Service Learning

Development of the Concept of Service Learning

The term service learning appears to have been first used in 1966–1967 to describe an internship project sponsored by the Southern Regional Education Board in which college students received academic credit or federally funded financial support for work with community organizations. Limited to a small group of practitioners through the mid-1980s, service learning witnessed a remarkable growth in the last decade and a half of the twentieth century. According to a study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, “Between 1984 and 1997, the number of K–12 students in service-learning programs rose from 900,000 to over 12.6 million while the proportion of high school students participating in service-learning grew from 2 percent to 25 percent during the same time period” (National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, 2002, Defining Service Learning, para. 2). Campus Compact, a national coalition of more than 750 college and university presidents committed to the civic purposes of higher education, found a recent increase in service learning on college and university campuses. Among the 327 campuses that responded to a survey distributed in 2001, 14 percent reported an increase of 10 percent or more in the number of faculty involved in service learning from 1998 to 2001, with 51 percent noting a smaller increase of a few additional faculty each year. Eighty-seven percent of the respondents offered service-learning courses in 2001, an 8 percent increase from 2000.

Although the United States is the center of the service-learning movement, a growing interest in service-learning and related pedagogies can be identified in other parts of the world. A study by the International Consortium on Higher Education, Civic Responsibility, and Democracy has documented the development of democratic pedagogies at specified universities in Europe as well as the United States. In South Africa, the Community Higher Education Service Partnership (CHESP) uses service learning to connect and involve eight South African universities with their communities.

[Page 1224]Although service learning has increased dramatically at all levels of education over the past decade, the concept, if not the term, has deep historical roots, dating to the work of the U.S. philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859–1952), who said that genuine learning was stimulated by working to solve or by solving genuine problems. Service learning also has roots in research on participatory action, particularly in the writings of the social psychologist Kurt Lewin, who emphasized what he called actionable theory, acted upon in real-life situations. Organizational and educational theorist David Kolb's work on experiential education and Donald Schön's study of the professions and the reflective practitioner both discuss the similarities between the work of Dewey and Lewin. Kolb and Schön have also made important contributions to the theory and current practice of service learning.

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