The impact of service-learning on university teachers. A part of a systematic review

Abstract

This article shows a specific result about the impact of Service-Learning (SL) on academic teachers, highlighted by a systematic review, coming from larger doctoral research, still in progress, concerning the decade 2011-2021, regarding the transformation of in service and future teachers, which corresponds to the main research question of the study. The review of 60 studies, focused both on teachers still employed and future teachers, showed a substantial imbalance between the studies including pre-teachers and in-service teachers. After a general framework of the theoretical background, the development of SL in the higher education in Italy has taken in consideration as main reference. The article describes the methodology used for the study of the four articles, that involved both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Results show an effective impact of SL in the development of professional and personal teacher’s competences, but the low number of the population involved in the studies does not allow to a generalization of the findings.