Service Learning and Civic Engagement

Service learning has been used as a teaching tool for every type of learning from academic links between theory and practice to social problem-solving and interpersonal skill development [1]. Now service learning is being explored as a method to meet higher education’s historic mission to educate adults to become civically engaged members of the community [2]. As M. Stimmann Branson points out, “each new generation is a new people that must acquire the knowledge, learn the skills, and develop the dispositions… of private and public character that undergird a constitutional democracy” (p. 2) [3]. As increasing numbers of each new generation enter higher education, methods are being sought by faculty and administrators to help students learn such democratic knowledge and skills in addition to the academic content of their disciplines. Can participation in service