Global Service-Learning: Academically Rigorous and Personally Challenging

Photo: Hannah Caughman, Winthrop University, Current Bolivia Semester Student with Amizade and West Virginia University, pictured above at right connecting with a child at an orphanage supported through Amizade volunteers and students

Service-learning is a pedagogy - a teaching method. It is a delivery vehicle for clear course content. But it has the unpopular academic position of having unequivocal rootednesss in reality. At times, this leads to the suspicion that students receive credit simply for volunteering. This should never be the case with academic service-learning, and through the Amizade-West Virginia University partnership and course approval process*, it never is the case.

I'll write more on service-learning in the coming weeks and months, but for the moment, I've just posted below a set of student reflections that characterize one important characteristic of service-learning. That is, service-learning removes the common illusion that ideas studied in courses, personal values, and individual actions - are fundamentally separable. The quotes below are small excerpts from the students' larger reflections on the history and present reality of international development and their own personal roles and commitments in relation to global social challenges.


*All Amizade-WVU Courses are approved by the proposing faculty member, me (as Amizade's Executive Director), and at WVU: The Director of The Center for Civic Engagement, the appropriate Department Chairperson, the Appropriate Dean, the Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and the Associate Provost for International Academic Affairs.