2008 PROCEEDINGS - Public Relations Society of America

knowledge. Conventional classroom interactions rarely demand of students the type of metacognitive
gymnastics that reflection is capable of prompting.
In the second instance, reflection furnishes insights about student performance that would
ordinarily not be accessible to instructors in traditional classroom settings, where they are
regularly left to infer or intuit learning outcomes from sets of mostly quantifiable data, e.g.,
homework grades and test scores. Granted, self-reporting does not guarantee students will be
frank or thorough in their reflections. Yet, if instructors properly cultivate a sense within their
students of the value and gravity of reflection, students may, in fact, tend to take reflection more
seriously than if the task were merely assigned to them gratuitously without overt concern for its
significance.
Cognitive, normative and evaluative functions of service learning
Aside from reflection’s philosophical and pedagogical soundness, there are also three
very practical reasons to include reflection in the public relations service learning experience.
First, reflection serves a cognitive role. Reflection helps students to frame their service learning
experiences within the context of what they already know about communication and public
relations from their fundamental and theoretical course work.
Second, reflection serves a normative or prescriptive function in that students can gauge
the effects of their own successes and failures in preparing a campaign in order to better
understand what works and what does not. In doing so, students will perhaps be better suited in
their career roles to recognize desirable professional behaviors, outcomes and best practices.
Moreover, reflection may afford students a deeper appreciation of the ethical implications of
their decisions and actions in relation to their campaign teammates, their clients, and their
clients’ publics – especially pertinent in a society in which organizations often make excuses that
seem to render professional virtue irrelevant. The fact, too, that fostering civic engagement is
seen as a virtuous behavior in service learning adds a further normative dimension to the
campaigns course.
Finally, reflection provides an evaluative tool for instructors. In today’s classroom,
educators are routinely called upon to explain and justify their teaching goals as they pertain to
student learning outcomes. The assessment of student learning outcomes therefore weighs
heavily in how institutions treat their divisions, departments and programs. Amassing and
analyzing well-documented student self-accounting can only enhance the case for sustaining
service learning in general and supporting the public relations campaigns course in particular.
Growth and mastery
Inherent in the term “service learning” is the notion that the former in some fashion leads
to the latter. But does service naturally imply learning? Does the mere fact of engaging public
relations students in an experiential process help them to build knowledge and grow toward
professional mastery? Service learning theorists and public relations educators would seem to
agree that challenging students with real-world situations by thoroughly immersing them in the
application of their art can indeed engender knowledge and mastery. However, experiential
education without reflection does not challenge students to process and apply their learning to
other academic or even professional knowledge they already have. The process of critical
reflection is the vital link that permits public relations students to ponder the important
relationship between their actions and outcomes of their work in the campaigns course.
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