Integrating Community Service Into The Curriculum

The book contributes to an understanding of an educational shift prevalent in our society toward creating humanizing conditions though pedagogy, that will seek co-existence within the lines of policy while influencing system-wide change.

Service-learning, the integration of community service with academic course work, is a promising strategy for enhancing learning and developing active democratic citizens. This book responds to the many recent calls for youth involvement in service as part of the public school curriculum. While service-learning holds many benefits for students, teachers, and communities, there are also many challenges to effectively incorporatie it into the curriculum. Each of the book's four parts provides a different scope and purpose. Part 1 addresses the components of quality service- learning programs; Part 2 introduces diverse models of service-learning programs at the elementary, middle, and high school levels; Part 3 allows students, agency members, and administrators to tell their own stories of service-learning involvement, to discuss issues with other individuals who share their roles, and to offer recommendations for effective action; and Part 4 asks readers to consider the future of service-learning in public schooling. Community Service-Learning is a comprehensive resource that will be valuable for all those involved with K-12 service-learning programs: administrators, classroom teachers, students, program coordinators, and university teacher education programs.

This book serves as an introduction to using online teaching technologies and hybrid forms of teaching for experiential learning and civic engagement. Service-learning has kept pace neither with the rapid growth in e-learning in all its forms nor with the reality that an increasing number of students are learning online without exposure to the benefits of this powerful pedagogy.Eservice-learning (electronic service-learning) combines service-learning and on-line learning and enables the delivery of the instruction and/or the service to occur partially or fully online. Eservice-learning allows students anywhere, regardless of geography, physical constraints, work schedule, or other access limitations, to experience service-learning. It reciprocally also equips online learning with a powerful tool for engaging students.In eservice-learning, the core components of service, learning, and reflection may take a different form due to the online medium—for example, reflection often occurs through discussion board interactions, journals, wikis, or blogs in an eservice-learning course. Moreover, the service, though still community-based, creates a world of opportunities to connect students with communities across the globe—as well as at their very own doorstep.This book introduces the reader to the four emerging types of eservice-learning, from Extreme EService-Learning (XE-SL) classes where 100% of the instruction and 100% of the service occur online, to three distinct forms of hybrid where either the service or the instruction are delivered wholly on-line – with students, for instance, providing online products for far-away community partners – or in which both are delivered on-site and online. It considers the instructional potential of common mobile technologies – phones, tablets and mobile reading devices. The authors also address potential limitations, such as technology challenges, difficulties sustaining three-way communication among the instructor, community partner, and students, and added workload.The book includes research studies on effectiveness as well as examples of practice such drafting grants for a community partner, an informational technology class building online communities for an autism group, and an online education class providing virtual mentoring to at-risk students in New Orleans from across the country.

Service-learning has many definitions based on how a service program is structured in a particular institution. For this book, it is defined as a structured learning experience that combines community service with student preparation and reflection--a connecting link being established between academics and service. The central focus of this textbook is the integration of service-learning into the nursing curriculum. The contributors address the components of service-learning and its central relationship to education and curriculum and discuss issues related to service-learning by incorporating narrative comments from some from some 300 students who have participated in various service-learning programs.

The need for more empathetic and community-focused students must begin with educators, as service-learning has begun to grow in popularity throughout the years. By implementing service and community aspects into the classroom at an early age, educators have a greater chance of influencing students and creating a new generation of service-minded individuals who care about their communities. Teachers must have the necessary skills and current information available to them to provide students with quality service learning and community engagement curricula. The Research Anthology on Service Learning and Community Engagement Teaching Practices provides a thorough investigation of the current trends, best practices, and challenges of teaching practices for service learning and community engagement. Using innovative research, it outlines the struggles, frameworks, and recommendations necessary for educators to engage students and provide them with a comprehensive education in service learning. Covering topics such as lesson planning, teacher education, and cultural humility, it is a crucial reference for educators, administrators, universities, lesson planners, researchers, academicians, and students.

This book is a reference to administrators and educators at institutions of higher learning who are thinking about taking serious steps to link their educational mission to helping their surrounding communities. Various best practices across the disciplines in higher education about integrating community engagement in traditional coursework are presented. This book provides a multi-disciplinary and multi-method approach to incorporating the effects of community engagement (service learning) in the curriculum. Multiple departments from Art to Statistics, as well as various types of classes (undergraduate, graduate, online, face-to-face) are represented here. If you are not sure how to integrate community engagement in classes at your university, this book is for you.

First released in the Spring of 1999, How People Learn has been expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning. Like the original edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods--to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system. Topics include: How learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain. How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn. What the thought processes of experts tell us about how to teach. The amazing learning potential of infants. The relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace. Learning needs and opportunities for teachers. A realistic look at the role of technology in education.

Service-Learning Essentials is the resource you need to help you develop high-quality service-learning experiences for college students. Written by one of the field's leading experts and sponsored by Campus Compact, the book is the definitive work on this high-impact educational practice. Service-learning has been identified by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as having been widely tested and shown to be beneficial to college students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Organized in an accessible question-and-answer format, the book responds clearly and completely to the most common questions and concerns about service-learning. Each chapter addresses issues related to individual practice as well as to the collective work of starting and developing a service-learning center or program, with examples drawn from a variety of disciplines, situations, and institutional types. The questions range from basic to advanced and the answers cover both the fundamentals and complexities of service-learning. Topics include: Determining what service-learning opportunities institutions should offer How to engage students in critical reflection in academic courses and in cocurricular experiences Best practices for developing and sustaining mutually beneficial campus-community partnerships Integrating service-learning into the curriculum in all disciplines and at all levels, as well as various areas of student life outside the classroom Assessing service-learning programs and outcomes The dilemmas of service-learning in the context of power and privilege The future of service-learning in online and rapidly globalizing environments Service-learning has virtually limitless potential to enable colleges and universities to meet their goals for student learning while making unique contributions to addressing unmet local, national, and global needs. However, in order to realize these benefits, service-learning must be thoughtfully designed and carefully implemented. This easy-to-use volume contains everything faculty, leaders, and staff members need to know about service-learning to enhance communities, improve higher education institutions, and educate the next generation of citizens, scholars, and leaders.