Convention Highlights / Pedagogical Forum

I came to service learning about 4lA years ago, when I took on responsibility at the Illinois State Board of Education for a federal grant program to promote that pedagogy. I had been involved in service activities for all my conscious memory?there were, for example, the Up With People! movement and the Great Books program when I was in high school?and so linking service with education was a comfortable idea for me. What was new for me conceptually was how powerful service learning is when used as a teaching method. It is akin to any number of other engaged-learning methods, such as the Junior Achievement model, except that the engagement is to provide a needed service to one's community. There is plenty of research to indicate the effectiveness of engaged-learning methods. Students like these methods because it takes the acquisition of facts and skills out of the theoretical realm of the classroom and into a real-life application. Yet service learning adds another plus for the students: the warm fuzzies. We tend to discount warm fuzzies in our headlong rush towards scientifically-based education, but these are impor tant, in part because research tells us that people remember something better when the brain can attach multiple connections to the thing to be remembered. That is, if you have a biology fact that has

Convention · Engineering ethics · Library science · Pedagogy · Plenary session · Political science · Service-learning · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Diverse Educational Innovations Studies · Engineering · Service-Learning and Community Engagement

• When Service-Learning Is Not a “Border-crossing” Experience

  Carmen Carracelas-Juncal•Hispania•2013

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