Understanding how service learning pedagogy impacts student learning objectives

Facilitating service-learning through competencies associated with relational pedagogy: a personal reflection

“…Service-learning is a form of experiential learning that enables students to gain practical experience of real-world issues related to course content through hands-on experience, personal reflection, community service and development (Hickmon, 2015;Kenworthy-U'Ren, 1999;Stanton & Giles, 2017;Wang & Calvano, 2018). It differs from other forms of experiential learning such as cooperative education, internships, gaming simulations, structured exercises, case studies and role-play (Gallagher, 2011;Kenworthy, 2010;Leigh & Kenworthy, 2018).…”

Service-Learning for Sustainability Entrepreneurship in Rural Areas: What Is Its Global Impact on Business University Students?

“…Applying SL in this field of knowledge complements the business education received by students, while also enhancing their curricular learning, professional development, civil training and social commitment and, therefore, providing them with important competencies that are currently demanded by society from business professionals [12,40]. SL should therefore be an essential component of the training given by Economics and Business schools all around the world because it significantly contributes to the generation of business leaders with civic awareness and a commitment to ethics and sustainability [11,13].…”

“…More specifically, if we distinguish between the various functional areas of a company, there are studies applied to several business disciplines, such as Administration [16,17], Accounting [41,42], Finance [40,43], Marketing [44,45] and Operations Management [46,47], most of which only describe the SL projects implemented but do not perform an empirical analysis of their impact on university students. In contrast, the research on the application and evaluation of SL in Entrepreneurship education is very limited in the United States [12]. Even though SL has been defended as a suitable pedagogical tool both for teaching the body of knowledge pertaining to the process of creation of new firms and for educating about a set of key entrepreneurial competencies [13], to our knowledge, only two American studies have been published on the use of SL in this business discipline [18,19].…”

“…The use of SL in university studies in Business Administration helps to enrich the business management training that students receive, allowing them to acquire important professional competencies that are difficult to achieve using other teaching methods. It also allows them to receive education in line with the principles of ethics, social responsibility and sustainable development [11][12][13]. This explains why it is attracting so such interest at present, given the increasing emphasis on the use of teaching methods that promote civic responsibility and social commitment among university students in areas relating to business management, in reaction to a growing number of ethics scandals that have arisen in the corporate world over the past few decades [14,15].…”

“…All these investigations about incorporating SL in business education have focused on the university context in the United States [20], merely describing both the practices adopted there and their outcomes for all participants-students, teachers and the local community. It is therefore necessary for empirical research to be carried out in the area of Entrepreneurship to try to evaluate the true effects of SL on the various groups involved, especially on university students [12]. In particular, this research gap seems to hold especially true for non-American environments, since SL is still said to be a US-American methodology that has not been globally taken up [13].…”