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
- (610) 499-1136
- mcbarnett@widener.edu