Serve And Learn

This volume makes two important contributions: First, it provides a framework grounded in theory and best professional practice that middle and high school teachers, their students, and community partners can use to design, implement, and evaluate service-learning projects that address authentic community needs. Second, it demonstrates ways collaborative service-learning can enhance students' intellectual development, promote their academic achievement, strengthen their citizenship skills, and accelerate the kinds of educational accountability and reform initiatives emphasized in the national educational standards movement, and the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. Serve and Learn: Implementing and Evaluating Service-Learning in Middle and High Schools: *provides what may be the only comprehensive guide to implementing, assessing, and celebrating service-learning in today's middle and high schools; *emphasizes and explicates a collaborative approach to service-learning in which teachers, students, and community partners team together to advance learning and meet genuine community needs; *demonstrates how service-learning teams use key elements of standards-based education, multiple intelligences theory, and cooperative learning to guide project development, implementation, assessment, and evaluation; *offers optional designs for service-learning projects that are suitable for use by interns and beginning teachers, as well as by experienced and master teachers, and that can be used in a developmental sequence by school and community partners to build from small, individual projects toward school, system, and community wide projects; and *includes end-of-chapter activities that help those who use the book as a text to practice the model and its strategies, and use results to create their own service-learning projects. The book is organized in three parts that present service-learning along a theoretical to practical continuum. Part I lays the foundations for the method by proposing a collaborative model for service-learning. Part II explicates this model and explains the four sets of processes that teams use to commit to a project, cooperatively determine students' project outcomes and ways to measure them, develop learning activities to help students achieve outcomes, and then evaluate their projects and celebrate growth. Part III provides resources for carrying out the collaborative model. A wide range of educators will find this book useful. Its distinctive contributions and features are particularly valuable for teacher educators, students, and community partners already committed to service-learning projects; to those who are introducing service-learning into their practice; and to instructional supervisors, school administrators, and community agencies seeking to create a climate for service-learning or to enrich initiatives already underway.

"This year, over ten million people will go abroad, eager to find the perfect blend of adventure and altruism. Volunteer travel can help you find your place in the world--and find out what you're made of. So why do so many international volunteer programs fail to make an impact? Why do some do more harm than good? Learning Service offers a powerful new approach that invites volunteers to learn from host communities before trying to 'help' them. It's also a thoughtful critique of the sinister side of volunteer travel; a guide for turning good intentions into effective results; and essential advice on how to make the most of your experience."--Amazon.com.

This volume provides a framework grounded in theory and best professional practice to design, implement and evaluate service-learning projects that address authentic community needs. It demonstrates ways collaborative service-learning can enhance students' intellectual development, promote their academic achievement, strengthen their citizenship.

"[This book] questions the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of the core concepts of service learning: 1. learning, 2. service, 3. community, and 4. change. By 'liberating' service learning, [the author] suggests reversing the prioritization of the concepts, starting with change, then community, then service, and then learning. In doing so, [the author] clarifies the benefits and purpose of this work, arguing that it will create greater pedagogical and community impact. [This book] challenges--and hopefully will change--our thinking about higher education community engagement."--

Parsons shows you how to steer your students toward lives as participating, caring citizens of their community and their society. She demonstrates how to introduce learning-by-doing possibilities into every service project. You will learn how to connect educational values with community action in a relationship that benefits everyone involved.

Service learning, as defined by the editors, is the generation of knowledge that is of benefit to the community as a whole. This seventh volume in the Outreach Scholarship book series contributes a unique discussion of how service learning functions as a critical cornerstone of outreach scholarship. The sections and chapters of this book marshal evidence in support of the idea that undergraduate service learning, infused throughout the curriculum and coupled with outreach scholarship, is an integral means through which higher education can engage people and institutions of the communities of this nation in a manner that perpetuate civil society. The editors, through this series of models of service learning, make a powerful argument for the necessity of "engaged institutions".