ABSTRACT
Over the past 25 years, the prevalence of service learning courses has steadily increased in higher education. Service learning has gained prominence in higher education as a high-impact educational practice and as an active learning strategy that provides both a rich set of potential learning outcomes and opportunities for educators to explore teaching and learning in ways that have implications for all pedagogies. Service learning is rooted in the public purposes of higher education; careful attention must be paid to its design, implementation, assessment, and outcomes to ensure that it fulfills these purposes. This chapter conceptualizes and defines service learning by articulating many of the components and variables that comprise the complexity of and inform the research on this teaching and learning strategy. Service learning may involve short- or long-term community-based activities, which may consist of direct or indirect service.
