COLLEGES and universities today are increasingly turning their attention to facilitating students’ learning through community service, which helps to ensure students’ development outside the classroom.

Service learning in educational institutions are facilitated mostly through the offerings of co-curricular programmes organised by the student services or student affairs departments.

They are organised with deliberate learning outcomes and include building a variety of skills and competencies needed to achieve success in a student’s career of choice and life on as a whole. Leadership, interpersonal, and communication skills are among them, in addition to team work and co-operation as well as time management and budgeting.

Developing skills and competencies

The University of the West Indies’ Quality Leadership Programme provides a good example of how such skills and competencies, as detailed above, can be developed. That programme, now 13 years old, has more than 500 students registered for this academic year.

Leadership

Under the programme, which includes seminars, workshops and service learning, students are put into small groups for which they select leaders. After a leader is selected, group members must then identify a project in a community or an agency on which they work over the course of the academic year.

The projects for service learning usually involves working in children’s homes, places of safety and homes for the elderly as well as interacting with the residents. Students also build and repair basic schools, refurbish health centres and build water tanks and other needed facilities for communities. They therefore have practice in selecting and making decisions.

Teamwork

They must work as a team to develop their project proposals, which involves budgeting as well as the actual writing and presentation of their proposals to advisors. They must also interact with community and agency representatives with whom they will work on implementing the project.

In addition, their efforts may involve fundraising to make the project a reality while they organise how the work will be done. It is here that sharing of responsibilities becomes a major task as they simultaneously learn to manage their time in order to cope with their academic demands as well as the demand to see their projects through to successful fruition.

The value of others

In addition to the variety of skills and competencies mentioned, the students develop an appreciation for persons outside of their own environment and begin to understand social issues. At times stereotypes are eliminated and students an appreciation for the privileges they enjoy is clearly in evidence. At end of the project, they are able to assess their progress and write a report on their achievements and skills learned.

The result

Service Learning therefore facilitates the holistic development of the student through the building of a variety of skills and competencies needed to enhance their academic performance. What is learned in the field also helps to prepare students for the demands of the dynamic world of work and, indeed, for the challenges of life.

Merrit Henry is the career counsellor and students services manager at the placement and career services unit, UWI, Mona. You may send comments to: merrit.henry@yahoo.com.