No abstract

Background: Service-learning is a pedagogical approach to teaching designed to create space for students to reflect critically on community service within an academic course of study with the aim of developing socially minded and actively engaged citizens. Purpose: As service-learning has moved away from the margins of educational practice, its potential as a high-impact practice has become increasingly well documented. This documentation speaks only to the theoretical potential of service-learning and does little to consider its practical impact on students and the communities with which they are asked to engage. Methodology/Approach: We conducted an exploratory mixed-methods study to examine the impact of the implementation of service-learning pedagogy in classrooms on students’ civic attitudes. Findings/Conclusions: Results show that endorsement of some key components of service-learning pedagogy on course syllabi are associated with increased changes in students’ reported civic attitudes, suggesting that implementation of pedagogy plays an important role in student experience and learning outcomes. Implications: These findings point to important differences in student outcomes between traditional and critical service-learning pedagogy implementation and point to the challenges inherent in shifting to implementation of critical pedagogy within a hierarchical structure of higher education.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a unique set of circumstances in which most of us are struggling with the same sort of existential questions across our unique contexts and subjective experiences. As we work to answer these questions within the uncertainty of the pandemic, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) provides tools through which to consider and make meaning of these existential questions. DBT skills, which are aimed at increasing our capacity to practice mindfulness, regulate emotions, tolerate distress, think dialectically, and interact interpersonally, provide practical strategies to increase our senses of agency as we consider who we are in our own lives and in our relationship with others. With increased agency, we are more able to respond to the existential questions inherent in a global crisis by building the kind of courage needed to choose who to be.

Service-learning is an experiential pedagogy that combines community service opportunities with academic content and critical reflection. When higher education rapidly shifted to online learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators, community partners, and students had to reimagine how to implement the community component of this pedagogy. As a part of a larger study from a pilot service-learning-mentoring program, results from the spring 2020 semester showed that students’ attitudes about civic action, social justice, and diversity decreased throughout the semester. We argue that a decrease in civic attitudes seen in service learners during the spring 2020 semester points to important implications about the impact of shared and sustained distress on student’s capacity to engage in service activities that deviate from their expectations of service as an opportunity to provide in-person help to individuals. We consider the role of psychological proximity in moving students to see themselves as interconnected with the communities they serve and to see the problems that exist in these communities as their own. We suggest that a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic might provide an opportunity for service learners to build psychological proximity to communities and social problems in the absence of physical proximity.

No abstract