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Student learning from community engagement
Edited by Juliet Millican and Tom Bourner [University of Brighton, UK]
A college education can provide many benefits, not the least of which is the opportunity for personal growth and development. Employers expect college graduates to have social skills as well as academic achievements. In this paper, I describe one approach to developing these types of skills, particularly focusing on the development of empathy. In this study, empathy is framed as a type of understanding that students can achieve through service-learning (SL) opportunities. I discuss what previous research has shown about the factors that make SL effective. After explaining the research design and implementation for this study, I discuss the specific factors, which seem to be important in the development of empathy and implications for future research.
Many American colleges have chosen to initiate community-based projects, including SL courses. One reason for taking this direction in undergraduate education is that colleges have begun to recognize the need for personal and social development of students. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has challenged its members to adopt core commitments, which include extending the educational purpose of the institution to address the development of personal and social responsibility (defined as striving for excellence, personal and academic integrity, community contributions, respecting others' perspectives, and ethical and moral reasoning). In a survey sponsored by the AAC&U ([1] Antonaros et al. , 2008, p. 3), over 90 percent of the 23,000 undergraduate students and 9,000 faculty, administrators and staff agreed that developing "personal and social responsibility should be a major focus of a college education".
[2] Barr and Tagg (1995) issued a call for institutions of higher education to evaluate the traditional methods of instruction in light of the changing needs of college students and the research findings on how people learn. Their seminal article on the change in teaching and learning continues to guide educational research today. The essence of their challenge is reflected in the following quote:
[A] college's purpose is not to transfer knowledge but to create environments and experiences that bring students to discover and construct knowledge for themselves, to make students members of communities of learners that make discoveries and solve problems ([2] Barr and Tagg, 1995, p....