Incorporating Service Learning into a General Education History Course: An Analogical Model

The popularity of service learning has grown in recent years, as educators place more value on active and experiential forms of learning. Service learning is learning conducted through service work in a community setting in combination with coursework that frames the service experience with respect to civic engagement and political power. Yet incorporating service learning into a traditional course curriculum presents numerous challenges, especially for lower-division survey or general education history courses with broad content or multiple thematic requirements. Two challenges, in particular, stand out: (1) assessing student learning from the service experience, which takes place outside the professor's purview; and (2) making service learning an integral, rather than ancillary, component of the course. In this paper, the author is proposing an "analogical" model of course structure--built on educational theorist Donald Schön's concepts of reflective practice--designed to address these challenges. The author developed and implemented this model for a general education course on the history and politics of Los Angeles that comprises part of the first-year core sequence for students in the Honors College program at California State University, Los Angeles. The community partner for the service project was 826LA, a tutoring/creative writing center located in the Echo Park neighborhood that caters to a largely working-class Latino student population.