Investigating the Overlapping Experiences and Impacts of Service-Learning: Juxtaposing Perspectives of Students, Faculty, and Community Partners

Abstract

As service-learning and community-based learning proliferate in higher education, increased attention has been directed toward gathering evidence of their impacts. While the bulk of the literature has focused on student outcomes, little work has been done to examine how the perspectives of stakeholder groups overlap and intersect. This study uses an exploratory qualitative design to examine the experiences of service-learning students, faculty, and community partners at a four-year public university, which revealed five key themes: the time-intensive nature of service-learning, the added value provided by the service-learning faculty member, the additional benefits created by service-learning connections, the unintended opportunities for discovery of self and others, and the impacts of the liminal space of service-learning transcending traditional academic boundaries. Implications of the study reveal the importance of institutional support and coordination to maximize impacts on stakeholders, as well as the need for further study of overlapping stakeholder perspectives in multiple contexts. Service-learning is a teaching and learning strategy that applies students’ classroom learning to meet a meaningful community need, building upon John Dewey’s (1938) call for a pedagogy grounded in experience that prepares students to be active members of a democratic society. Scholarship since the 1990s has recognized the rapid expansion of service-learning programs in higher education and the need for rigorous, structured assessment of the outcomes and impacts of such programs (Chupp & Joseph, 2010; Driscoll, Holland, Gelmon, & Kerrigan, 1996; Eyler, Giles, & Braxton, 1997). The past decade and a half in particular have seen the production of service-learning scholarship that answers this call with unprecedented breadth, including work by Abes, Jackson, and Jones (2002) to understand faculty motivations; Celio, Durlak, and Dymnicki’s (2011) meta-analysis of student impacts; Kilgo, Ezell Sheets, and Pascarella’s (2015) examination of longitudinal data on high-impact educational practices from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education; and Keen and Hall’s (2009) longitudinal study of students engaged in co-curricular service-learning through 23 liberal arts colleges’ Bonner Scholar Programs. This study reports assessment findings from a four-year public university located in the southern United States, with a service-learning program that officially launched in 2013. The program assessment plan established program outcomes and measures for students, faculty, and community partners; this research provides results of focus groups conducted with all three stakeholder groups in February and March 2016. Although several service-learning faculty members at the institution have conducted research related to their own servicelearning courses and pedagogy, a program-wide study was needed to report findings on outcomes and impacts on the students, faculty, and community. The primary purpose of this research, then, was to identify the outcomes of the university’s service-learning program by studying the impacts on students, faculty, and community partner organizations. The following research questions were addressed: (a) How has servicelearning impacted student participants’ academic performance and understanding of their discipline, cultural awareness, civic responsibility and community, and their skills in collaboration; (b) How has service-learning impacted faculty members’ teaching practice, teaching philosophy, and commitment to civic engagement and community; and (c) How has service-learning impacted nonprofit community partner organizations’ ability to fulfill their service missions?