Learning to make a difference – how to bridge the gap between ideal and delivery in service learning

Advocates reflect on why, despite its intuitive appeal, aligning student gains with social good is so difficult to get right – and some of the ways in which the sector might break new ground

There is this nagging allure to how we involve students with the civic fabrics into which their university education is woven: a persistent sense that we could achieve so much by engineering – to borrow language from social enterprise – a kind of “dual bottom line” which couples social good with educational gain.

Sector-wide investigations have alluded to its potential (see the Civic University Network, and the Student Futures Manifesto); it is echoed in many university strategies. It manifests in innumerable initiatives and projects – a cross-section of which have been surfaced in the recent report by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement with the University of Westminster. This demonstrated the plethora of practices to involve students in learning in community settings, sometimes termed “service learning” but with a host of other names including community-engaged learning, live projects, real-world learning, and civic engagement.

But while there is consensus around the value of this service learning, there is ambiguity in how it should best be realised – and delivery at scale is notably absent. Brilliant schemes and initiatives often struggle against institutional inertia and conventions, or their own internal complexities – and service learning is rarely anything but marginal in the totality of institutional provision. Where, elsewhere in the world, service learning is more institutionalised, there remain key concerns around the value to communities, especially where scale is achieved.

How can we resolve this mismatch of ideal and delivery?