Social Work and Service Learning

Service learning and social work education comprise an exciting, yet underutilized, partnership. This book represents the first comprehensive overview of this active and empowering approach to learning in social work. Both educators and practitioners will discover conceptual and practical guidance for developing productive community-based projects.

Often envisioned as located at the midpoint on a continuum from volunteer work to internship, service learning combines the opportunity to serve with the opportunity to learn. It offers community agencies a chance to collaborate with academic colleagues to meet identified community needs, frequently with an explicit social justice dimension.

The contributors illustrate how service learning facilitates students' understanding and interacting with community members as partners, not clients. Service learning encourages students to use critical thinking skills to reflect on their work and its implications. This combination of study-action-reflection in conjunction with course content is highly effective.

The book explores its subject from several perspectives. The first section serves as a conceptual and theoretical orientation to service learning in social work. The second section offers models that illustrate many ways of implementing service learning across the components of the social work curriculum. The final two parts of the book focus on evaluation and service learning in the broader context of civic engagement.

Meryl Nadel, MSW, DSW is an associate professor and director of the Center for Social Research in the Social Work Department at Iona College, New Rochelle, NY. In addition to service learning, her research interests include social work/social welfare history, prevention, qualitative methods, and social work involvement in the summer camp movement.

Virginia Majewski, MSW, PhD is professor and associate dean of the Indiana University School of Social Work in Indianapolis, IN. In addition to service learning as a pedagogical approach for social justice, her research and teaching interests include hunger and food insecurity, rural community organizing, and American Indian issues.

Marilyn Sullivan-Cosetti, MSW, PhD is an associate professor and director of the Seton Hill University Social Work Program, Greensburg, PA. Her research interests include service learning in the academy, juvenile female violent offenders, and community organization practice.