Meeting important educational goals for chemistry through service-learning

Abstract

This paper describes a service-learning course in Chemistry Honours at Rhodes University in South Africa. Students visit two schools in different settings, where they present a lecture-demonstration, entitled ‘A Pollutant's Tale’, and two hands-on experiments to school learners. The students are assessed on their learnings as seen through their own reflections on the activities in reflective journals. The reflections from 27 students over four years of the course were analysed to investigate to what extent the educational goals of the course were being met. Six broad themes emerged from student reflections: (1) social awareness; (2) civic responsibility; (3) challenging beliefs; (4) enhanced understanding of science communication and demonstration skills; (5) personal growth; and, (6) evaluating the service-learning experience. In our discussion of these themes, we suggest that through service-learning, students have learnt to do things differently in Chemistry: they have learnt about society beyond the laboratory and beyond their previous life-experiences. Importantly, the students have undergone personal development and picked up critical skills which they will need when traversing life and its challenges – such as, working with and learning from diverse groups of people, teamwork and learning to cope in stressful situations. The paper will be of particular interest to those who are involved in chemistry teaching in both schools and higher education institutions, as well as those interested in service-learning as a pedagogical tool, community and civic engagement and the development of transferable skills in chemistry students.

Using a College Curriculum to Integrate Informal Science Learning Opportunities for University and Middle School Students

“…Service-learning has been successfully incorporated into higher education courses across fields such as Psychology (Bringle et al, 2016), Human Development and Family Studies (Weiler et al, 2013), Public Health (Mackenzie et al, 2019), Engineering (Mclean et al, 2019), Ecology (Mc-Ginley, 2018), and Chemistry (Najmr et al, 2018;Sewry and Paphitis, 2018), among others. Although the goals of each service-learning course or project may differ, they often share the common purpose of reaching beyond the university 'walls' to involve community members in learning or in project work.…”

“…Service-learning is known to boost university students' learning and civic engagement. For instance, university students may gain increased social awareness and civic responsibility (Huda et al, 2018;Sewry and Paphitis, 2018), greater academic content mastery, and improved communication and problem-solving skills (McGinley, 2018). Notably, service-learning opportunities can also increase STEM undergraduate students' confidence in collaborating and commu-nicating with diverse audiences, potentially influencing their persistence in the STEM field (Woodley et al, 2019).…”

“…For example, low-resourced communities may gain quality (in)formal educational programming (Woodley et al, 2019), or access to professional-level services from students at no cost (Yusop and Correia, 2014). Further, when scientists and STEM (under)graduate students engage in their communities through service-based learning (Sewry and Paphitis, 2018), they can increase the impacts of science communication, for example by engaging youth as future scientists (Hebets, 2018). Ultimately, programs that use university-level service-learning courses to engage K-12 youth in informal STEM learning have the potential to positively affect communities and students at multiple levels simultaneously.…”

SoTL: A mechanism for understanding and finding solutions to teaching and learning challenges

“…He argues that these strategies need to be implemented in a systematic way to ensure that every student has an opportunity to participate in at least two such practices during their undergraduate studies. These strategies are already in use in many South African universities, and include: coordinated first-year experience seminars (Leibowitz et al, 2009); writing-intensive courses (Nichols, 2017); collaborative assignments and projects (Thondhlana & Belluigi, 2017); inquirybased learning; service-learning (Sewry & Paphitis 2018) and capstone courses (Bauling, 2017). These kinds of practices contribute to the development of students' identities as scholars and, in the case of service-learning, may foster critical citizenship.…”

Service-learning by PhD students to aid socially neglected people

“…This has even led to the execution of institutional programs and networks that facilitate the implementation of these SL methodologies (Duffy et al, 2011;Rodríguez Gallego, 2014;Elsafty et al, 2020). The use of a methodology based on SL represents a great step forward in the pedagogical field, since the advantages mentioned will be incorporated into educational centers, including universities (Dillabaugh, 2019;Sewry and Paphitis, 2018) and doctoral studies (Sewry and Paphitis, 2018;Saitta et al, 2011). All of this will undoubtedly generate more knowledge as communities can focus the lines of work on their needs (Ching, 2018).…”