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Engaged Scholarship and Learning
Follow us at @engagedutrgv
ESTAC 3.106 and BINAB 1.105
Hours: M-F 8:00am-5:00pm
Email: engaged@utrgv.edu
Phone: (956) 665-3461 Edinburg
Phone Alt: (956) 882-4300 Brownsville
Support for Service Learning Designated Courses
Service Learning is a thoughtfully organized service experience that addresses a need in the community in a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship and integrates a reflective component that relates the service experience to academic course objectives and the students learning.
UTRGV requires that officially designated courses meet defined criteria in course design. However, course content, readings, and activities remain at the sole discretion of the faculty member teaching the course. These criteria are based on nationally recognized standards and have been established to enable the institution to document and assess Service Learning activities in a consistent fashion and to tie institutionally recognized community engagement activities to the agreed-upon practices and definitions.
Service Learning Designation applications are reviewed and approved at a section-level (on an instructor basis for a singular course.) Use our Service Learning Toolkit to learn more.
Engagement Zone's Service Learning Module
UTRGV has implemented the use of Engagement Zone, a platform that allows you to view student-tracked hours, view service opportunities, connect with over 200 organizations across the Rio Grande Valley, and pull semester reports of all the service completed as part of your course. Upon approval and designation of the Service Learning course, the Office of Engaged Scholarship and Learning will meet with Service Learning faculty to review Service Learning details that will be added to the Engagement Zone platform.
Engagement Zone is a portal that allows UTRGV students, faculty, and staff to address community needs. The portal allows us to connect with community organizations in meaningful ways. Through Engagement Zone, community partners can post service needs and events in real-time. The Service Learning Module delivers an online solution that saves educators and Service Learning coordinators time by efficiently communicating service opportunities to the entire campus. The platform offers program administrators one centralized place to pull all data from. This creates efficiency and maximizes impact in multiple ways:
- Faculty and staff do not have to gather data from different sources.
- Administrators and instructors can use detailed data collected by Engagement Zone to accurately report the accomplishments of each Service Learning course or program.
- Tracking provides hard numbers on student involvement, including types of services and hours served. The collected data reveals how UTRGV's Service Learning program has impacted the community and the student population.
- Faculty and program directors can tap into community needs and discover organizations and partners that are doing great work in the community.
Core Components of the Service Learning Teaching Strategy
- Investigation: Students begin their research on the community problems related to course content.
- Planning: Students, often working with community partners, plan the ways in which they will meet the community's needs.
- Action: All participants implement their plans by engaging in activities that will meet the community's needs. This is the actual service portion of Service Learning.
- Reflection: At each stage, participants engage in some form of activity that allows them to think about the community's need, their actions, their impacts, what worked and did not work, and/or similar types of analytic thinking.