Preparing students to learn across the disciplines: pedagogical interventions in community-service learning

Community-service learning (CSL), which is grounded in John Dewey’s theory of learning through experience (1938), allows students the opportunity to participate in a service experience that is integrated within the curriculum, meets the actual needs of the community, and incorporates critical reflection to connect their academic learning with their experiences. There is now overwhelming evidence that CSL has the ability to influence students’ cognitive and affective learning (Levesque-Bristol, Knapp, and Fisher, 2010; Eyler and Giles, 1999; Warren, 2012). In 2014, we offered two collaborative courses that included an international travel component and shared the same cohort of students. Each course offered its own CSL experience but these service projects approached CSL from different disciplinary perspectives that challenged students’ definitions of community. Thus, we began a SoTL research project that examined how students understand community-service learning. We asked students to reflect on their understanding of CSL at the start of the course, after pedagogical interventions, and following their hands-on experiences. Although students did modify their definitions after a hands-on experience, they still did not demonstrate a nuanced understanding of this pedagogy by the end of the course. As such, we became interested in determining how different pedagogical interventions could help students prepare for and understand community-service learning. In a second iteration of these same courses, we introduced CSL using various pedagogical tools including: readings, structured discussions, and evaluations of real-world scenarios. We similarly asked students to reflect on their understanding of CSL at various points in the course and then compared students’ understanding and preparation for participating in CSL activities to those from students in the prior cohort. To analyze reflections, we conducted qualitative analyses using three types of coding procedures: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Although all students began with the same misconceptions of CSL, students exposed to more varied pedagogical interventions exhibited a more comprehensive understanding of CSL and its value to both their learning and the communities compared to the previous cohort. Overwhelmingly, students reported that working through a real-life case study was the most effective way to improve their understanding of CSL. While a hands-on experience is essential to understanding CSL, we argue that greater preparation in the classroom results in enhanced student learning and further expands the power of this pedagogical tool.