What is the Service-Learning Institute?
The traditional in-person Service-Learning Institute, better known as SLI (“slee”) is a 3-day learning community style institute designed to assist you in transforming your traditional course into a high-impact community-based experience. The Service-Learning Institute focuses on the basics of curricular course design, as well as introduce participants to the concept of high-impact community engaged practices as conceptualized by Hoy and Johnson (2013).
Begin by examining your learning objectives, and end with focusing on how to work with your community partners to co-create high-impact experience for your students. The Institute includes plenary workshops, concurrent learning sessions, and small group learning communities, allowing faculty, graduate students, and community partners the opportunity to focus on their individual learning needs.
Institute Objectives:
- To increase the number of high-quality, high-impact community engagement experiences courses
- To share promising practices and generate new ideas
- To enhance reflection, assessment, and partnerships in curricular and co-curricular high-impact community engagement experiences
- To build a network of engaged scholars and practitioners
Institute Topics:
- Introduction to high-impact community engagement practices (Hoy & Johnson, 2013)
- Designing both curricular and co-curricular high-impact community engagement experiences
- Creating and assessing learning outcomes connected to community-based experiences
- Developing meaningful reflection activities
- Developing authentic community-campus partnerships
- Constructing service-learning course documents including course syllabus, memorandum of understanding, and learning contract
- Preparing students for community-based learning
- Introduction to critical service learning (Mitchell, 2008)
Who should attend?
The Service-Learning Institute has been designed for:
- Faculty interested in designing new service-learning (or high-impact community engaged) courses or gaining strategies to improve the quality of their existing community engaged-course.
- Graduate students who are interested in incorporating community engaged pedagogy into their future work.
- Community partners who are working with faculty or graduate students in the planning and implementation of a community-based learning experience.
