Students connect academic curriculum with meaningful public work to strengthen our communities for a sustainable future.
During your Service Learning course, you may have done some of the following:
- Work with community members, community organizations, government agencies, or external constituencies to identify and address societal issues
- Implement solutions to meet community needs.
- Reflect on sense of civic identity
Reflection Activities
First, clearly identify and describe your Service Learning Course. Then, select and incorporate evidence that demonstrates you had some of the experiences suggested above. To do so, you will need to complete at least 2 of the reflection activities listed below. As this is a digital portfolio, avoid relying only on writing. Consider providing pictures, video, or other media to demonstrate skills obtained or enhanced by this experience. You can use video to respond to some of the prompts, so long as you also include materials you produced during the experience.
- Provide an example of a service learning project in which you set a goal and achieved it in collaboration with others from within the community. What parties were involved? Why? What need was being addressed? Reflect on how you developed a plan, worked with others, resolved issues, and used responsible decision-making in order to to pursue this goal. What might you do differently when faced with a similar situation in the future? Include a PDF of this project.
- Reflect on your service learning course by discussing how lectures, assignments, and experiences had you explore and analyze civic issues. Provide specific examples and your views of those experiences.
- Reflect on the relationship between prior coursework/learning and the responsibilities of your service learning experience. What were your responsibilities within the service learning project? How did your college coursework prepare you for this type of work? What prior knowledge/experience were you missing prior to working within the community? How did your service learning experience affect your career and academic goals?
- Reflect on your service learning course by providing a brief description of the service learning project/experience. What new knowledge, skills, and abilities did you gain by participating in this service learning course? Describe how your experiences have shaped your views of your major/minor and your career goals. If possible, include pictures or video of the event(s).
- Include a one minute reflection video regarding your service learning experience. What were key experiences and concepts you will take away from this process? How will this be useful to you in the future?
- Have you applied concepts from your service learning experience in another context, such as a family, social, or other activity? If so, how did you do so? If not, how might you apply concepts you learned in the future?
If one or more of the prompts don’t seem to directly address your experience, please feel free to interpret them to some degree, allowing you to respond in an authentic way. This is your experience; these prompts are meant to help you share it in a way that is useful to multiple audiences.