Implementing Service Learning in the Principles of Marketing Course

Abstract

Service learning-a pedagogical technique combining academic learning with community service-offers many benefits to students, faculty, educational institutions, and the community. Relative to social sciences and liberal arts faculty, however, business faculty have been slow to incorporate it into their coursework. Service learning may be particularly relevant to marketing courses, given marketing's interest in social causes. At the same time, implementing service learning into the Principles of Marketing course may be challenging because of students' limited marketing background. This article addresses the implementation of service learning in the Principles of Marketing course. Based on the authors' experience, the article recommends an approach to effectively implement a service-learning component into the introductory marketing course. The authors also provide an assessment of outcomes from their approach, critical success factors for instructors who wish to alter this approach, and key challenges as we move forward with service learning in the Principles of Marketing course.

Closing the Loop: Community Engaged Pedagogy in Business Courses

“…She recommends that service learning may fit best in business courses where "skilled interaction with users is a key learning goal" (Andrews, 2007, p. 19), in other words, in majors where learning how to communicate with and deliver services face-to-face is an important factor in career and business success. However, even when the CSL experience involves providing specific skills or advice to community partners, adopting this pedagogical approach in first or second year courses, such as Introduction to/Principles of Marketing, may be difficult because of students' limited background and experience (Klink and Athaide, 2004). While third-parties such as Hootsuite and Google can facilitate access to technical skills training materials and in some cases funding, they also specify with which community partners student teams may work 3 .…”

“…Many successful programs function with the assistance of a 'service learning office' that helps to coordinate CSL. For example, Klink and Athaide (2004) had the assistance of a community centre at their school which helped identify agencies and projects (c.f., Holtzman, Stewart and Barr, 2008). Without this kind of centralized function, individual faculty members are often approached by community organizations and must find a way to screen the opportunities to ensure they are appropriate for the course they are planning.…”

“…We thus side with Petkus (2000) and other educators who see incorporating reflection activities as an essential component of learning. Reflection is what distinguishes CSL from traditional volunteering (Klink and Athaide, 2004) and from consulting projects. We might further argue that is it reflection which actually helps educators achieve course and program learning objectives.…”

“…Indeed, a range of marketing courses using CSL is discussed in the literature: social marketing (Domegan and Bringle, 2010), nonprofit marketing (Mottner, 2010) consumer behaviour (Petkus, 2000), personal selling (Hagenbuch, 2006), principles of marketing (Easterling & Ruddell, 1997;Klink and Athaide, 2004;Schwartz and Fontenot, 2007), strategic marketing (Gallagher and McGorry, 2015;Holtzman, Stewart and Barr, 2008), and advertising/promotion (Cook, 2008). In addition, we found very experienced CSL practitioners, such as Klink and Athaide (2004) who between them had supervised 120 CSL projects over a 10 year time period, and educators who had developed new courses specifically to integrate learning through service learning experiences (Metcalf, 2010).It seems that courses focused on social or non-profit marketing are a 'natural fit' for CSL. Mottner (2010) described a service learning assignment from her non-profit marketing course that required student teams to complete a marketing project for a nonprofit community partner.…”

“…Holtzman, Stewart and Barr, 2008;Klink and Athaide, 2004). Thus, as we design CSL experiences for our courses, it is important to ensure that all stages of the cycle are included.…”