Service Learning at The University of Texas at Austin

Our program works to promote and support academic service learning across all colleges and disciplines at UT. We provide resources and logistical support for students who are interested or enrolled in service learning courses, for faculty who are currently teaching or would like to teach a service learning course, and for community partners who are interested in partnering with UT faculty and service learning students.

What is Service Learning?

"Service-learning incorporates community work into the curriculum, giving students real-world learning experiences that enhance their academic learning while providing a tangible benefit for the community" (Campus Compact National 2007).

Service learning is a pedagogical model that intentionally integrates community service, academic learning, and civic learning. It is a response to the call for higher education to take responsibility for preparing active citizens for a diverse democracy.

Because service learning is integrated into discipline-based academic curricula, courses from across the curriculum can take advantage of this pedagogical model. Faculty interested in developing academic service-learning courses are asked to create these courses from the perspective of how the course and the activity in the community advance scholarship and effective teaching.

Academic service-learning is different from an internship.

Internships typically offer a relatively independent involvement in a community placement with supervision. In an academic service-learning course, the volunteer/service component is directly linked to the academic learning objectives of a course and seeks to more critically engage community processes with academic preparation.

Academic service-learning is not volunteering.

Volunteering is simply that, volunteering. It is not related to the academic goals of a particular course although it is an important way to be involved in one's community.

Examples include:

• Rhetoric and Composition: As part of their Rhetoric and Composition courses, students learn about the complex issues of hunger, homelessness and illiteracy by serving at food pantries and shelters, reading books on these topics, and then writing papers that integrate their experiences with the course readings.
• Environment: As part of their chemistry or environmental science courses, students join with community partners in helping to identify neighborhood homes that have unsafe levels of lead contamination.