Benefits
Academic Service-Learning Benefits
Teaching an ASL course offers a multitude of benefits for faculty members. ASL enhances teaching effectiveness, advances scholarship and academic contributions, and provides service to the university and surrounding community.
Enhance your teaching effectiveness by:
- Developing powerful curricula that provide students with a “real world” context for theory and discipline-specific knowledge.
- Raising student awareness about current social issues as they relate to academic areas of interest.
- Engaging students in interactive classroom discussions that draw upon course material and invite new perspectives and personal experiences.
- Becoming a “facilitator” rather than a “giver” of knowledge.
- Developing students’ critical thinking, writing and interpersonal communication skills.
- Helping students learn about the complexities of social injustices and systematic problems.
Advance your research by:
- Identifying new areas for investigation and publication, increasing opportunities for professional recognition and reward.
- Structuring activities to address larger questions related to instructional effectiveness and/or appropriate outreach models for specific populations.
- Measuring the effectiveness of service-learning and discussing the results in the context of broader subject matter.
- Presenting professional papers at state, regional and national conferences.
- Publishing findings in higher education publications or in applied academic journals, particularly those that report teaching innovations.
- Submitting grants for external funding related to service-learning activities.
Serve the university and surrounding community by:
- Actively participating in the direct service and/or research projects that your students are doing.
- Offering your professional skills and expertise to the nonprofit agencies where your students are serving.
- Serving on the board of directors for the nonprofit agency with which you have partnered.
- Mentoring other faculty members on integrating service-learning into their courses.
- Making presentations to the faculty senate or academic departments about the impact of service-learning.