Service-learning partnerships utilize innovative teaching pedagogies that shift the focus from classroom to external settings on and off-campus. Employing experiential learning styles that differ from traditional classroom pedagogies, service-learning partnerships actively engage students, making them responsible for their own learning. Although both are experiential, service-learning partnerships transcend volunteer experiences by requiring reflective practice of new knowledge and skills. Service-learning partnerships provide a diversity of opportunities for contextualized learning, stressing interaction and feedback.

The scholarship of engagement means connecting the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems . . . Campuses would be viewed by both students and professors not as isolated islands, but as staging grounds for action. The scholarship of engagement means creating a special climate in which the academic and civic cultures communicate more continuously and creatively with each other.