service learning

Today I went to a teaching excellence workshop hosted by the provost's office. The presenters were from the speech and communications disorders department. That department won a university wide teaching excellence award, and they talked about their approach to teaching. One pillar of their strategy is that of service learning. I actually am pretty familiar with service learning, as I was a TA for a course called "instructional design and service learning" at purdue university, and was also co-advisor of a engineering projects in community service (EPICS) team at Purdue university. My EPICS team built exhibits for a children's science museum in Lafayette, IN. The three projects were worked on while I was there were (a) a working replica of the mars rover, (b) a small wind tunnel, and (c) a system that would track the visitors to the museum according to which exhibits they visited and for how long (through the use of RFID tags). Most of the students were engineering students - electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and so on (at Purdue they have a plethora of engineering majors - they actually have seven or so different buildings each housing its own school of engineering). I helped the team think about how to help students reach educational goals through interaction with the exhibits.
Service learning is of course a great approach but does have its limitations. For example, some of the projects the communications disorders department did were in Mexico, and to go students sometimes had to pay their own way. Obviously something like that would not work in a K-12 environment. And at the university level, many students would not be able to afford to participate. But of course people right here in Utah have needs too, so more feasible service learning projects can be established on a more local level. Of course anyone who knows me knows that I value the role of international exposure in students' development, but I don't think it is a prerequisite to service learning.