The University of Iowa

Why Service Learning and Civic Engagement?

There are many reasons to consider integrating service learning and civic engagment into the Academy.  Public Scholarship, in general, has many connections to the following areas: culture, economics, politics and policy, social psychology, and technology just to name a few.  Further, public scholarship transcends traditional constraints (age, class, gender, culture, etc.) that can often limit the scope of integrating the University into society.  Graduate students interested in "taking their work into new spaces" may be asking themselves questions like:
  1. How do I collaborate outside of academia?  I've never been taught how to do so!
  2. How do I construct my presentation in a manner that speaks to diverse audiences?
  3. What is the value of service learning?  Are there data to support using it in courses I teach?
  4. Is work like this supported and recognized by The University?
Faculty might be asking the same thing.  Consider the community perspective.  Consider different civic groups and populations who may be asking themselves:
  1. How can I work with The University when I am not faculty, staff, or student?
  2. What exactly are they doing there, anyway?  I want to know more, but I don't know to whom I should speak!
  3. My organization does x and The University does y.  We could learn a lot from working together, is this possible?
  4. "They" are spending my tax dollars on research.  What's it all about?

Consider the following statement - an encouragment to us all:

"How and what do we do in higher education to return to our public purpose and civic mission? First, higher education must walk its talk. We must exercise citizenship in our own communities…a higher education institution, public or private, is no different than a corporation in that it is a citizen of its community, and one of its civic responsibilities is to use its resources and research capacity to improve living at the local level—socially, culturally, as well as economically.

The second thing that higher education can do is to provide students with the opportunities to become civically engaged.… We know from our experience that concentration on a concrete problem leads students to political engagement. We know that connecting studies with problem-solving service in the community deepens, complicates, and challenges students’ learning. It turns them into knowledge producers, not just knowledge consumers. They become citizen scholars who renew our democratic society."

Toni Murdock, President, Antioch University Seattle (from a speech to graduating high school seniors, May 2004)

The current economic times demand ingenuity to overcome budget cuts and shrinking resources. Of course, many expect fiscal creativity, but how about academic creativity as well? How about public engagement? Can we link economic survival to public scholarship? Well, it's not as simple as, "if public scholarship, then financial recovery," however consider the economic benefits of an engaged University:

  • In a time when graduate education has come under scrutiny, service learning and civic engagement extend the assets of The University.
  • Academics (faculty, graduate students) that collaborate with the public are stable investments.  Since the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and scholarly artifacts are reciprocal (ideally) in publically engaged work, the returns are at least equal to the investments.
  • Consider a "cost-benefit analysis."  Developing a course with a service learning component has a low financial cost, but requires time.  The benefits, however, can far exceed the time spent in development.  The University student gains a perspective and can develop skills by participating with community partners.  These skills return with them to the University and are used to produce "traditional" scholarly artifacts such as books, journals, and even new technologies.

As a public institution, we have an obligation to our communities (local, state, national, and even global).  Here at Iowa, we are able to achieve the research results, novel discoveries, and transferable technologies due largely to state and federal funding, much of which originates from the pockets of the community.

Service Learning and Civic Engagment embraces the development of critical thinking (reflection) skills. 

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