ABSTRACT
Design and planning programs have a long tradition of providing service to communities, but much of that work was based on a service model that treated the community as a client. This expert–client relationship was typically not collaborative, student work took place in the studio, and the relationship generally ended when the service was delivered. Since the 1990s, however, design and planning programs have moved toward service-learning, an educational approach that involves collaboration and exchange between a community partner and an academic partner to address a community-identified problem or need. Service-learning relocates the place of learning from the classroom to the community context, where issues, realities, and variables are shaped, influenced, and activated by real-world values, issues, constraints, and opportunities. This approach meets an academic need to provide critical learning experiences and gain knowledge that is impossible to learn “inside” the conventional classroom. It also meets community needs through co-learning and collaborative problem solving between the community and academic partners that provide usable outcomes that enable the communities to meet identified needs (erasingboundaries.psu.edu).
