Incremental Integration: A Successful Service-Learning Strategy

Many colleges and universities have embraced service learning, but the enthusiasm of administrators often exceeds service-learning application at the classroom level. For a variety of reasons, educators hesitate to implement service learning in their courses. Understanding service learning as a pedagogical tool is the key. Both students and faculty need time to learn the strategies and practices of service learning in order to succeed. This paper discusses strategies for integrating service learning into a department-wide curriculum, using a sequence of horticulture courses as an example. By increasing the service-learning component with each successive course, teachers and students gain confidence in the method and therefore are more likely to have positive results in courses with a greater service-learning component.