Learning Through Serving: A Student Guidebook for Service-learning and Civic Engagement Across Academic Disciplines and Cultural Communities

This substantially expanded new edition of this widely-used and acclaimed text maintains the objectives and tenets of the first. It is designed to help students understand and reflect on their community service experiences both as individuals and as citizens of communities in need of their compassionate expertise. It is designed to assist faculty in facilitating student development of compassionate expertise through the context of service in applying disciplinary knowledge to community issues and challenges. In sum, the book is about how to make academic sense of civic service in preparing for roles as future citizen leaders.

Each chapter has been developed to be read and reviewed, in sequence, over the term of a service-learning course. Students in a semester course might read just one chapter each week, while those in a quarter-term course might need to read one to two chapters per week. The chapters are intentionally short, averaging 8 to 14 pages, so they do not interfere with other course content reading.

This edition presents four new chapters on Mentoring, Leadership, Becoming a Change Agent, and Short-Term Immersive and Global Service-Learning experiences. The authors have also revised the original chapters to more fully address issues of social justice, privilege/power, diversity, intercultural communication, and technology; have added more disciplinary examples; incorporated additional academic content for understanding service-learning issues (e.g., attribution theory); and cover issues related to students with disabilities, and international students.

This text is a student-friendly, self-directed guide to service-learning that:

• Develops the skills needed to succeed
• Clearly links service-learning to the learning goals of the course
• Combines self-study and peer-study workbook formats with activities that can be incorporated in class, to give teachers maximum flexibility in structuring their service-learning courses
• Promotes independent and collaborative learning
• Equally suitable for courses of a few weeks’ or a few months’ duration
• Shows students how to assess progress and communicate end-results
• Written for students participating in service learning as a class, but also suitable for students working individually on a project.

Instructor's Manual

This Instructor Manual discusses the following six key areas for aligning your course with use of Learning through Serving, whether you teach a senior-level high school class, freshman studies course, or a college capstone class:

1. Course and syllabus design
2. Community-partner collaboration
3. Creating class community
4. Strategic teaching techniques
5. Developing intercultural competence
6. Impact assessment

This Manual is free and available for download in PDF format by clicking on "INSTRUCTOR MANUAL" on the left side of this webpage, just underneath the cover image.

Christine M. Cress is Professor of Educational Leadership, Higher Education Policy, and Community Engagement at Portland State University. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She has conducted professional trainings on curricular integration and the scholarship of service-learning at scores of colleges in North America, Europe, Japan, India, and Nepal. Earlier in her career, she was an academic and career adviser at Western Washington University, Whatcom Community College, and Northwest Indian College. For the last twenty years at PSU, she has directed Master and Doctoral degrees and a fully on-line Graduate Certificate in Service-Learning including facilitation of short-term international service-learning and COIL/Virtual Exchange classes in India, Japan, Morocco, and Turkey. Her cultural privilege is primarily northern European American with Cherokee (non-tribal affiliation) and Sene-Gambian heritage. She is a first-generation college student, adoptee and adoptive parent, and member of a multi-racial lesbian family. These myriad social positions influence her scholarship which addresses intersectionality, systemic oppression, and equity-centered education and community engagement.

Peter J. Collier took a non-traditional road to his position at PSU and that dramatically informs his research and teaching. He deeply understands that not everyone arrives at a university skilled at "being a college student." Dr. Collier began his education studying engineering at Iowa State University in the late 1960's. From there he moved to New York City where he studied at Julliard and later worked several years as a commercial song writer. He moved back to Oregon in the 1970's, but did not resume his academic studies until 1985 when he earned an associate degree in nursing from Rogue Community College. He earned a Bachelor's degree from Southern Oregon University in 1987 and finally landed at PSU after earning his Ph.D. in System Science and Sociology in 1997. His wide-ranging education and real-life experiences make Collier uniquely qualified to study and teach about the sociology of higher education, identity development and social psychology.Currently Professor Collier's research focuses on issues around how a lack of familiarity with the taken-for-granted aspects of higher education make it more difficult for students from non-traditional backgrounds to succeed at the university.

Vicki L. Reitenauer is an instructor in the senior Capstone service-learning program at Portland State University.