Select Activities 

Sample campus workshops

• Design for Learning: Integrating Critical Reflection and Assessment -- As the component of service-learning (including community-based research) that generates, deepens, and documents learning, critical reflection is key to successful outcomes; it is also challenging to implement effectively. This workshop will guide participants through a process of 1) articulating the learning they are after, 2) designing their teaching and learning strategies accordingly, 3) using reflection to generate and deepen learning, 4) assessing learning, and 5) building capacity for learning through reflection. Participants in this hands-on session will apply to their own courses tools for intentional design for learning that have been refined through a multi-year, inter-institutional scholarship of teaching and learning project focused on the integration of critical reflection and assessment.

• Partnerships in Service-Learning -- Service-learning (including community-based research) is a relational pedagogy, depending for its success on quality partnerships that are intentionally-designed and customized to context. This workshop is grounded in a conceptual model that distinguishes between "relationships" and "partnerships" and that claims "partnership" potential for the full range of relationships involved in service-learning (between and among students, faculty, community members, and institutions). Participants in this hands-on session will engage with several tools designed to support careful examination of such partnerships, including in terms of a) assessing capacity to partner, b) nurturing growth in partnerships, c) investigating the nature of partnerships, and d) building capacity across all partners for roles as co-educators and co-generators of knowledge.

• Community Partner Workshop -- This session will provide an overview of the concept of “democratic engagement” in service-learning. Together we will explore ways to develop partnerships that position all partners (i.e., faculty, students, and community organizations) as co-educators, co-learners, and co- generators of knowledge.

• Research on Service-Learning -- In this 2-day workshop we will focus on integrating service learning practice with research and scholarship. In this workshop participants will:

  • Identify, analyze, and refine their own service-learning related questions and associated research and practice designs

  • Apply conceptual frameworks for service-learning, for scholarship, and for research to their own work

  • Generate characteristics of high quality scholarship related to service-learning and evaluate their own and other’s work accordingly

  • Compare and contrast examples of service-learning related scholarship with respect to such variable as types of method, fit between question and design, rigor of data analysis

  • Analyze, refine, and apply to themselves the concept of “civic minded scholar” 

• Articulating and Assessing Civic Learning -- Educating for democracy. Graduating responsible citizens. Teaching the public purposes of our disciplines. Cultivating critical thinking, problem-solving, and cross-cultural skills. What do these and related "civic learning" goals of the academy really mean to us as educators and how might we operationalize and measure them in our teaching? In this session we will examine a variety of conceptualizations of "civic learning" and use research-grounded tools for the design of course-embedded assessment to help achieve greater precision in both generating and assessing associated learning outcomes.

• 'With-ness' as a Way of Being: The Heart of Service-Learning and Community Engagement -- Sigmon's seminal 1979 article establishing the core principles of  service-learning made explicit that all serve and are served, all teach,  and all learn. Thirty years later, the Democratic Engagement White Paper  (Saltmarsh, Hartley, & Clayton, 2009) conceptualized a paradigm shift  from technocratic to democratic community engagement, with a key element  being the distinction between the hierarchical, deficit-based doing  "for" and the reciprocal, asset-based thinking and acting "with."  Democratic engagement positions all participants as "teachers, learners, and leaders" (Mondloch, 2008/9), indeed as "co-learners, co-educators,  and co-generators of knowledge (Jameson, Jaeger, & Clayton, 2010). How, concretely,in our everyday practice, might we live out the "thick"  reciprocity of democratic engagement in a largely technocratic world? Patti refers to the identities, perspectives, and practices underlying such a conceptualization of reciprocity as 'with-ness.' Much of her current work is focused on collaboratively exploring 'with-ness' as a way of being. What learning does it require and foster?  What forces encourage it and what forces hinder it--at individual, interpersonal,  organizational, and systemic levels? What, exactly, would we do (and not do) on the first day of class, during a gathering of faculty and  community members, in designing a syllabus or a research project, in  facilitating a workshop, in disseminating our work? In short, how can we enact and encourage the sharing and integration of power, voice, resources, and questions that comprises 'with-ness,' most especially in  our community-engaged classrooms and partnerships? 

• Students Engaging with the World, Now: As Real as it Gets -- All too often we speak of the “real world” as beginning after graduation and, relatedly, we think of the undergraduate experience as a time of preparation for “real life.” Service-learning, however, invites us to approach college as the real world and to assume responsibility for that world and for our presence in it, now. This understanding of what constitutes the “real world” both requires and fosters shifts in perspective and practice, not only on the part of students but among all members of the college community. Students can be key change agents in this process, leading the way toward a more civically engaged campus. Our guest, Patti Clayton, has worked closely with undergraduates for many years to develop strong models for what they call “service-learning as a shared developmental journey.” She will share several stories of the extraordinary impact these students have had, on campus and beyond, and will discuss with us the lessons they have learned together and the keys to their leadership.

• Tapping the power of theory to enhance assessment of service-learning -- Drawing on the recently released edited volume Research on Service Learning: Conceptual Frameworks and Assessment (Clayton, Bringle, & Hatcher, 2013), in this interactive session we will discuss the use of theory to refine goals, guide design, and conceptualize and interpret evidence—in other words, to fully integrate assessment into service-learning. We will (a) examine the purposes and practices of assessment in service-learning through the lens of a conceptual model for research, (b) consider examples of theory-grounded assessment in service-learning (in multiple arenas, including student learning, community outcomes, and partnerships), and (c) determine relevant theory and generate associated assessment strategies for use in our own contexts.

• “Engagement-Grounded” Teaching and Learning --  Service-learning is often lauded as part of higher education’s paradigmatic shift away from teacher-centered classrooms and, correspondingly, defined as a learner-centered pedagogy. At the same time, from its inception service-learning has been conceptualized as positioning all participants as learners and teachers; recent work explicitly adds co-generators of knowledge to the rich conception of identities to be held by all partners in the process. Perhaps, then, service-learning is leading ongoing paradigm shift—into what might be called “engagement-grounded” rather than “student-centered.” In this interactive session we will explore together the possibilities of framing teaching and learning as “engagement-grounded.” We will discuss (a) the civic learning we might seek to achieve; (b) the meaning and implications of positioning all participants as co-educators, co-learners, and co-generators of knowledge; and (c) the concrete tasks associated with bringing democratic engagement to life in the design and implementation of service-learning (and other) pedagogies.  The session will invite—and challenge—each of us to take on and to support one another in “co-” roles as we inquire together, share and critique our experiences, and contribute to emerging scholarship around democratic engagement.

• Research on Faculty Learning about Community-Engaged Scholarship: Quantitative and Qualitative Investigation of Competency Development  -- Facilitators will share the process and results of investigating faculty competencies for community engaged scholarship. Methods include quantitative and qualitative analysis of participant responses to a competency-based self-assessment scale and a series of written reflection activities. Discussion will include technocratic vs. democratic orientations to engagement and accounting for "response shift bias" (the tendency to over-estimate one's competence on a pre-test, which can mask learning gains determined through pre/post instruments) through use of "then" (retrospective reporting of baseline competence) data. Participants will examine research design and data and will leave with sample competencies, assessment instruments, and data analysis methods.

• Service-Learning 
• Part I: Introduction to Service-Learning and Critical Reflection -- Part I will engage participants in reflective examination of a conceptual framework for service-learning and a corollary model for critical reflection (the DEAL Model). In this context, we will explore possibilities for (1) establishing in our classrooms a shared understanding of service-learning and of critical reflection as counter-normative pedagogy, (2) designing well-integrated critical reflection strategies and mechanisms, and (3) defining and cultivating civic learning in service-learning. Participants will leave the session with sample critical reflection activities and tools to support their work as instructional designers and their students as service-learners.
• Part II: Integrating Critical Reflection and Assessment to Enhance Learning -- Building on the discussion in Part I, this session will guide participants through a process of (1) articulating (academic and/or personal growth) learning goals and objectives, (2) designing critical reflection accordingly, and (3) integrating critical reflection with formative and summative assessment of learning. We will use tools grounded in Bloom’s Taxonomy and in Paul & Elder’s Standards of Critical Thinking that have been refined through several years of inter-institutional research. Participants will apply rubrics to and provide feedback on sample critical reflection products and will leave the session with sample rubrics, tools to support integrated course design, and with ideas for their own scholarship of teaching and learning.

• Do Counter-Normative Pedagogies Have Threshold Concepts? -- We will apply the idea of threshold concepts not to disciplines but to pedagogies, using service-learning (SL) as our example. Positioning students, faculty, and community members as co-learners, SL requires and fosters shifts in perspective, practice, and identity that seem to point to threshold concepts associated with learning how to teach and learn (and serve) through this approach. Together we will hypothesize illustrative threshold concepts associated with learning and maximizing use of this counter-normative pedagogy, critically analyze use of this concept in this context, and consider implications for the design of SL and of associated faculty/staff development.

• Critically examining the use of technology in university-community partnerships: Beyond the hype -- In this interactive session, we will examine the ways in which technology (including the web, social media, and mobiles) can enable enhanced forms and expressions of partnership, redefine and nurture community, and allow actors to create and deepen relationships. Examining case studies from a variety of contexts, including through the lens of core concepts such as reciprocity, we will co-generate a critical understanding of the democratizing potential of new technologies, the conditions under which that potential is and is not fulfilled, and implications for how individuals, higher education institutions, and community organizations connect and collaborate.

• Designing Service-Learning with Assessment in Mind (pre-conference workshop) -- Service-learning is a "high impact pedagogy," with potentially significant outcomes not only for students but also for faculty, educational institutions, community organizations, community members, and the range of partnerships at its heart. Intentional design and a scholarly, improvement-oriented approach are key to producing and assessing both processes and outcomes. In this session we will explore a precise yet flexible conceptualization of service-learning that can guide customized design and assessment of the pedagogy. We will identify the types of outcomes at stake for the full range of constituents and examine research-grounded tools that can support the design of critical reflection and partnerships with assessment in mind.

• Research Service-Learning: Advancing Nonprofit Education, Scholarship, and Practice -- Just as teaching and research in general can come together to improve understanding and practice, so too can the pedagogy of service-learning and the process of community-engaged research be approached deliberatively and integratively to advance a wide range of objectives among practitioner-scholars. What role might “research service-learning” play in nonprofit education, scholarship, and practice and what principles of good practice might guide its implementation toward maximum impact? This interactive session will offer a framework for conceptualizing the pedagogy of service-learning as “research service-learning” and will provide and support participants in critically analyzing a range of examples in the context of nonprofit studies at both the undergraduate and graduate level. We will consider the possibilities for designing research service-learning in such a way as to avoid common pitfalls and capitalize on its mutually-transformative potential.

Sample scholarly collaborations

Reciprocity Writing Group --

Editorial Fellows Team, IARSLCE --

Research on Service-Learning: Conceptual Frameworks and Assessment --

Next Generation Engagement Initiative, NERCHE --

• A two-year multidisciplinary seminar that facilitates  the development of innovative research and pedagogy on issues central to engaged undergraduate learning. Twenty faculty and staff from diverse campuses were selected to participate in the seminar.

Canadian Alliance for Community Service-Learning

• Gemmel, L., & Clayton, P. H. (2010). A Comprehensive Framework for Community Service-Learning in Canada (pdf of report)