Generating, Deepening, and Documenting Learning: The Power of Critical Reflection in Applied Learning

Applied learning pedagogies—including service-learning, internships/practica, study abroad, and undergraduate research—have in common both the potential for significant student learning and the challenges of facilitating and assessing that learning, often in non-traditional ways that involve experiential strategies outside the classroom as well as individualized outcomes. Critical reflection oriented toward well-articulated learning outcomes is key to generating, deepening, and documenting student learning in applied learning. This article will consider the meaning of critical reflection and principles of good practice for designing it effectively and will present a research-grounded, flexible model for integrating critical reflection and assessment

The Articulated Learning: An Approach to Guided Reflection and Assessment

The value of reflection on experience to enhance learning has been advanced for decades; however, it remains difficult to apply in practice. This paper describes a reflection model that pushes students beyond superficial interpretations of complex issues and facilitates academic mastery, personal growth, civic engagement, critical thinking, and the meaningful demonstration of learning. Although developed in a service-learning program, its general features can support reflection on a range of experiences. It is accessible to both students and instructors, regardless of discipline; and it generates written products that can be used for formative and summative assessment of student learning

Integrando aprendizaje-servicio y tecnologías digitales: análisis de sus desafíos y promesas

Our intent is to frame the integration of service learning and digital technologies broadly in teaching and learning and to explore some of the complexities of the challenge and the promise, thereby setting up readers’ engagement with the questions and issues that follow in the papers of RIED.  We seek to provide perspectives that may contribute to subsequent implementation of pedagogical innovations and research that will improve practice and, in consequence, outcomes for all.  We begin by offering an overview of the what’s and why’s of service learning.  We then examine some of the how’s of service learning in the context of its integration with digital technologies.  Finally, we explore several issues that may shape new developments at the interface of these two pedagogical innovation.En este artículo pretendemos enmarcar la incorporación del aprendizaje-servicio y las tecnologías digitales en la enseñanza y el aprendizaje, a la vez que analizar la complejidad de algunos de sus desafíos y promesas. De esta forma, se compromete a los lectores con las preguntas y los problemas que se abordan en los artículos que componen este monográfico de RIED. Buscamos proporcionar perspectivas que puedan contribuir a la implementación de innovaciones e investigaciones pedagógicas que mejorarán la práctica y, en consecuencia, los resultados de aprendizaje. Comenzamos brindando una descripción general de lo qué es y el porqué del aprendizaje-servicio, para examinar, en una segunda parte, el cómo del aprendizaje-servicio en escenarios digitales. Finalmente, exploramos varios temas que pueden dar forma a nuevos desarrollos en el contexto de estas dos innovaciones pedagógicas

A NERCHE Annual Report: Profiles of Public Engagement: Findings from the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty

Community-campus engagement has evolved significantly over the past quarter century, shaped by a number of factors. One has been the effort to reclaim the civic mission of American higher education. Frank Newman, while at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the early 1980s, asserted that the most critical demand is to restore to higher education its original purpose of preparing graduates for a life of involved and committed citizenship,” and concluded that “the advancement of civic learning, therefore, must become higher education\u27s most central goal (1985, xiv). Another factor has been the increased understanding that colleges and universities serve as “anchor institutions” (Axelrod & Dubb, 2010) and thus have responsibilities to their neighbors to act as “stewards of place” (American Association of State Colleges and Universities, 2002). There is also the influence of research in the cognitive sciences and developmental psychology that has provided a deep understanding of how students learn, highlighting the importance of validating prior experiences and gaining higher-order thinking skills through inquiry-based, problem-posing teaching and learning strategies that involve students in addressing important, trans-disciplinary issues in communities (National Research Council, 2000). Finally, there is an emerging awareness that generating knowledge increasingly requires new epistemological frameworks and research methods that honor and emphasize the “ecological” or interconnected nature of knowledge generation that includes but go well beyond the academy (Bjarnason & Coldstream, 2003; Gibbons et al., 1994; Saltmarsh, 2011). This last factor, in turn, is being driven especially by a new generation of scholars who are fundamentally oriented to networked knowledge generation and are creating integrated academic identities as engaged scholars (Sturm, Eatman, Saltmarsh, & Bush, 2011). In many ways, the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement is a product of this set of influences, particularly the evolution of perspectives on knowledge generation and the scholarly work of faculty. NERCHE created the annual Ernest A. Lynton Award in 1996 to recognize excellence in what was then called “Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach.” In 2007, it was renamed the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement to reflect shifts during the intervening decade toward a fundamentally more collaborative, integrative conceptualization of faculty work. What has not changed is the recognition of Ernest Lynton’s key contributions to engaged knowledge generation and its implications for faculty work and institutional change

Partnerships in Service Learning and Civic Engagement

Developing campus-community partnerships is a core element of well-designed and effective civic engagement, including service learning and participatory action research. A structural model, SOFAR, is presented that differentiates campus into administrators, faculty, and students, and that differentiates community into organizational staff and residents (or clients, consumers, advocates). Partnerships are presented as being a subset of relationships between persons. The quality of these dyadic relationships is analyzed in terms of the degree to which the interactions possess closeness, equity, and integrity, and the degree to which the outcomes of those interactions are exploitive, transactional, or transformational. Implications are then offered for how this analysis can improve practice and research

Case-in-Point Pedagogy: Building Capacity for Experiential Learning and Democracy

Experiential learning in and out of the classroom provides students with opportunities to learn from reflecting critically on concrete experiences. This article introduces Case-in-Point (CIP), an experiential teaching and learning strategy that uses critical reflection-in-action within the context of the classroom environment to modify behaviors in real-time. We broaden the use of CIP beyond its original realm of application, teaching leadership, to instruction in a range of disciplines, and we explore its use to build capacity for experiential learning and democracy

Differentiating and Assessing Relationships in Service-Learning and Civic Engagement: Exploitative, Transactional, or Transformational

As a defining aspect of service-learning and civic engagement, relationships can exist among faculty members, students, community organizations, community members, and administrators on campus. This research developed procedures to measure several aspects of these relationships. Investigators collected information from 20 experienced service-learning faculty members about their relationships with repre- sentatives of community organizations using the newly-developed Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale (TRES). Results indicate that transactional and transformational qualities can be dif- ferentiated using TRES and are related to other characteristics of relationships (e.g., closeness). Conceptual work underlying this study aims to advance practitioner-scholars’ understanding of partner- ships as one type of relationship, offering a refinement on and an expansion of the terminology associ- ated with service-learning and civic engagement

Designing Programs with a Purpose: To Promote Civic Engagement for Life

Curricular and co-curricular civic engagement activities and programs are analyzed in terms of their capacity to contribute to a common set of outcomes associated with nurturing civic-minded graduates: academic knowledge, familiarity with volunteering and nonprofit sector, knowledge of social issues, communication skills, diversity skills, self-efficacy, and intentions to be involved in communities. Different programs that promote civic-mindedness, developmental models, and assessment strategies that can contribute to program enhancement are presented

Urgency and Opportunity in Difficult Times: Elevating Voices and Widening the Circle of SLCE Leadership

Welcome to the third in an ongoing series of special sections in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (MJCSL) devoted to sharing the work of the Service-Learning and Community Engagement Future Directions Project (SLCE-F DP). This special section marks the second anniversary of the project. In this essay, we, the five curators of the SLCE-F DP, both introduce the thought pieces that comprise this special section and share our team’s critical examination of the project’s history and our sense of its own best future directions

Relationships and Partnerships in Community–Campus Engagement: Evolving Inquiry and Practice

Inquiry and practice related to community–campus partnerships are ever evolving, with significant current momentum toward democratic engagement. To inform the ongoing development of associated practitioner scholarship, we examine the development of a tool for assessing the quality of community–campus relationships, the Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale (TRES), as a microcosm of some underlying dynamics in previous and current work. After an overview of its conceptual foundations, we present TRES, review examples of its uses across multiple contexts, and share lessons learned from critical reflection on those uses along with associated implications for the future development of such tools. Subsequent discussion focuses on shifts toward conceptualizing both partnerships themselves and processes of inquiring into them in terms of systems and co-creation. Seeking to support readers in operationalizing democratic engagement in their inquiry and practice, we share conceptual frameworks, tangible tools, guiding questions for research, and reflective critique on our experience as practitioner-scholars of partnerships