Beyond textbooks: A service-learning model inspiring others

A university in Hong Kong has, over a decade, fine-tuned an ‘outside the textbook’ model of service learning that is inspiring universities in Asia and Africa to follow suit.

Dr Grace Ngai, head of the Service Learning and Leadership Office of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), told an online forum presented by the University Social Responsibility Network (USRN) that the aim of the model was “to nurture socially responsible professionals and leaders with a strong sense of national pride and a global perspective”.

“[We are] casting that as research,” Ngai told the meeting on 23 April attended by 86 academics from Asia, Africa and Europe, adding: “If we look at the research question, the students report an increase in intercultural attitudes and skills.”

‘Service learning’ is a teaching and learning methodology that integrates community service with academic learning. This approach combines the practical application of knowledge with civic engagement, fostering both learning and community benefit.

At PolyU, service-learning projects have seen IT students work with a remote village in Cambodia to help residents set up computers and the internet. Students of the School of Optometry have provided vision screening to local Hong Kong students, while students from the Faculty of Business have gained hands-on experience of installing solar panels and water filters in rural communities.

Ngai warned that when you take students outside their home to do service learning in another community, not their own, you need to ask the question: “What are we teaching them?” And one needs to be careful you are not promoting a “holier than thou” attitude to the students.

Trilateral partnerships

She said when the university started over a decade ago to take 40 students outside Hong Kong to embark on a cross-cultural service-learning experience, it seemed a daunting task.

However, today the institution has over 300 students involved in overseas service learning in the Philippines, Rwanda, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa and the Yunnan province of China.

“We try to build in a very heavy dose of reciprocal learning. And we do this through a trilateral partnership,” explained Ngai.

“Traditional service learning has the university, the service provider, and the community, the service recipient. What we do is we try to build in another aspect of it through a local university or a local college,” she added.

PolyU works with the University of the Philippines, Duta Wacana Christian University in Indonesia, the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and Taylor’s University in Malaysia.

“In Hong Kong, many of our students come from a very homogeneous background. These collaborations give our students the opportunity to work together with peers that are different from themselves,” said Ngai.

“For many of them, this opportunity will be the first time that they have ever interacted with a person of a different race or ethnicity as a peer. For many of our students, that is something that’s very eye-opening for them. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘transformational’ – that takes a lot more,” she noted.

Voluntary versus compulsory

Associate Professor Dennis F Quilala, project development associate for the Service-Learning Office of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, where the president’s goal is to institutionalise service learning, told the forum that collaboration with PolyU has taught his institution a lot, especially in terms of differences in context and perspectives.

“What we want to do is to improve people-to-people relations, and student-to-student relations in both Hong Kong and the Philippines,” he added.

“[When we started] two years ago [we had] plenty of their students and 10 of our students, and our students were in one particular class, but this year we had 200 students from their side and about 50 students on our side,” Quilala said .

However, he noted that there are differences in the way his institution implements service learning. For example, their programmes are not centralised as they are at PolyU.

He said the university “cannot require” all of its students to do community engagement and said many of the students who have gone to Hong Kong on service learning programmes have volunteered to do so. “They do these things outside their classroom without credits,” he stated.

Chia Ming Huei, a specialist in experiential learning from Singapore University of Social Sciences, told the forum service learning was embedded within the core curriculum of the institution and is designed as part of the graduation requirement for all undergraduate students.

Learning with Communities is a university core course that utilises an “experiential learning approach in collaboration with diverse stakeholders to empower students to navigate responsible actions for real-world community impact”.

As part of the course, students learn the skills needed to curate, co-curate, implement and also co-evaluate a reciprocal community change initiative in collaboration with diverse stakeholders.

Students can choose the community they want to work with during pre-semester registration, where they can choose from a buffet of social topics offered based on their interest, skill set, strengths, and also their individual preference.

Huei added that they sent at least 500 students out to work for the community during a semester, which involved the curation of at least 420 unique projects with different community partners.

Partnering as equals

Dr Eugene Machimana, head of Curricular Community Engagement at the University of Pretoria, told the meeting that he has personally enrolled in a course at PolyU because there is “much to learn” from the university.

While noting the emphasis in the discussion on social responsiveness in preparing students to be global citizens in a shared globe, he said service learning should also have a focus on local resources and sustainability. He said communities also need to partner with the universities on an equal basis with an emphasis on mutual benefit.

“If there's not that element [equality], then there’s an issue of communities possibly feeling abused or misused in the way that we work with them as universities,” he warned.

There were also discussions among participants on how much influence communities should have in designing curricula and the assessment of students’ work.

One academic from Singapore pointed out that if service learning is made compulsory and there are students who don’t want to be there, especially in overseas communities, it could lead to “unintended consequences”.

In response Ngai said 13 years ago, when PolyU started the programme, there was much debate on this point, though there was no argument about service learning being important in academic learning.

Ngai said making the service-learning component compulsory was a more controversial issue, “and there were a lot of the same arguments, like: ‘Are we forcing volunteerism?’” said Ngai.

However, she said it was important to support the programmes with good evaluation methods and to properly train the lecturers who oversee the programmes.

“One thing that we have seen from the student side is that the service-learning requirement does not seem to have backfired,” Ngai said.