CIVIC LEARNING RESOURCES

Key Terms Commonly Used in the Service Field

Volunteerism – Most people are familiar with the term volunteerism. It is typically used it to refer to people who, of their own free will and without pay, perform some service or good work.

Community Service – Strictly defined, community service means volunteering done in the community. If students are said to be doing community service, this means that they are volunteering somewhere outside the regular school campus. In reality, many community service projects occur within the school/college itself, e.g., peer tutoring, assisting immigrant students, or working with students who are physically challenged.

Community-Based Learning – Community-based learning is a term for any learning experience which occurs in the community; it does not necessarily involve service. Common forms of community-based learning are internships and apprenticeships, which, although they may have no formal service purpose, offer important experiences for students to master skills within a real life setting or after they have completed requisite courses.

Service Learning – Service learning is the blending of service and learning goals in such a way that both occur and are enriched by each other. Service learning projects/activities emphasize both sets of outcomes, the service and the learning, and projects/activities are designed accordingly. Most prominently, programs that emphasize learning always include a strong reflective component where students utilize higher order thinking skills to extend their formal learning from the service experience.

Mentoring –As used at Coastal Carolina University, mentoring is an experience that originates from a course, required or elective, that expects the student to be paired as a mentor and/or tutor with a K-12th-grade public school student.  Through the mentoring relationship students are expected to contribute to the learning of the public school student and advance their own learning experience in the course from which the mentoring activity originated. Civic (or service) learning includes a reflective component encouraging students to utilize higher order thinking skills to extend their formal learning from the mentoring experience.    View the Dalton & Linda Floyd Family Mentoring Video. (Having trouble viewing? Download Quicktime.)