Office of Service-Learning

Study Away/Abroad Engagement Experiences and Service-Learning

Study Away/Abroad Engagement Experiences utilize service-learning opportunities to deepen participants’ understanding of the communities in which they are engaged and to give participants hands-on experience as community organizers. Participants take part in service-learning activities alongside community members and organizations involved in efforts to better their communities. In these settings, participants learn about methods and techniques of community organization and have the opportunity to practice their own community organizing skills in a service-learning context.

Participants take part in a variety of service-learning opportunities. These opportunities are unique to each experience, but past service-learning opportunities include those listed below.

The Navajo Study-Away Engagement Experience

Participants have:

• cleaned up community spaces.
• dug a well for Navajo hosts.
• aided elderly Navajo people living alone.
• helped reconstruct hogans, traditional Navajo living spaces now commonly used for ceremonies such as sweat lodges.

The South Bronx Study-Away Engagement Experience

Participants have:

• volunteered at community centers such as the Point and the Mercy Center, where they worked with children in after-school programs. They helped children with homework and directed art projects.
• worked in a soup kitchen.
• restored community gardens to bolster community efforts to provide green spaces in urban areas.
• gone door-to-door with community organizers from Mothers on the Move to engage community members in efforts to improve public housing conditions.

The Peru Study-Abroad Engagement Experience

Participants have:

• worked in an orphanage, engaging with the children and the surrounding community.
• donated toys and art supplies to the children in the orphanage, which they used in creating art projects with the children.
• took part in the orphanage’s building projects.

Often, participants are motivated to develop other service-learning projects in their own communities and in communities throughout the world once the Engagement Experiences have ended. Participants have initiated an after-school program in Bowling Green, travelled to Mexico to build a home for an impoverished family, started an arts-based pen-pal program between children in after-school programs in the Bronx and in Bowling Green, and implemented community mapping projects in Bowling Green to gather information about community issues. Participants’ involvement in the service-learning opportunities on Engagement Experiences motivates them to take active roles in improving their communities, encouraging them to become life-long community activists.