Why Does IPSL Believe in Service-Learning™?

Service-learning™ develops in participants a lifelong commitment to service and leadership. It promotes understanding of local issues as well as recognition of the interrelatedness of communities and societies across the world. Service-learning™ also takes the theory from the classroom and applies it to real-life situations.

Why is service-learning™ important, valuable and necessary?

Service-learning™ addresses simultaneously two important needs of our societies: the education and development of people and the provision of increased resources to serve individuals and communities.

Service-Learning™...

• enriches students' learning of academic subjects. Theory is field-tested in practice and is seen and measured within a cultural context. Because the learning is put to immediate use, it tends to be deeper and to last longer.

• develops leadership skills in students as they learn to work collaboratively with the community. They learn that the most effective leadership is that which encourages the active participation-and, indeed, leadership-of others.

• promotes intercultural and international understanding. The service, whether local, domestic, or international, almost always occurs with people whose lives are very different from that of the student. By working with them, the student comes to understand and appreciate their different experiences, ideas, and values, and to work cooperatively with them. Service-learning™ thus nurtures global awareness and socially responsible citizenship.

• fosters in students personal growth, maturity, the examination of values and beliefs, and civic responsibility, all within the context of a community and its needs. Students explore how they may use their education for the benefit of the community and the well-being of others, especially those in need.

• provides help to service agencies and to communities, addressing needs that would otherwise remain unmet. Service-learning™ does not replace paid work. Rather, it supplements and extends such work, offering service that would otherwise not be available.

• sets academic institutions in a reciprocal relationship with the community that supports them and in which they are located. In today's world, with pressing issues in every community and nation, academic institutions are called to apply their knowledge and resources to these problems and needs.

• advances our understanding of societies, cultures, and world issues by testing scholarship against immediate practical experience and theory within a cultural context.

Where and how is service-learning™ practiced?

Recognizing the many needs of communities, nations, and the world, wishing to respond to these needs, and wanting to provide the most stimulating and valuable education to their students, educators around the world are discovering the richness of service-learning™. They are applying the pedagogy of service-learning™ in a wide variety of situations and through various models. In developing service-learning™, they are not following the lead of any one nation or system. Instead, they are creating their own versions, compatible with their national systems of education, the prevailing educational philosophies, the mission, curricula, and structures of their own institution, and identifying the needs that they may most effectively assist in addressing.

The most common setting for service-learning™ is the local community near the campus, so that the studies occur on campus and the service is performed nearby. But many programs also exist that take students into a new setting, sometimes to another country. International service-learning™ can be especially rich, as it exposes students to many conditions, ideas, assumptions, and people that are substantially different from those with which they are familiar.

Service-learning™ may be designed to link one course or subject to service or it may join several disciplines. It may be offered to a group of students or for an individual through independent study. The students may serve together in a single agency or village, or they may be individually placed in a variety of service positions.The pattern may be that of study followed by a period of service, and concluding with reflection and examination, or the service and study may be intertwined throughout the period of service-learning™.

Increasing numbers of universities and colleges throughout the world are requiring that students have a service-learning experience to receive a degree. But the more common pattern is to offer service-learning in a variety of departments and courses of study so that students may themselves elect service-learning. In most institutions offering service-learning, there are opportunities throughout the degree program to participate; in others it is year-specific, such as for first- or final-year students.

Principles of Good Practice

The best-designed and executed service-learning™ programs ensure that:

• there is reciprocity between the community served and the university or college, and their relationship is built on mutual respect and esteem.

• the learning is rigorous, sound, and appropriate to the academic level of the students. The studies do not offer foregone conclusions but rather, in the spirit of academic inquiry, expose students to a wide range of points of view, theories, and ideas, asking that they critically examine these ideas and their experience in service, thereby reaching their own thoughtfully considered insights.

• the service is truly useful to the community or agency. Experience has shown that the agency or community is best qualified to define what is useful. The time and quality of the service must be sufficient to offset the agency time spent in planning, supervising, and evaluating the program; otherwise the institution and the student are exploiting the very people they intend to assist.

• there is a clear connection between the studies and the service. The studies may focus on the general culture of those served or be more specific in relating subject matter and the service experience. Either pattern is effective.

• students are allowed and, indeed, encouraged to develop and demonstrate leadership skills, using their own initiative when appropriate, bearing in mind that they should first listen to the community and be responsive to its values and needs.

• opportunity for personal reflection on the meaning of the experience in relation to the student's values and life decisions is built into the program in a structured way. The keeping of a journal is a common means of providing this opportunity for the students to connect what they are learning and experiencing with their own lives.

• support services are provided. Students are prepared for their service and the community in which they will serve. Provision is made for their health care should it be needed, and students are advised on issues of safety. Ongoing advising services are available.

How can universities, colleges, nongovernmental and related organizations participate?

There are a variety of ways in which to affiliate with the International Partnership for Service-Learning™ and Leadership:

• Become a Member. Join like-minded institutions in broadening the dialogue on international service-learning™; engage in contact and collaboration with your peers around the world; receive information, ideas and assistance from IPSL; and have opportunities to provide your knowledge, experience, reflections and questions as peers to your fellow members as well as to IPSL as it fulfills its dual mission of advocacy and program development in the field.

• Send students on IPSL programs. Institutions around the world use IPSL programs to make service-learning™ available to their students in a wide variety of locations. IPSL programs create a powerful dynamic between direct cultural exposure and academic learning. Interaction with the community teaches students how the culture functions; time in the classroom teaches them why it functions as it does. By testing theory with practice, IPSL students find their learning takes on greater depth and meaning.

• Commission special programs. Institutions and organizations often ask IPSL to design and administer international service-learning™ programs especially designed for their students, teachers, or members. IPSL can make special arrangements in many of our program locations to respond to particular institutional needs for an international service-learning™ experience. Participate in and/or cosponsor activities such as conferences, training workshops for faculty members and/or service-learning™ and study-abroad officers on campus, and related meetings sponsored or co-sponsored by IPSL.

• Use—and possibly write for— IPSL publications such as the newsletters, textbooks, and training materials.