Experiencing the city: Urban Studies students and service learning

Abstract

Service-learning represents a method of learning in which students learn through volunteering, while at the same time being asked to reflect on their experiences and tie together experience with classroom-based material, thereby developing their learning through service activities. This paper explores the role and value of service learning in Urban Studies and is based on a review of student reflective journals written following a service-learning experience in which undergraduate students were given the opportunity to volunteer outside the classroom as part of their coursework in an introductory Urban Studies course at the University of Toronto. Evaluating student learning through service learning-based reflection enables further understanding of how students learn through exploration of the urban realm.

Keywords:

• Urban Studies
• service learning
• reflection
• urban experience

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the students who generously provided their reflective journals for this research, the University of Toronto Curriculum Renewal Initiative Fund & Innis College for providing funding to operate the service learning initiative, and three anonymous reviewers for feedback and suggestions on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Dale's cone of experience has alternately and incorrectly been called the “cone of learning” as well. It appears that the initial model was altered to included percentages indicating how much information one retained based on the method of learning. For instance, it has been said that after two weeks, one remembers 20% of what they heard in a lecture and 90% of what they did in a demonstration on the same topic. While these percentages have been misrepresented as being part of Dale's cone, the basic tenet of the cone of experience still holds – that learning outcomes tend to improve as one becomes increasingly involved in the learning process. (See e.g. http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/10/people_remember.html, http://www.brainfriendlytrainer.com/theory/dale%E2%80%99s-cone-of-learning-figures-debunked)