You can’t throw snowballs over Zoom: The challenges of service-learning reflection via online platforms

Smeltzer, Sandra; Leon, Calvi; Sperduti, Vanessa R.

doi:10.1344/ridas2020.10.9

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Specifically, these types of services focus on the advocation of social injustice and promulgate consciousness of certain social issues [17]. However, whether students still gain as much as they would have if SL were conducted in person remains unanswered [18,19].…”

Section: Service-learning At a Distancementioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Service-Learning in Project WeCan under COVID-19 in a Chinese Context

Leung

Shek

Dou

2021

IJERPH

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Service-learning is a widely adopted educational pedagogy and philosophy. With the support from the Wharf (Holdings) Limited (Group), service-learning was conducted in the “Project WeCan” in Hong Kong. Prior to COVID-19, traditional service-learning was implemented with students learning in the classroom and applying their knowledge and skills to the community through providing direct face-to-face service. With the COVID-19 outbreak in the 2019–20 academic year, school lockdown measures appeared. Students had to learn online and to design and implement service offsite. As the impacts of this rapid shift in paradigm remain unknown, this study examined changes in university students using a pretest–posttest design (n = 124) and perceptions of service-learning experience via the subjective outcome evaluation design (n = 192) under COVID-19. The authors also investigated service recipients’ (n = 56) satisfaction with service activities they participated in during the pandemic. Both objective outcome evaluation and subjective outcome evaluation findings revealed that service providers (university students) and recipients (secondary school students) experienced benefits from the Project. Findings support the benefits of online service-learning in “Project WeCan” even during unprecedented times such as COVID-19.

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Section: Service-learning At a Distancementioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Service-Learning in Project WeCan under COVID-19 in a Chinese Context

Leung

Shek

Dou

2021

IJERPH

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“…In line with other reports on online teaching and learning (e.g. Hewson & Hughes, 2005;Smeltzer et al, 2020), the students reported that it was harder to get to know their fellow students, especially if they participated in the course on a fully online basis.…”

Section: Methodological Considerationssupporting

confidence: 86%

Navigating Difference in Inter- & Transdisciplinary Learning

Horn¹

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Complex sustainability issues – such as the energy transition and social inequalities – cannot be addressed from a single field. They are not confined to the disciplinary compartments into which academia is organised, and they are affected by and affect diverse societal actors. Therefore, such complex issues require inter- and transdisciplinary approaches in which scientists from diverse disciplines and societal actors collaborate and integrate their knowledge and perspective to generate novel insights. If we want to stimulate inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration for complex sustainability issues, this places a demand on our universities in how they train their students. And although the call for inter- and transdisciplinary approaches is commonly accepted, there are still many questions about how inter- and transdisciplinary learning comes about and can be supported. This motivated us to undertake this PhD project with the research question: How can we prepare university students for inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to address complex sustainability issues? We conducted an action research project in the context of a novel inter- and transdisciplinary master module that we designed and implemented as part of this research project: the Interdisciplinary Community Service Learning (iCSL) module. This module consists of two courses: iCSL1: Defining Challenges in a Multi-Stakeholder Context and iCSL2: Addressing Challenges through Transdisciplinary Research. Students from diverse fields collaborate with each other (interdisciplinarity) and with non-academic actors (transdisciplinarity). During the first two pilot years of the iCSL module (2019-2021), we collected research data for the six studies in this PhD project including observations, interviews, focus group discussions, and written reflections. From the data we learned that inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration requires that teams ‘navigate difference’ – in opinions, perspectives, and knowledge – to expose, recognize and confront differences and engage in knowledge integration. Only then the value of diverse knowledge and perspectives in cross-disciplinary teams can be used to generate novel, richer, more comprehensive insights and thereby realise the potential of inter- and transdisciplinarity. However, we found that the students in our courses often did the exact opposite; they tended to avoid, overlook, and ignore differences. Consequently, their collaboration ran the risk of remaining superficial and narrow, which prevented them from fulfilling the promises of inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. The potential for inter- and transdisciplinary learning and training thus lies in supporting teams and individuals to navigate difference, counteracting personal and social tendencies. We saw that diverse representation – of disciplinary and societal perspectives - in the inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration were key to getting in contact with differences. Another condition turned out to be the collaboration towards a joint goal or product, that necessitated knowledge integration. Besides these conditions, we saw that interventions could support inter- and transdisciplinary learning. We found that it is important to engage the individual as a whole in inter- and transdisciplinary learning to stimulate the development of attitudes, behaviours and values, as opposed to an exclusively cognitive focus on knowledge and skills. Stimulating affective processes played an important role in doing so. Furthermore, we saw that students’ abilities to engage in inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration varied widely and that a combination of structure and freedom helped in catering to diverse competence levels and learning needs. Together, the findings from this PhD research project contribute to the understanding of inter- and transdisciplinarity and of inter- and transdisciplinary learning. Additionally, the research findings provides insight into processes that are relevant beyond the educational context when attempting to better understand and facilitate inter- and transdisciplinarity. In order to support the uptake of our lessons in other contexts, we also provide concrete recommendations and two directly usable, open access tools.

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“…Previous work (e.g., Dias & Diniz, 2014; Nemetz et al, 2017) has emphasised the importance of interaction in learning, but maintaining interaction quality is challenging for e-service-learning (Stefaniak, 2020; Waldner et al, 2012). This is especially true for synchronous communications – for example, in reflection sessions, which have indeed been found to be difficult to execute in an online context (Smeltzer et al, 2020). Over a video conferencing link, both the teacher and the student may struggle to make sense of each other's body language, which obviously would have an impact on student engagement and teachers’ perceptions of how much (or how little) students are engaged (Willermark & Islind, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the online context brings about unique challenges with communication (Smeltzer et al, 2020) and technology (Bharath, 2020), in addition to the usual challenges of workload and student motivation (Guthrie & McCracken, 2010; Waldner et al, 2012). As a result, e-service-learning is still uncommon, even in online education (Strait & Nordyke, 2015).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Large-Scale Study of Students’ E-Service-Learning Experiences and Outcomes During the Pandemic

Ngai

Lau

Kwan

2023

Journal of Experiential Education

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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in strict social distancing and lockdown measures to contain the spread of the disease. These measures significantly impacted experiential pedagogies, including service-learning. Many teachers pivoted to e-service-learning. While past literature suggests that e-service-learning is as, or even more effective than, traditional service-learning, there are few large-scale comparative studies that support this claim. Purpose: Our study fills the research gap via a large-scale study into student e-service-learning experiences and outcomes during COVID-19. Methodology/Approach: The study examines learning outcomes of students taking e-service-learning subjects during the early stage of the pandemic, i.e., the 2020/21 academic year, in a Hong Kong university, and compares their learning experiences and gains with a similar group of students who studied the same subjects from 2014/15 to 2018/19. Findings/Conclusions: Results indicate that while e-service-learning is effective in enhancing students’ cognitive and civic learning, it is less effective than traditional service-learning in facilitating civic learning outcomes. Implications: Investigating students’ learning experiences suggests that the quality of reflection and interaction with the community, which are critical learning experience components, may have been impacted by online communication. These factors may have played a key role in influencing the effectiveness of e-service-learning compared to traditional service-learning.

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You can’t throw snowballs over Zoom: The challenges of service-learning reflection via online platforms

Cited by 5 publications

References 12 publications

Evaluation of Service-Learning in Project WeCan under COVID-19 in a Chinese Context

Evaluation of Service-Learning in Project WeCan under COVID-19 in a Chinese Context

Navigating Difference in Inter- & Transdisciplinary Learning

A Large-Scale Study of Students’ E-Service-Learning Experiences and Outcomes During the Pandemic

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