Service Learning in Organizations

This course explores service learning as a form of active learning that values critical thinking and problem solving. When service-learning is effectively implemented, students gain in measures of academic achievement, citizenship, and leadership competence. There are several components of the service learning (SL) approach:

• SL uses community service as the vehicle for the attainment of students' academic goals and objectives.
• Community service fills a need in the community through volunteer efforts. Service-learning also fills that need, but it uses that need as a foundation to examine ourselves, society, and the future. Further, service-learning provides students with opportunities to use newly acquired skills and knowledge in real-life situations.
• SL identifies in advance and tracks specific learning objectives and goals.
• Students perform a valuable, significant, and necessary service which has real consequence to a community, organization or other stakeholder group.
• SL enhances student learning by joining theory with experience and thought with action; it also helps students to see the relevance of academic subject to the real world.
• SL also builds leadership competence through practice, reflection and active engagement.

Upon completion of the course, students will have accomplished the following:

1. Developed an understanding of the concept of servant leadership and how it explains the inextricable link between ethics and effective leadership.
2. Studied the key characteristics of servant leadership and how they related to and impact both personal and business success.
3. Enhanced one's project management skills by working as part of a team on a servant leadership project.
4. Develop critical leadership skills such as conflict resolution, negotiations and high impact communication.
5. Applied course concepts to a relevant example in the service learning project, in which the teams work on a specific external project related to leadership, social responsibility, and ethics in business.
6. Applied course concepts using a case analysis, business plan, and/or presentation to a client.