Service-Learning Australia

Authentic service-learning experiences, while almost endlessly diverse, have some common characteristics.

Authentic service-learning experiences:

• Are positive, meaningful and real to the participants.
• Involve cooperative rather than competitive experiences and therefore promote skills associated with teamwork, community involvement and citizenship.
• Address complex problems in complex settings rather than simplified problems in isolation.
• Offer opportunities to engage in problem-solving by requiring participants to understand the specific context of their service-learning activity and community challenges, rather than only to draw upon generalized or abstract knowledge from a textbook.   As a result, service-learning offers powerful opportunities to acquire the habits of critical thinking; i.e. the ability to identify the most important questions or issues within a real-world situation.
• Promote deeper learning because the results are immediate and uncontrived. There are no "right answers" in the back of the book.
• As a consequence of this immediacy of experience, service-learning is more likely to be personally meaningful to participants and to generate emotional consequences, to challenge values as well as ideas, and to support social, emotional and cognitive learning and development.

(Taken mostly from Eyler & Giles, Where's the Learning in Service-Learning?)