Community engaged pedagogies, also referred to as service-learning, are teaching and learning strategies that combine academic learning with community service (Elyer & Giles, 1999). Pedagogical sholarship suggests that service-learning impacts student learning in a variety of ways as described below.

Academic Service-Learning

Academic service-learning is an educational experience that unites experiential components, civic engagement, and classroom activities.  As such, the goal of academic service-learning is to enhance the development of each student's sense of civic responsibility while achieving the academic objectives for individual courses or across courses within a curriculum.  Institutional support fosters the linkage of learning, assessing, and applying academic content in meaningful, measurable projects within real community settings.

Service-learning focuses on intentional reciprocity between the student and the community.  Structured reflection on the interplay between academic development and community benefit provides the key to academic service-learning.  Together, reflection and reciprocity allow the academic service-learning experience to benefit the student, the university, and the community.

Faculty Directors:

Lori Simons, PhD, LPC, CCDP-D, CAC-D

  • Practicum and Internship Coordinator of the Psychology Department
  • (610) 499-4602
  • lnsimons@widener.edu
  • Kapelski Learning Center 115B

 

Marina Barnett, MSW, DSW