LibGuides: Service Learning and Community Engagement: For Faculty

Toolkits

Constructing a Service Learning Syllabus
Service Learning. strategies, outcome, and assessment.
"This handbook is designed as a short, accessible, and practical how-to guide for instructors seeking to apply service learning and research to the practical tasks of linking service-learning experiences with course learning outcomes and assessment techniques. "
Practical Guide for Integrating Civic Responsibility into the Curriculum
"This curriculum guide discusses civic responsibility, how it is tied to service-learning, how faculty can integrate concepts and exercises in a practical way, and how faculty can assess the development of civic responsibility in their students. Provides practical, easy-to-use applications and includes numerous exercises, activities, and assessment tools."

Cult of Pedagogy
"Cult of Pedagogy is run by a team of people committed to making you more awesome in the classroom," providing lesson plans, podcast, videos, and blogs from a community of teachers to teachers of all levels.
Common Lit
"Common Lit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students."
Merlot
The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
Teaching Commons
"Open Educational Resources from Leading Colleges and Universities."
Open Educational Resources Commons
Open educational platform by educators for educators containing lesson plans, assessment ideas, classroom activities, textbooks, and teaching strategies.
Open Access Publishing in European Networks(OAPEN)
"The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation."
Open Course Library
"The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts."

FACULTY can benefit personally and professionally from integrating service-learning into courses. Teaching with service-learning can:

Encourage interactive teaching methods and reciprocal learning between students and faculty
Add new insights and dimensions to class discussions
Lead to new avenues for research and publication
Promote students' active learning; engage students with different learning styles
Develop students' civic and leadership skills
Provide networking opportunities with engaged faculty in other disciplines
Provide firsthand knowledge of community issues; provide opportunities to be more involved in the communities they live.
Adapted from UMass Amherst

More on this topic:

The two primary aims of service-learning should be to offer an intellectually rich educational experience for students and to address a significant community need.
The service-learning project should be well-integrated into the course content so that students clearly see the relationship between the project and the academic goals of the course. They should also be able to understand why the experience has intellectual value.
Adequate in-class time should be allocated for the students to share, discuss, and analyze their service-learning experiences with other students in the class and with their professor.
The time commitment for the completing the service-learning project and students' reflection on it should be flexible, appropriate, and in the best interest of everyone involved including students, faculty, and community partners.
Faculty should recognize that creating a viable service-learning project with a community partner takes time, commitment, and an understanding of the partner's point of view and needs.
The community partner, not the faculty member, should identify what the community partner needs and the goals to which it aspires.
Collaborations between faculty and community partners are key to creating a service learning project that is both intellectually rich and provides a real service to the community.
Final results of the service-learning project should be shared by the student with the community partner.

Adapted from UMass Amherst

Reflection is an important part of service learning and students may need support in crafting a well-thought service learning.

Facilitating reflection
A guide from the Way back machine on how to construct meaningful reflection assignments.
Comfort Zone Boundary Crossing Assignment
Stereotype List

Assessment Toolkit for Health and Science
Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Matrix
"This Institutional Matrix is designed to help you map your institution’s overall commitment to education for personal and social responsibility (PSR)."
Podcast as an assessment tool

Learning Through Serving by Christine M. Cress; Peter J. Collier; Vicki L. Reitenauer
Call Number: LC220.5 .C72 2013
ISBN: 9781579229894
Publication Date: 2013-07-10
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire; Myra Bergman Ramos (Translator)
Call Number: LB880 .F73 P4313 2000. Manhattan Library
ISBN: 0826412769
Publication Date: 2000-09-01
Teaching Community by Bell Hooks
Call Number: LC196.5 .U6 H66 2003
ISBN: 9780415968188
Publication Date: 2003-08-25
Teaching Critical Thinking by Bell Hooks
Call Number: LB1025.3 .H67 2010
ISBN: 9780415968201
Publication Date: 2009-09-15
Teaching to Transgress by Bell Hooks
Call Number: LC196 .H66 1994
ISBN: 9780415908085
Publication Date: 1994-09-12

This American Life
This American Life is a weekly public radio program and podcast. Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme.
RadioLab
"Created by Jad Abumrad and hosted by Jad and Robert Krulwich, Radiolab investigative the use of radio to make science accessible to broad audiences."
StoryCorps
"StoryCorps’ mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world."
Serial
"Serial is a podcast from the creators of This American Life, hosted by Sarah Koenig. Serial tells one story—a true story—over the course of a season. Each season, we follow a plot and characters wherever they take us. We won’t know what happens at the end until we get there, not long before you get there with us."
Freakonomics
Exploring the hidden side of everything.
Invisibilia
"Invisibilia is Latin for "the invisible things." We explore the invisible forces that shape human behavior — things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions."
Code-Switch
"We're a team of journalists fascinated by the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting. "