What is Service-Learning?
Service-Learning is the formal integration of community service into student instruction and learning. Service-learning, or curriculum-based service, connects students with the community in partnerships that provide effective and far-reaching assistance to those in need, as well as create valuable learning environments. Service is performed within the context of university course work, which supplies an informational and support structure for outreach activities. Service-learning thus addresses a unique synthesis of community, university, and student need.
Service-learning:
- encourages undergraduates to learn and develop through active participation in thoughtfully organized service experiences that meet actual community needs and that are coordinated in collaboration with the University and community;
- integrates service and academic curriculum and provides structured, in-class support for outreach activities. Community service should enhance and enrich traditional course work, providing an experiential foundation for topics covered in class;
- provides undergraduates with the opportunity to apply academic skills and knowledge in real-life situations. It fosters social responsibility, leadership and civic engagement, gives students the opportunity to explore careers or majors, and to understand multicultural traditions and values;
- includes earned course credit and class requirements that synthesize community outreach with academic experience.
What Does the Office of Service-Learning Do?
Each semester, the Office of Service-Learning:
- Establishes partnerships between community agencies and MU that address critical local needs;
- Conducts on-going evaluation of community need;
- Compiles new lists of placement sites where students might do their service projects;
- Assists faculty with design and implementation of service-learning courses;
- Assists students with their placements in meaningful and fulfilling service;
- Records all service-learning students and their placement sites;
- Monitors students' progress and problem solves;
- Advocates student needs at placement site;
- Helps faculty and community agencies evaluate their students' service; and,
- Helps students evaluate their placement sites.
We also:
- Maintain MU
Serves - an online database of community
service opportunities for MU students and faculty.
MU Service-Learning Mission Statement...
Service-learning at MU strives to create an expectation of service to others as an integral part of students' academic experience. This service should provide students with an opportunity to enrich and apply classroom knowledge, explore careers or majors, improve citizenship, understand and appreciate cultural traditions and values, develop civic, corporate, and social responsibility while enhancing the students' personal growth and self-image and enriching the lives of persons within the community.
Goals:
- To provide opportunities and academic credit for experience-based learning to promote life long commitment to social responsibility and public service.
- To develop faculty incentives for involvement in service as a learning resource for students.
- To establish collaborative, reciprocal partnerships between MU and the community which meet social needs.
- To integrate service-learning into the culture of the University.
- To engender independent thinking and problem solving through community service.
- To ensure safe, accessible and structured learning projects.
- To educate and monitor community agencies as to their rights and commitment to service-learning at MU.
Office of Service-Learning Resources...
The Office of Service-Learning was created to support and encourage partnerships between MU and community service agencies and organizations. We serve as consultants for program design and implementation. The Office of Service-Learning administers the "SL: Service-Learning" designation.
Resources include:
- a database of service-learning courses on campus, including program descriptions and enrollment information;
- a database of community agencies and organizations that maintain service partnerships with MU;
- a list of faculty members who are interested in forming community partnerships and designing service-learning courses;
- a list of community agencies and organizations that are willing to provide service opportunities for undergraduates in the context of MU curriculum;
- a multidisciplinary annotated bibliography of sources on service-learning;
- a multidisciplinary service-learning resource file, including journal articles and essays on service, leadership, multiculturalism and similar subjects, as well as articles on service-learning program development and model programming nationwide;
- a grant resource file, listing federal, state, and foundation funding sources;
- a website, through which Office of Service-Learning documents and data may be accessed and downloaded.
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