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The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) strives to reduce suicide attempts and deaths through research, education, and advocacy. AFSP has been at the forefront of changing minds about suicide prevention and creating effective means of intervention. Stigma and myths surrounding mental illness and suicide still prevail and contribute to its incidence. People often hesitate to admit suicidal ideation and to seek help. Healthcare professionals are in a key position to identify people who are suicidal and connect them with appropriate services. In order to do this, they need to not only know about suicide but be willing to intervene. Advocacy is the act of creating political, economic, and social change. It is the professional responsibility of those working in healthcare to be active advocates for underserved populations where care is not optimal. This ability must be learned and practiced. Educational opportunities are needed to address the cognitive components of suicide as a health issue and advocacy as a professional responsibility. However, the affective and procedural domains must also be addressed in order to make the transition of this knowledge to practical use. There is substantial evidence that service learning is effective in addressing attitudes towards marginalized issues. It is also a powerful mechanism to improve self-efficacy in a skill. Establishing a partnership between UMass and AFSP to develop service learning coursework to meet the goals of educating students in health-related majors in aspects of suicide prevention and advocacy would benefit both parties. Goals would include program development and evaluation.

"Randy Stoecker has been "practicing" forms of community-engaged scholarship, including service learning, for thirty years now, and he readily admits, "Practice does not make perfect." In his highly personal critique, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement, the author worries about the contradictions, unrealized potential, and unrecognized urgency of the causes as well as the risks and rewards of this work. Here, Stoecker questions the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of the core concepts of service learning: 1. learning, 2. service, 3. community, and 4. change. By "liberating" service learning, he suggests reversing the prioritization of the concepts, starting with change, then community, then service, and then learning. In doing so, he clarifies the benefits and purpose of this work, arguing that it will create greater pedagogical and community impact. Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement challenges--and hopefully will change--our thinking about higher education community engagement"--

ABSTRACTExperiential learning is a growing practice in higher education today. Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs use experiential learning to expose students to application and reinforcement of academic theories and concepts. This most often is accomplished through a required internship. This article argues for the addition of service learning requirements to MPA curricula. A complementary relationship between internship and service learning requirements yields four primary benefits: (1) further involvement of pre-service and in-service students in experiential-learning activities; (2) additional exposure to real-life application of course concepts; (3) better and more targeted classroom reinforcement mechanisms; and (4) additional community benefit. Complementarity between internship and service learning requirements allows the best of each experiential-learning approach to augment the other. We contend that this produces better-prepared MPA graduates by exposing them to a more diverse set of immersive learning opportunities and application scenarios.

This chapter provides a theoretical orientation to the intersections of the theory and practice of leadership and service‐learning. It articulates a set of values to guide leadership educators in their service‐learning practice. The authors advocate a critical approach that fosters social justice.

Rationale: Service learning and community engagement are a natural fit for many disciplines. Service learning projects provide students with an opportunity to apply course content to real world situations (Harder, 2010), developing projects that will benefit clients, agencies, and communities. Service learning is used across a variety of disciplines including social work (Hostetter, Sullenberger, & Wood, 2013) nursing (Murray, 2013) and business (Payne, Campbell, Bal, & Piercy, 2011). Working in a group within a service learning context provides a multitude of benefits including greater interest, motivation, and engagement; improved communication skills; real-life application of course content; and skills acquisition (Murray, 2013; Payne et al., 2011; Postlethwait, 2012). Panel Purpose: The purpose of this panel is to describe how four faculty members incorporated service learning into their social work courses. This panel is unique in that three of the four faculty began conducting service learning projects while at the same institution and are now integrating service learning into their respective university settings in a variety of ways. Goals: Five goals exist for this panel. By the end of the Panel participants will understand (1) how to implement student-led community-based research projects, (2) how to build partnerships with diverse stakeholders/agency settings, (3) benefits and challenges of student-led research within a community-based agency, (4) how to use projects to support agency change, and (5) future directions in service learning. Specifically, the panel will provide the audience with information on how to incorporate student-led community-based research projects into their courses. First, the discussion will focus on how to prepare for a community-based research project. The panelists will describe how to: (a) develop an assignment that is consistent with learning outcomes and meets the need of the partner agency, (b) create a project that is feasible to complete in one semester and results in a high quality project, (c) manage and plan for difficult group dynamics, and (d) incorporate measures of student learning and engagement into a service learning course. Second, the panelists will describe the art of building relationships and engaging diverse stakeholders/agencies in the community-based research project, highlighting key strategies. Next, the panelists will discuss the benefits, challenges, and lessons learned from implementing service learning into their courses. For example, one panelist will describe the challenges of partnering with a rural agency, while another panelist will highlight how agency politics influence students' abilities to conduct agency-based research. Lastly, the panelists will discuss how to use service learning to support community change and explore future directions for service learning. Participant Engagement will occur through questions designed to elicit discussion related to the five Panel goals. Participants will also be asked to share their experiences with the various topics covered during the panel.

The Landscape of Rural Service Learning / Nicholas Holton, Karen McKnight Casey, Cynthia Fletcher, Charles Ganzert, John Hamerlinck, Steven A. Henness, Pam Proulx-Curry, J. Ashleigh Ross, Heidi A. Stevenson, Randy Stoecker, Sophie Tullier, Spencer Wood -- Return to Slaterville-Caroline : A Retrospect with Hope for the Future / Eva M. Hagenhofer -- Geographic Disparities in Access to Higher Education Service Learning / Randy Stoecker and Charity Schmidt -- Student Voice in Rural Service Learning / Sophie Tullier -- The Rural Service Learning Practitioner's Perspective / Ashleigh Ross and Randy Stoecker -- Beyond Service-Learning : Living Democracy in Rural Alabama / Blake Evans -- Food For Thought : A Product Model Service Learning Experience for Environmental Science Students at a Rural Campus of the University of Wisconsin Colleges / Lauren Wentz -- Service Learning and Rural Development in West Virginia : A Community Center Approach / Chris Baker and Corey Dolgon -- Naadamaage Kinomaagewin : Service Learning in Native American Studies / Martin Reinhardt -- Rural Service Learning as Participatory Action Research : Lessons from Central Pennsylvania. Brandn Green / Heather Feldhaus, Ben Marsh, and Carl Milofsky -- Guiding Students Toward Engagement : An Alternative Model Linking Service Learning with Community Based Research / M. Beth White and Spencer D. Wood -- Using a Group Community-Based Research Project in the Introductory Sociology Class as an Exercise in Public Sociology / Shelley Koch -- Striving for Service Learning Success in a Rural K-12 Tribal School / Judith Puncochar -- Our Work in Progress : Service Learning and Rural Communities Partnering in a College-Ready Writers Program / Marisa Sandoval Lamb and Flora Ann Simon -- Service Learning in the Rural Community College / Nicholas Holton -- Reasonable Care : Risk and Liability in Service Learning / Charles F. Ganzert -- Organic and Dynamic : How Systems Theories Can Inform Rural Service Learning Practice / Heidi A. Stevenson -- Rural Service Learning : Innovation in the Hinterland? / Nicholas Holton, Karen McKnight Casey, Cynthia Fletcher, Charles Ganzert, John Hamerlinck, Steven A. Henness, Pam Proulx-Curry, J. Ashleigh Ross, Heidi A. Stevenson, Randy Stoecker, Sophie Tullier, Spencer Wood

In addition to enhancing language skills of their students, instructors of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) learners seek to address the social and emotional needs of their students yet are challenged to do so only in a classroom setting. Service-learning (SL) offers the authentic opportunities in which learners can employ their language skills and evaluate how these abilities are valued outside of the classroom setting. In addition to encouraging deep grounding of the course material, SL promotes learners' general abilities in critical thinking, self-awareness, knowledge, tolerance, and compassion (Eyler & Giles, 1999). We add to the emerging literature of SL with SHL populations (e.g., Trujillo, 2009; Martínez, 2010; Leeman, Rabin & Román-Mendoza, 2011; Petrov, 2013) and find that SL is a powerful tool to not only connect SHL learners to their identity, the Spanish language, and the community, but also to validate the high level of cultural and linguistic skills that SHL students already possess and to spur the development of more skills. Moreover, integrating SL in SHL courses aids learners in developing their knowledge of the Spanish language and of course material far and beyond what could be accomplished in the classroom alone and allows the community to provide students with valuable knowledge, skills and insights as well.

As service‐learning has moved from the margins to the mainstream of education, programs once led by students are now coordinated by administrators, faculty, or leadership development staff. This chapter calls for the return of student‐led service.

The challenges of engaging social work students in the research curriculum are well-documented, and the literature supports the use of service learning to increase engagement. This study explores self-efficacy as one measure of learning outcomes. Changes in students' (N=88) assessment of their ability to perform research and program evaluation tasks skillfully were measured by administering the Evaluation Self-Efficacy Scale (ESE) on the first and last days of a graduate-level advanced research class that included a service learning project. ESE scores on the last day of class were significantly higher than on the first day of class. The effect size was larger than in prior similar studies, suggesting that service learning contributed to students' sense of mastery of course content. These results support the use of an engaged-learning model such as a service learning project in advanced social work research courses to improve students' evaluation self-efficacy.

This study examined the extent to which a mandatory service-learning experience impacted Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) students' attitudes and interest in working in gerontological social work and identified factors that influence a student's desire to work with aging populations. Using a convenience sample of 51 BSW students, participants either conducted a structured life review or a friendly visitor assignment with an older adult. Participants were a diverse group of primarily female students, ranging in age from 20-57 years old. Pre- and post-survey results suggest that intergenerational service-learning in social work can be a valuable instructional technique, helping students to maintain or increase interest in working with elder populations, alleviating concerns of working in gerontological settings, and giving insights into both the challenges and rewards of this field of work.Keywords aging/gerontology; practice learning; service learning; experiential teaching methods; social work education