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Service Learning
An important component of the Certificate Program in Leadership and Ethics (CPLE) is service learning. Service learning enriches education by engaging students in meaningful service to their schools and communities through a process that is carefully integrated with established learning objectives. Active engagement in meaningful service enhances academic achievement, citizenship, and leadership development. Service learning is 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.
Components of the service learning approach:
- Service learning (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. SL also fills that need, but it uses that need as a foundation to examine ourselves, our society, and our 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 (as well as intangible ones).
- Students perform a valuable, significant, and necessary service that 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 the academic subject to the real world.
- SL builds leadership competence through practice, reflection, and active engagement.
Past service learning projects
Study-abroad code of conduct
The objective was to research and develop a solution to the problem of binge drinking among students while studying abroad and to develop an "ethical code of conduct" for students. The Study Abroad Office at the University of Pittsburgh was so pleased with the outcome that it is sharing the project as a model for study-abroad units on college campuses across the country.
Student small business clinic
The students developed a plan for the creation and implementation of a student-run small-business clinic in which both undergraduate and MBA students assisted small business owners with core functions, and received credit and business experience.
The results are already being implemented among a group of students who have signed up to be part of the University’s new Entrepreneurship Living Learning Community within a new residence-hall facility built on campus.
Ethical peer intervention and international study
The students developed a peer-intervention model along with video-based training to help raise awareness of students who might engage in high-risk behavior during short international study trips. This training targeted business and engineering students who participate in what is known as the MCE +3 course that takes small groups of students on short international study trips to visit companies and gain some knowledge about international business. The students' approach was so innovative that it was nominated by one of the faculty members for the Thomas Saaty Innovation Award within the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business.
Future projects
This year, the CPLE students will design and implement a series of campus and community activities to highlight the importance of ethical leadership in celebration of the 100th anniversary of noted environmental leader Rachel Carson's birthday.