Service Learning & Community Engagement
What is Service Learning?
Service learning is a way of teaching and learning that incorporates community engagement into academic coursework. Guided reflection links community-based student experience to course learning goals and objectives. Service learning experiences respond to real community needs and enhance students' civic responsibility.
Students not only learn to serve but also serve to learn. Service learning is a deliberate, adaptable, interdisciplinary pedagogy. It is based on intellectual rigor, civic involvement, and lifelong learning.
The University of Iowa offers many service-learning courses, including 49 new courses that were developed in the two years following the weeklong Service Learning Institutes held May 2005 and 2006.
For more information, please contact the Center for Teaching or to arrange a consultation about linking to community partners, contact the Community-Based Learning Program, or call 335-7589.
More Information About Service Learning
- What is Service Learning?
- The Benefits of Service Learning
- Where's the Learning in Service Learning?
- Does Service Learning Really Help? (New York Times)
- Forming a Partnership
- How to Design a Service Learning Course
- 10 Principles of Good Practice in Curriculum & Pedagogy
- Reflection Activities
- Ideas for Reflection Questions
- Using Service Learning to Teach Community Health
(Journal of Academic Medicine- AAMC) - Generating, Deepening, and Documenting Learning: The Power of Critical Reflection in Applied Learning
(Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education - 2009 Obermann Graduate Institute on Public Engagement
- Service Learning Resources