Navigating Feasibility: Choosing Service-Learning for Academic Fit - Conference Tutorial
Abstract
Service learning combines community service with course instruction and reflection, and provides students with impactful experiences that are beneficial in many ways. In courses that employ service learning, students engage with community partners to complete projects that can have a tangible impact on the missions of local community organizations. These projects allow students to develop and exercise their skills in real-world contexts, expose students to ways that computing can be used for the social good, and attract students from groups traditionally underrepresented in computing.
Adopting project-based service learning comes with numerous challenges. Changing pedagogical approaches demands a significant time commitment, and may be difficult to integrate into an existing curriculum. Some institutions have staff and resources dedicated to supporting instructors seeking externally sourced projects, while others lack such support, leaving instructors to fend for themselves. Potential community partners who lack technical knowledge may be enthusiastic about a partnership, but need assistance with brainstorming project ideas. More technically minded partners might have many ideas for projects, but lack the perspective to gauge the scope of work that can be accomplished by a group of students in a single semester. Student work is not guaranteed to deliver software that can be deployed, so careful communication is required to ensure partner expectations are aligned with possible outcomes and pedagogical goals.
In order to ease adoption by instructors who wish to embrace service learning projects but lack institutional or peer support, we are developing a framework that provides a course structure, sample deliverables and associated rubrics, instructor guides, and resources for sourcing appropriate projects. We draw from our past experiences to try to increase the chances of successful learning outcomes for students in service learning courses by addressing common pitfalls and highlighting factors that help lead to feasible projects with appropriate scope and academic fit.
This tutorial will focus on project feasibility evaluation. Tutorial participants will be presented with project proposals from hypothetical project partners, and engage in discussion to collaboratively assess the feasibility of the project case studies. Participants will discuss potential adjustments to the proposals that reduce risk to student learning outcomes while still satisfying the goals of the partners. We will provide our partner conversation guide and project feasibility evaluation rubric to help guide discussion.
This tutorial builds upon the success of our previous tutorial at the 2024 CCSC Northeastern Conference, and our Birds of a Feather session at the 2024 SIGCSE Technical Symposium. We draw from our collective experience facilitating over 100 distinct projects involving more than 600 students at different types of institutions.
