Service Learning for Counselors: Integrating Education, Training, and the Community.

Service learning integrates classroom instruction with community service to augment learning. This method of instruction facilitates humanistic counseling skills by enhancing counselor awareness and knowledge of unique needs and strengths of diverse peoples while promoting personal, social, civic, and professional responsibility. This article describes applications of service learning for counseling students and professionals. ********** Service learning and community service are important components of higher education (Montrose & Ross, 2000). Service learning is a structured learning experience that facilitates the acquisition of awareness, knowledge, and skills while promoting a commitment to personal, social, civic, and professional responsibility. It is a form of experiential education that directly involves the participant in the phenomena being studied (Kendall, Duley, Rubin, Little, & Permaul, 1986). The purpose of this method of instruction is to increase understanding of concepts studied in a classroom environment by providing students with opportunities for direct exposure to problems, issues, and strengths of communities. Service learning also emphasizes the development of positive and collaborative relationships. Community service, although closely aligned with service learning, differs in a significant way. Community service is volunteer work that aims to contribute to the welfare of others and to provide benefit to an organization and/or a community. However, community service does not require a structured learning process or linkage to an academic curriculum, nor does it require a focus on mutuality and collaboration. Community service may have educational benefits (e.g., teaching students to be socially responsible); however, it does not allow for structured time to process what students experience during service activities or for use of skills acquired in the classroom in real-life situations (Burns, 1998). In this article, we describe service learning and experiential education, foundations of service learning in counseling, roles of service learning in counselor education, and applications for professional counselors. In addition, we provide examples of service-learning curricular programs. SERVICE LEARNING AND EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION Service learning is an instructional activity or strategy designed to achieve various learning objectives, yield outcomes integrated in the context of learning, offer applied learning opportunities, and provide communities and participants with the opportunity to work together on the basis of the tenets of collaboration, inclusion, mutuality, and cooperation (Bums, 1998; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 1997). Service learning emphasizes working with the community rather than for the community. Didactic instruction, case examples, technology, and other training methods are less capable of actualizing the principles of mutuality, equality, and community that are the basis for service learning (Burnett, Hamel, & Long, 2004). Service learning is a form of experiential education that enables students to acquire multiple competencies (Kendall et al., 1986). Kolb (1984) described experiential education as a learning strategy that enables participants to develop affective or emotional competencies through concrete experience, improve perceptual or awareness competencies through reflection, develop symbolic or abstract competencies through practice in conceptualization, and enhance behavioral or action abilities through testing theoretical constructs in practice. Combining the principles of service learning with the theoretical foundations of experiential education provides an avenue for bridging the theory--practice gap in the training of students and the continuing education of professionals. FOUNDATIONS OF SERVICE LEARNING IN COUNSELING This service-learning model emphasizes the development of a community-centered perspective, enhancement of counselor self-awareness, utilization of peer learning, and promotion of contact between groups (Burnett et al. …