Best Practice Principles

There are four basic principles (with related guiding questions) that should guide instructors in organizing and constructing a service-learning course:

• Engagement: Does the community component meet a public good? How do you know this? Were the needs or problems to which service-learning students are responding defined by the community partner(s)? When and how were those needs identified? How have campus/community boundaries been negotiated and how will they be crossed?

• Reflection: Is there a mechanism that encourages students to link their community-based experiences to course content and to reflect upon why the work they have done is important?

• Reciprocity: Is reciprocity evident in the community-based component? How? Reciprocity suggests that every individual, organization, and entity involved in the learning process functions as both a teacher and a learner. Participants are perceived as colleagues, not as servers and clients. (Jacoby, 1996, p.36)

• Public Dissemination: Are the results of student work presented to the public or made an opportunity for the community to enter into a public dialogue? For example: Do oral histories students collect return to the community in some public form? Is the data students collect on the saturation of toxins in the local river made public? How?

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