Active Democratic Citizenship and Service-Learning in the Postgraduate Classroom

Abstract

This article investigates the use of service-learning in teaching active democratic citizenship in the postgraduate classroom. In particular it draws on a case study of an MBS Government module (GV6104) entitled “Political Participation and Mobilisation” that explores the relationship between democracy and participation. Students of this module are trained in the nonpartisan, internationally respected Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice (VSPJ) voter education/active citizenship program and have delivered it to Irish and foreign nationals in community settings in advance of the 2009 European Parliament and Local Government elections. In order to critically evaluate the project this article investigates service-learning as a pedagogy reviewing the literature on the relationship between it and civic education and explores service-learning best practice. It evaluates the performance of the University College Cork (UCC) project against service-learning standards of best practice using data from the students' assessment of their service-learning experience gathered from a survey; an analysis of their learning journals; and feedback from the community partners. It finds that the students overwhelmingly agree that the service-learning experience contributed to their civic education and recognizes the need for further scholarly work in an Irish context to ascertain the merits of this pedagogy and to mainstream it in Irish higher education.

Keywords:

• active citizenship
• civic education
• community partnership
• service-learning

The author is grateful to NAIRTL for funding this project.

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Graduate Education and Professional Development panel at the 2009 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference in Baltimore. The author wishes to thank the panel participants and the JPSE reviewers for their feedback.

Notes

For further discussion on this, see Harris (2008).

National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), and Dublin City University (DCU).

National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM) and University of Limerick (UL). All of the universities mentioned in this article are in receipt of state funding.

Thirteen thousand of these students are undergraduate while 3,000 are in postgraduate programs. The university has more than 800 faculty members.

Assessment for those choosing the service-learning option consists of 15 service hours (community hours/group discussion hours) completed; the active citizenship training and the development of materials for the community; a learning journal on their community experience that contains entries relating to guided reflections; and a 1,500-word report making specific recommendations on democratic innovations to enhance political participation.