MoMent

Engberg and Fox (2011) links involvement in service learning to global
perspective taking with positive relationships across cognitive, intrapersonal,
and interpersonal domains.
Other studies link service learning with civic learning outcomes that
demonstrate effcacy: increasing students’ sense of social responsibility and
citizenship skills such as religious and racial tolerance, prosocial decision
making, and exploring the intersections between identity and privilege
(Eyler et al. 2001; Lechuga et al. 2009); the ability to work well with others;
leadership and communication skills; and, importantly, a sense of being able to
effect change in their community (Gallini and Moely 2003; Rockquemore and
Schaffer 2000).
In the next generation’s development of service learning—in terms of
achieving greater impact within higher education itself—center directors,
faculty, students, and community leaders should correlate the different servicelearning
courses with specific outcomes; create introductory, milestone,
and cumulative levels for service-learning projects; and make differentiation
transparent to students and faculty alike. Likewise, center directors, faculty,
student affairs professionals, and students should coordinate regularly to
mirror the newly clarified course distinctions with a similarly progressive
and differentiated set of civic outcomes within student life programs. Finally,
academic administrators and faculty should adopt promotion and tenure
criteria that recognize the scholarly and pedagogical value of investments in
service learning and other pedagogies that foster civic development.
While service-learning research initially focused on its impact on
students, there is a now an emerging body of literature on its impact on
the community. Similarly, service-learning programs have amassed greater
understandings about how to establish more democratic, participatory,
and reciprocal partnerships. This aspect of community-based learning
is influencing the scope and design of the frontier work expressed in
transformative partnerships and alliances discussed later in this chapter.
Other studies link service
learning with civic learning
outcomes that demonstrate
effcacy: increasing students’
sense of social responsibility and
citizenship skills such as religious
and racial tolerance, prosocial
decision making, and exploring
the intersections between identity
and privilege; the ability to work
well with others; leadership
and communication skills; and,
importantly, a sense of being
able to effect change in their
community.
3. Collective Civic Problem Solving
The third civic pedagogy we highlight is collective civic problem solving.
Though a burgeoning arena of practice and scholarship, it has not had time
to produce the rich body of evidence about its impact on students and
communities that service learning has accumulated. Civic problem solving
certainly builds on the foundations that dialogue and service learning have
already laid; yet it seeks to delineate a new conceptual framework for civic
work. Saltmarsh and Hartley describe the context in which civic problem
solving is taking root. They themselves call for moving from a civicengagement
framework to a democratic-engagement paradigm. They assert
that a democratic-engagement paradigm leads to a focus on purpose and
process rather than activity and place. They explain:
Democratic engagement locates the university within an ecosystem
of knowledge production, requiring interaction with other knowledge
producers outside the university for the creation of new problem
solving knowledge through a multidirectional flow of knowledge and
A CRUCIBLE MOMENT: College Learning & Democracy’s Future 61