Giving Traction to Management Theory: Today's Service-Learning

Service-learning represents perhaps the most effective teaching tool available to the contemporary management professor. It can provide students with valuable academic, practical, and introspective knowledge as well as direct experience with diverse others. However, I argue here that we too often involve our students in service activities that fail to fully leverage their considerable skills. The new type of service-learning described herein is a complex, comprehensive pedagogy that requires a dramatic rethinking of the dynamic of experiential learning. In our model, transitory labor-based exchange relationships are replaced by active university–community partnerships, dynamic student leadership, and robust community benefits. People, process, and project considerations as well as student and client outcomes are discussed.