Message from the Conference Chair

Stephen Chan, Head, Office of Service-Learning, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HK

The Third International Conference on Service-Learning
10-12 January 2019
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HK

 Service-Learning has been demonstrated to be an effective pedagogy for achieving laudable learning outcomes such as civic engagement, social responsibility and ethical behavior. Increasingly, it is also recognized as effective in nurturing other desirable qualities such as leadership and in the case of international service-learning, global competency. For these reasons, it is increasingly integrated into main stream, credit-bearing academic programs.

 At The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), we made a strong commitment to embracing service-learning (SL) enthusiastically in 2010. Since then the program has grown to 60+ credit-bearing subjects with 4,000 students annually, with 200+ students engaged in service-learning in Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan and Rwanda, in collaboration with students from these countries as well as Korea, USA, Brazil, Israel and South Africa.

 We organized the 1st “International Conference on Service-Learning” in 2014 in Hong Kong, as a platform for interested academics and practitioners to share their research and experience with each other, to learn from each other, to promote collaboration, and to further develop the scholarship of service-learning.

 The 3rd International Conference on SL will be held on 10-12 January, 2018 at PolyU, Hong Kong. It will be a great opportunity to disseminate your experiences and research results, to explore solutions to the problems that you face, to develop partnerships, to be part of the growing community of service-learning and civic engagement in the region and beyond.

 There will be 2 full days of academic/professional paper presentations and panel discussions, with 2 keynote presentations by leading researchers and organizers in service-learning. Professor Andrew Furco, Associate Vice President for Public Engagement at the University of Minnesota, whose seminal paper proposing a definition of service-learning that so many of us have cited, will be speaking about the latest development of research in service-learning. Dr. Matthew Johnson, Executive Director of the renowned Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University, will also be giving us his insights on the development in the field.

 The topics of discussion include but are not limited to the following:
  
  • The role and impact of service-learning in higher education
  • Credit-bearing and/or mandatory service-learning
  • Direct and indirect services for the community
  • Service-learning as general education
  • Integrating service-learning into academic disciplines in both teaching and research
  • Sustainability of service-learning projects
  • The assessment of learning outcomes in service-learning
  • Learning through reflection
  • Cross-boundary (discipline, national, ethnical, …) in service-learning
  • Diversity in service-learning
  • ……

 Please join us at this exciting event.