According to its editor, Edward Zlotkowski, Successful Service Learning Programs: New Models for Excellence in Higher Education is a response to Ernest Boyer's 1994 call for a new American college, "committed to improving, in a very intentional way, the human condition" (2) through its special capacity to connect thought to action and theory to practice. With its ten profiles of service learning programs from a range of institutions of higher education, it is also a very practical, how-to manual for program directors and administrators who want to begin or enhance service-learning programs at their institutions. By providing a theoretical framework for service learning programs--"a form of experiential education deeply rooted in cognitive and developmental psychology, pragmatic philosophy, and democratic theory" (3)--and then showing very concretely how to carry them out, Successful Service Learning Programs builds a bridge between theory and practice in the same way service learning itself does.
Edward Zlotkowski is the Founding Director of the Bentley Service-Learning Project at Bentley College and currently a Senior Associate of the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE), responsible for AAHE's Service Learning Project, a national initiative to integrate service learning across the disciplines. In his excellent introduction, he views service learning programs as a way of organizing and coordinating some of the most exciting recent developments in pedagogical practice and of balancing the best of two competing epistemological paradigms: the pursuit of knowledge for self-interest and private good, on the one hand, and for civic responsibility and public work, on the other. Service learning, he argues, is an active learning strategy that surpasses others such as the case study and problem-based learning in its pedagogical power while incorporating more traditional strategies such as the lecture and discussion. At the same time service learning has the potential to promote greater integration of the traditional faculty roles of research, teaching, and service.
With this very useful framework, the rest of the book provides ten examples of how a variety of institutions with different internal and external constraints have made their service learning programs important institutional assets. Represented are a range of institutions including the liberal arts college, community college, urban university, historically black university, business-oriented institution, research university, and the institution with a religious affiliation. The service learning programs described range from older, complex programs deeply embedded in the fundamental mission of the institution ( e.g., Augsburg College) to comparatively new programs in an institution with a primary commitment to the liberal arts (e.g., Bates College) to foundation-funded replication efforts in an elite, research-oriented university (e.g., University of Pennsylvania). Most profiles address most, if not all of the following areas: program history, vision and mission, structure and operations including funding, and relationships with faculty, students and community organizations.
The examples also address how service learning programs in very different institutional environments obtain these features, identified Zlotkowski as keys to successful institutionalization: academic legitimacy and integrity, institutional relevance, adequate faculty support, and formal recognition of service learning within the promotion and tenure decision. The ten appendices provide a variety of supplementary material including organization charts, descriptions of selected service learning opportunities for students, administrative forms, guidelines for introducing student learning into existing courses, and policies and procedures for the evaluation of faculty that recognize equally contributions to research, teaching, and service.
In this practical reference, program directors and administrators will find a rich source of inspiration for possible organization and program structures, different types of organizational placements for students, and funding ideas for their service learning programs. Successful Service-Learning Programs also provides a set of convincing arguments for initiating or expanding service learning programs and a number of practical suggestions to secure their institutionalization.
Virginia S. Lee,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill