Transforming Communities: The Role of Service Learning in a Community Studies Course

This paper discusses Transforming Communities, a course about the interaction of public policy and community issues that includes service learning, along with other assignments designed to promote student understanding of issues critical to communities. The paper first addresses the roots and underlying principles of the Transforming Communities Program, with a focus on the Seminar. It describes how the academic content and community-based learning assignments work together to provide an interdisciplinary education about communities, with the overall objective of understanding how communities function and the means of strengthening them. It shows how the academic and experiential components of the course are incorporated into the larger picture of Transforming Communities. It concludes with a discussion of the program's accomplishments, while at the same time pointing out challenges that the course and others like it must address. (author)