefits of service pedagogy do not occur just when a community-based project is added to a syllabus, however. Successful service projects are designed with clear objectives in mind; without these objectives, the pedagogy can be a time-consuming and ineffective instructional tool. In this article, a review of service literature, analysis of findings from two local surveysone used with students and another with the executive directors of community nonprofitsand our experiences in the classroom are used to provide information that educators can use to design more successful service projects. Specifically, we offer a framework that identifies four common perspectives for using service pedagogy, and each perspective is linked to a particular set of outcomes.This framework can help instructors visualize potential outcomes, a prerequisite for crafting well-designed projects and evaluation tools. In addition, we discuss the pitfalls we have encountered in using service pedagogy so that others may learn from our misJ-PAE 10 (2004)3:199-208