Intergenerational Service Learning: Linking Three Generations: Concept, History, and Outcome Assessment

Abstract

In August 2006, the Foundation for Long Term Care (Albany, New York) received funding for a variant on service learning in elder care in which Boomers, other older adults, as well as college students would jointly engage in service-learning projects designed to address community needs in five different college towns and cities. This article reviews the historical antecedents to this project describing how it evolved from service of youth for the benefit of elders to the conceptualization of intergenerational service learning as service with elders. This new conceptualization ties in with Erikson's concept of generativity and the rising interest in civic engagement among elders. Recent research on the impact of volunteerism and health on an older population is reviewed, as is a summary of the different service-learning projects at each academic institution. This article discusses culminating evaluation findings on civic engagement, generativity, and satisfaction from participants at the five colleges in the project and describes challenges associated with evaluating outcomes of the diverse service-learning projects. Recommendations for future work are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• intergenerational service learning
• civic engagement
• generativity

This material is based upon work supported by the Corporation for National and Community Service under Learn and Serve America Grant No. 06LHHNY001. Opinions or points of view expressed in this article about this particular project are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Corporation or the Learn and Serve America Program.

Notes

1. In 1992, the FLTC completed its pioneering project called Coordinated Student Involvement in Elder Care (Hegeman & Linsider) which was funded by the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE). The project was (to the best of our knowledge) the first service-learning program focused on service (paid and volunteer) for elders by college students, followed by a 10-year period of service-learning projects. The article “Service Learning in Elder Care: Ten Years of Growth and Assessment” and the handbook Elder Care and Service Learning: A Handbook detail this 10-year period (Hegeman, Horowitz, Tepper, Pillemer, & Schultz, 2002; Seperson & Hegeman, 2002).

2. Funded by CNCS, the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE) developed service learning in gerontology courses on more than 50 of its campuses. These programs were profiled in Dorfman, Murty, Ingram, and Evans (2002). In addition, The Steven F. Austin Sate University in Texas created an earlier CNCS-funded program similar to the one developed by the FLTC (Watson, Church, Darville, & Darville, 1997).

3. These data reflect what was submitted by each college by the deadline date established by the CNCS. Discrepancies in the data presented here and the data presented by authors in subsequent articles on this project are due to participating colleges' continued acceptance and examination of surveys that arrived after the due date and/or differing inclusion strategies (e.g.: one strategy was to only include survey respondents that provided answers to three of the five of the survey questions).