Why Service Learning?
(Some information below is drawn from the Learn and Serve Clearinghouse definitions page)
For students
- Students report positive, meaningful and real experiences
- Students have better retention and better grades in SL classes than in non SL sections of the same classes
- Students often report success in investigating or discovering career options
- Some students later get jobs or at least skills and recommendations from the agencies where they volunteer; most gain knowledge of themselves and their communities
- SL involves cooperative rather than competitive experiences, promoting invaluable workplace skills associated with teamwork, community involvement, citizenship
- Students address complex problems in complex settings rather than simplified problems in isolation
- Students engage in problem-solving, gaining knowledge of the specific context of their service-learning activity and community challenges, which brings to life “book learning.” As a result, service-learning offers powerful opportunities to acquire the habits of critical thinking; i.e. the ability to identify the most important questions or issues within a real-world situation
- Students report deeper learning because the results are immediate and uncontrived.
- Because of the immediacy of experience, service-learning is more likely to be personally meaningful to participants and to generate emotional consequences, to challenge values as well as ideas, and hence to support social, emotional and cognitive learning and development
- Many students report becoming Lifelong Service Learners
For faculty
- Faculty find an exciting approach to scholarship that integrates community input and non-traditional scholarship into traditional classes
- Faculty get a chance to actualize academic concepts in real world situations in ways that galvanize students
- Faculty make contacts with working professionals who become advisers, guest speakers, resources
- Faculty have an opportunity to work in interdisciplinary teams on local issues
- Faculty like having an opportunity to reach students with innovative alternative assignments
- Faculty report improved student performance
For college
- Gavilan has unparalleled, inexpensive, positive public image building
- Gavilan gets a chance to cross the town-gown boundary by offering valuable student aid in the community
- Gavilan gains extremely fundable grant partnership possibilities in largely Hispanic communities
- Gavilan acquires a means of providing real world relevance through community participation
For community
- Agencies get valuable help in delivering and improving vital services and resources to needy populations
- Agencies receive help doing projects that are important but would otherwise not get done
- Agencies get publicity for needs in community and of partner organization
- Agencies can address student and community misconceptions about at-risk, immigrant, and needy populations
- Many agencies expose students to needs in community and cultivate civic minded participation
- Agencies can foster and encourage lifelong habits of civic participation in students
- Students will bring fresh perspectives and energies, and new ideas, to community agencies