Using Faculty Learning Communities and the Campus Teaching Learning Center to Ignite Service-Learning on Your Campus

Service-learning is a valuable pedagogical tool to integrate service to community with classroom learning. In their most limited sense, service-learning courses unite in a single mission the traditionally-separate duties of research, teaching, and service (Cushman, 1999). Additionally, more than volunteerism, service-learning combines community work with classroom instruction, emphasizing reflection as well as action. It empowers students by making them responsible in a real-world context, while giving them the support, encouragement, information, and skills to be effective scholars and citizens. (Rosenberg, 2000) Although service-learning is a relatively new pedagogy, many studies have reported various benefits from the use of service-learning in college curriculums (Speck, 2001). The win-win-win combination comes from the benefits students derive from real-world assignments, benefiting members of the community, more effective teaching tools for faculty and great interaction with students, as well as the positive connection the university develops with the community. Center Collaboration With Faculty Member on Existing Service-Learning Project: A Case Study of a Success Story For five years, the faculty member had been coordinating the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) Program, having students prepare tax returns for poor and elderly taxpayers with limited success. Once the staff member of the campus teaching learning center learned of the project, identifying it as service-learning, she referred the professor to financial, staff, and other resources. In one year, this collaboration resulted in a greatly improved program and we now have a basis of assessment data to study the long-term impact of this program