Empowering Cooperative Teamwork for Community Service Sustainability: Insights from Service Learning

In the past decades, the demand for providing soft skills among higher learners has been met through cooperative teamwork commitment. The need to continue empowering such initiatives should entail finding a balance between accountabilities and capabilities to play a significant role in academic achievement and social community engagement. This paper aims to examine the strategies to empower cooperative teamwork to provide insights into community service sustainability, where this would entail designing its key roles to engage with higher learners’ practices. The literature from recent reviews was developed to construct a critical examination of the role of service learning in strengthening cooperative teamwork to contribute to community service sustainability. This approach used the keywords cooperative teamwork, community service, and service learning. The findings reveal that there are three main points representing the core attempts to help empower cooperative teamwork to support community service sustainability: expanding strategic management of cooperative-based experiential learning, community service with commitment to civic responsibility, and incorporating service learning into higher education (HE) contexts. The value of this paper aims to contribute to the knowledge development of service learning, specifically addressed with the experiential skills obtained through planning, implementing, and evaluating the service learning process. The ultimate aim was also to enhance cooperative teamwork with critical, creative, and innovative thinking as key performance skills.