Acclaimed by Russ Edgerton, Alexander Astin, Ernest Boyer and many other influential educational commentators as a "powerful pedagogy," service-learning still struggles for institutionalization and, to some extent, academic respect. There are colleges and universities that have made service-learning central to their learning programs; there are important national publications and organizations, chiefly Campus Compact, dedicated to advancing it. Many faculty, however, still doubt its value as a strategy for promoting learning; others grant that value but doubt it can work in their disciplines, or in their kind of institution, or their community; or accept all these things but are prevented by inertia and a perceived lack of institutional rewards from undertaking service-learning with their students.
Langseth and Plater aim their book at academic administrators, but a curious faculty member can also profit by reading it. It is divided into two sections: the first, "Topical Essays," includes five chapters that are more theoretical, while the second, "Case Studies," describes civic engagement and service-learning programs at eleven institutions. These are of all sorts, large and small, public and private, urban and small-town, community college and research university, ranging from the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota to LeMoyne-Owen and Bates Colleges. A reader who doubts the appropriateness of this powerful pedagogy for his/her own college and university can find a similar institution in this section where administrators and faculty believe it can work and are busy putting it into practice.
One of the most useful practical chapters draws conclusions from Miami-Dade Community College, framed as "lessons learned":
The chapters in section one vary in quality but all provide powerful support. This book contains several different definitions of service-learning, but the most useful, probably, comes from Andrew Furco and Barbara A. Holland (whose chapter is on the important need for institutionalizing service learning):
Service-learning, speaking broadly, is an academic stragegy that seeks to engage students in activities that enhance academic learning, civic responsibility, and the skills of citizenship while also enhancing community capacity through service.
Amy Driscoll and Lorilee R. Sandmann's chapter is aimed at administrators and calls for them to support the scholarship of civic engagement; fortunately it goes beyond this and explains how, including a useful checklist for evaluating engaged scholarship.
The most stimulating chapter is Jim Ostrow's "Service-Learning and the Problem of Depth," which takes on the question holding many faculty members and administrators back-the nagging doubt that service-learning is really learning at all in any non-trivial sense. Ostrow acknowledges some other aims of service-learning--"advancing habits of social responsibility and citizenship, or rendering higher education relevant to local and global social problems"--but puts them aside to concentrate on the ability of service-learning to achieve greater academic depth, involve students more richly in their subject matter, and achieve a deeper kind of learning than the test-driven knowledge-temporarily-acquired model affords. He quotes John Dewey on subject matter as just "something to be learned" and comments:
In this context, the key problem revealed by Dewey is that subject matter is never significant in itself as something to be learned. Mathematics, literature, engineering, philosophy, sociology, political science, management, biology and education matter to members of disciplines as ways of engaging the world, as ways of doing things with their bodies and minds. They matter as opportunities for discovery and practice. . . . Our students often experience subject matter less as a field of possibilities for discovery and action than as potential evidence of its own acquisition-as learning material.
Acquiring and disposing of subject matter on a rhythm driven by testing Ostrow calls a "bulimic approach to student performance." A repellent metaphor, but his argument is strongly felt and powerfully argued. The energy, passion, and commitment represented in this volume cannot prove that service-learning should be adopted (though there are data here and elsewhere that support such a claim) but they should impress skeptics.
Merritt Moseley
University of North Carolina at Asheville