Public Relations and Public Service

Public relations practitioners often are required to be both strategists who counsel organizations about their opportunities and challenges and technicians who produce communication messages distributed over a variety of channels. A comprehensive public relations curriculum should prepare students to assume both roles. Both professionals and scholars endorse a public relations curriculum in which students explore the public relations planning process and discover how to apply the process to actual communication situations in organizations (Ehling 1992). Service-learning offers public relations educators a means of integrating these goals.