What is the Comparative Advantage of the Service Learning Pedagogy? Insights from Development Economics

Dawn Richards Elliott

Forum for Social Economics, 2009, vol. 38, issue 2-3, 263-278

Abstract: We rely on the Kolb learning cycle and the experiences from two development economics class to analyze the comparative advantage of service learning pedagogy. We hypothesize that service learning is uniquely positioned to improve learning outcomes in applied/policy-oriented specializations. We conceptualize learning outcomes from a discipline-specific perspective where service hours are directly linked to the course content. We argue that the sustainability of service learning in applied/policy-oriented disciplines is limited by journal-entry orthodoxy and short-term costs. Emotive journal entries often encourage an “everything goes” response which threatens the credibility of service learning and limits its use in specializations that value objectivity. Service hours imply costs to faculty and students that exceed those of traditional approaches. This can serve as a disincentive for course adaptation, despite the decline in these costs over time, and enrollment. Our analysis encourages instructors to explore alternatives to the widely used journal-entry and to seek opportunities to inform students of the expected long-run benefit/cost tradeoffs. We encourage administrators to support faculty who teach classes that are predisposed to service learning in ways that can reduce short-run costs. With its comparative advantage and the united efforts across the academy, we expect that in the long-run service experiences will routinely be used to complement traditional lectures in applied/policy-oriented classrooms across the academy.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s12143-009-9051-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:fosoec:v:38:y:2009:i:2-3:p:263-278

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFSE20

DOI: 10.1007/s12143-009-9051-z

Access Statistics for this article

Forum for Social Economics is currently edited by William Milberg, Dr Wolfram Elsner, Philip O'Hara, Cecilia Winters and Paolo Ramazzotti

More articles in Forum for Social Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().