Service Learning at CGCC | Key Components | Benefits |

Rationale for Service Learning

..."'service learning works because it is based on one simple principle: you don't learn the basics by memorizing the basics, but by doing projects in which you utilize the basics.'...More than any other educational institution, the community college's very mission is enmeshed with a commitment to improve the communities that surround its campuses....The real value, though, lies in enhanced learning."

Judith S. Berson, "A Marriage Made in Heaven." Community College Journal

"Service learning bridges the traditional gap between academic and the "real world." Service makes academic study immediate and relevant."

Caroline Nolan, Yale Daily News

"Our institutions of higher learning might certainly take heed-not only encourage students to do such service, but help them stop and mull over what they have heard and seen by means of books to be read and discussions to be had. This is the very purpose, after all, of colleges and universities-to help one generation after another grow intellectually and morally through study and the self-scrutiny such study can sometimes prompt."

Robert Coles, "Community Service Work," Liberal Education

"Boyer provides a context for service education with a solid academic footing. 'To be considered scholarship, [and therefore within the province of the university and academically justifiable] service activities must be tied directly to one's special field of knowledge and relate to, and flow directly out of, this professional activity.' A 1993 study of the political science undergraduates at the University of Michigan concluded that students involved in service learning were significantly more likely than others in the same class to 'report that they had performed up to their potential in the course, had learned to apply principles form the course to new situations, and had developed a greater awareness of social problems.' The use of service component in a curriculum will not in and of itself provide students with an understanding of democracy or with an expanded context for considering traditional objective classroom knowledge. It is therefore very important to build into the curriculum a 'reflection' component so that teachers can facilitate learning through instructor-directed discussion and/or implications requires the guiding influence of a teacher."

Jeremy Cohen and Dennis Kinsey, Journalism Educator, Winter 1994

"Students need the chance to directly connect books and experience, ideas and introspection, to continuing activity in the community."

Robert Coles, Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities, Harvard University

Chandler-Gilbert Community College

2626 E. Pecos Road, Chandler, AZ 85225
(602) 732-7146