Customer Reviews

Service-Learning Code of Ethics (JB - Anker)

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Very little has been written on ANY problems related to service learning, even potential ones.

I've done this stuff for ten years, and stuff happens.

Most book-length work on this subject offer only cheery, happy tales of students enjoying every minute of their placements, doing all the readings, having deep insights--even flashes of enlightenment-- and wishing they could take the course all over again. (See, for example, Where's the Learning in Service-Learning?)

So a very big hat tip to the authors, who point out that there are, for example, potential breaches of confidentiality that may arise. Students should know that they have to be careful what they write and say about what they see and hear in the community. Pretty basic, right? Well, this is a major step forward in the literature on this subject, the quality of which is not high. The authors explore many potentially problematic situations, and offer a useful set of guidelines for student and instructors to follow.

A quibble: some of the examples and scenarios verge on the sophomoric. Even in a book aimed at undergraduates, more complex situations and ethical dilemmas could have been explored.

That being said, this is a big step forward. When we send our students out into the community, they need to know that they should first and foremost Do No Harm.