Relationship for Our Time, (A)?: Community College Service Learning's Ties to Civic Engagement

Civic engagement has increasingly become a focus of higher education. One methodology that educators are using to increase students' community involvement is service-learning. The results of studies investigating this relationship, however, are mixed. Using a definition of civic engagement that included both political and community-focused knowledge and activities, this study investigated whether community college students who participated in service-learning scored higher on a post-course civic engagement survey than community college students who did not. T-test analyses revealed that service learners scored statistically higher on the post-course survey than non-service learners. Implications for greater service-learning faculty involvement are discussed as an approach to more purposely directing service-learning experiences toward the goal of greater student civic engagement. (publisher)