How serice experiences affect students.docVIP

How service experiences affect students 1. Currently, higher education is confronting urgent calls to return to its original mission of developing a well-informed, critically thinking, and civically engaged citizenry. (civic center/education/duties/rights/virtues) 2. What exactly can higher education do to promote citizenship development among students, and at the same time address the myriad problems that continue to plague society (paraphrase)? 3. One answer may be found within the college or university curriculum, through the simple but extremely powerful academic tool known as “service learning”. The basic idea behind service learning is to use a community or public service experience to enhance the meaning and impact of traditional course content. Connecting service directly with academic courses makes it quite different from “volunteer” work that is performed in the community. Service learning also involves more than simply sending a class of students into communities for additional course credit. Properly designed service learning courses relate the community service experience to the course material and require that students reflect on their experiences through writings, discussions, or class presentations. Service learning not only enriches traditional course content by giving the student an opportunity to test or demonstrate abstract theory in the real world, it also improves the quality of the service being performed by giving it an intellectual underpinning. 4. Service learning may be implemented in any number of academic fields. For example, students enrolled in a psychology class could conduct counseling, mentoring, and drug education for at-risk school children. We have also examined the relationship between the service experience and 35 college outcomes in the following areas: civic responsibility, academic attainment, and life skills. The most remarkable result of the study was that all 35 student outcome measures