Service-Learning Essentials: Questions, Answers, and Lessons Learned

Chapter 3 Developing and Sustaining Campus-Community Partnerships for Service-Learning

As an avid observer, practitioner, and advocate of service-learning, it is clear to me that high-quality service-learning must be grounded in authentic, mutually beneficial campus-community partnerships. However, in reality, there are too many partnerships “in name only” that exist primarily in a grant application or college promotional brochure. Too many communities have complained about being used as “learning laboratories” or having been “partnered to death” by a well-meaning university. Service-learning partnerships are complex, fluid, dynamic, and fragile. They take time, energy, and patience to develop, and they evolve over time. Yet the only ...