"Showtime at Delgado" and the Service Learning Curve

In Spring of 2007, Delgado Community College offered faculty the opportunity to enroll in faculty development workshops for service-learning. Faculty who participated came from areas as diverse as marketing, nursing, speech communication, psychology, veterinary tech, and mass communication. The project that is the focus of this article resulted from collaboration between the speech and mass communication faculty members who attended these workshops. This article will focus on the challenges and benefits of service-learning for students and faculty, based on the project, "Showtime at Delgado." The findings are that the main challenges of service-learning involve miscommunication, vulnerability, and unpredictability, with the benefits of confidence, real‐world learning and experience and deeper connections between students, faculty and the community outweighing the challenges. [authors]