Service learning: Service-Learning is teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities. A community engagement pedagogy or teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strong communities.
Service-learning class: A course-based educational experience in which students participate in an organized service activity and reflect on the experience in such a way as to gain further understanding of course content, a broader appreciation of the discipline, and an enhanced sense of personal values and civic responsibility.
Service learning pedagogy includes four elements:
Civic identity: When one sees her or himself as an active participant in society with a strong commitment and responsibility to work with others towards public purposes.
Civic Identity: Organizations, movements, campaigns, a place or locus where people and/or living creatures inhabit, which may be defined by a locality (school, national park, non-profit organization, town, state, nation) or defined by shared identity (i.e., African-Americans, North Carolinians, Americans, the Republican or Democratic Party, refugees, etc.). In addition, contexts for civic engagement may be defined by a variety of approaches intended to benefit a person, group, or community, including community service or volunteer work, academic work.
Community engagement: Community engagement seeks to better engage the community to achieve long-term and sustainable outcomes, processes, relationship, discourse, decision making, or implementation.
Voluntarism: Volunteerism refers to the act of performing service without pay — usually with charitable institutions or community agencies. (NYLC)
Civic engagement: Civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes. (NYTimes)
Community-based learning: Students engage in actively addressing mutually defined community needs as a collaboration between community partners, faculty, and students as a vehicle for achieving academic goals and course objectives.
Terms adapted from:
Reprinted with permission from "VALUE: Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education." Copyright 2018 by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. http://www.aacu.org/value/index.cfm.
NYTimes Archives. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/college/collegespecial2/coll_aascu_defi.html?pagewanted=all
NYLC-National Youth Leadership Council- Service Learning Glossary