ABSTRACT
Foreign language education provides excellent opportunities to expose students to language cultures through experiences that can enrich their understanding not only of language and culture but also themselves and their roles in communities local to global. Service learning (SL) is an empirically supported high-impact pedagogy that integrates academic material, community-engaged activities and critical reflection to achieve academic, civic and personal growth learning goals and to advance public purposes. Through intentional design, learning in any and all of these categories can be intercultural in nature, and community change can be linked to local, regional, national, and/or global change initiatives. With its goals and processes co-created by instructors, students and community members, SL has great potential to cultivate among all participants the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors associated with global citizenship, including the critique of self and of systems on which authentic, culturallycontextualized and effective efforts to move toward justice, sustainability and peace (the ultimate ends held up by this volume) depend. SL integrated into foreign language education may provide one of the most potent means for developing global citizenship, amplifying language acquisition and enhancing civic-minded democratic engagement as articulated in such frameworks as the Council of Europe’s Competences for Democratic Culture, UNESCO’s Framework for Global Citizenship and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This chapter provides an overview of the what, why and how of SL as a significant, ongoing and worldwide innovative change in pedagogy and also explores opportunities and challenges associated with its use in foreign language education.
