When preparing Annual Faculty Reports or other documents related to promotion or tenure, faculty might be inclined to place community service-learning activities in the category of "service”—to the university and/or the surrounding community—but upon closer examination, most CSL practitioners find that their service-learning engagement should also be highlighted in the context of their academic work—their teaching and research.
Teaching
Adopting service-learning as a pedagogical tool enhances a faculty member’s teaching effectiveness by:
- Developing more powerful teaching approaches that provide students with a "real world" context for theory and discipline-specific knowledge, thereby helping students to understand and retain more relevant information
- Raising students’ awareness about current social issues as they relate to academic areas of interest
- Engaging students in powerful, interactive classroom discussions that invite new perspectives and personal experiences
- Developing students’ critical thinking, writing, and interpersonal communication skills
- Increasing students’ awareness and understanding of their community and its needs
- Helping students learn about the complexities of social injustices and systemic problems
Research
Service learning can enhance a faculty member’s research portfolio by:
- Providing access to community issues and settings that might become the focus of discipline-driven research projects
- Developing community relationships that might lead to collaboration in participatory action research aimed both at addressing the community’s need for directly useful knowledge and the faculty member’s goal to contribute to his or her discipline
- Providing opportunities for research on alternative methods of teaching one’s discipline
Service
Service-learning can offer faculty the opportunity to serve the university and surrounding community by:
- Participating in the direct service and/or research projects that students are doing
- Offering professional skills and expertise to the non-profit agencies where students are serving
- Serving on the Board of Directors for the non-profit agencies with which one partners
