Let's hear the truth about service learning

All institutions of higher education (and institutions of lower education too, for that matter) should be employing those pedagogical techniques that George Kuh and others have labeled "high-impact educational practices." One of them is service learning (which also goes by other labels). But one of the things that drives me nuts is when we promote those approaches without also giving equal emphasis to the notion that we have to implement them well. High-impact educational practices are worthless unless they're done well. Here's an article from Inside Higher Ed about an investigation of service learning programs. A couple of excerpts...

Every semester, "service learning" programs send students out to local community organizations to get their hands dirty, putting to use the concepts they learn in the classroom. The intended outcome is a symbiotic relationship between the college and the community. In The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning(Temple University Press), Randy Stoecker, professor of community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin, and Elizabeth Tryon, community partner specialist for the Human Issues Studies Program at Edgewood College’s School of Integrative Studies, explore the relationship between college and community, asking whether the latter benefits as much as service-learning proponents say.

With the help of Amy Hilgendorf, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin in human development and family studies, Stoecker and Tryon tapped into community organization staff members' empirical knowledge by publishing interviews that were conducted and analyzed by service-learning students. Issues ranging from supervision to training to poor student performance are addressed, with concluding recommendations for ways for colleges and community organizations to make better use of each other.

When you ask community workers if they are satisfied with students, they almost always say yes. But when you ask them what those students accomplished, too frequently the answer is "not much."

And now, for the rest of the story...