As a service-learning course, UNIV 290 invites students to develop more than just academic competence.  Students' community-based experiences require them to develop key social and civic skills, such as communication across lines of difference, time management, and flexibility.  Application of class concepts to real-world experiences encourages them to practice higher-order, critical thinking skills.  And ongoing reflection on their personal capacity for service and leadership develops valuable self-knowledge, vocational awareness, and transferable skills.

Throughout UNIV 290, students will learn to:

Articulate, apply, and critically evaluate important theoretical frameworks for community engagement, including considerations of identity, power and privilege; paradigms of social action; asset-based community development; and the social change model of leadership;

Actively engage with and apply learning from their local community through experiences of direct service, community-based research, and directed critical reflection on these community experiences;

Analyze and evaluate concrete examples of engagement “for the common good,” including their own and those of the organizations where they are volunteering, according to heuristics discussed and developed in class;

Create a set of publicly available, web-based resources that chronicle and reflect on their personal community-based experiences so as to encourage engagement in and activism regarding a social issue or issues of passionate concern to them;

Foster critical thinking skills and sharpen reflective writing skills, especially in an online environment.

Ideally, by course's end, participants will also:

Increase their awareness of one or more community issues and the challenges of developing and managing not-for-profit organizations that respond to them;

Increase their understanding of the role individuals play in the community through various forms of civic engagement and social action (e.g., volunteerism, donations, drives, services-provision, advocacy for social and/or policy change);

Assess and critically reflect on their own leadership identity, leadership behavior, personal voice, and role in the promotion of social change in the community;

Promote similar reflection and informed action for social change within the broader Loyola community through public discourse about class topics and community-based experiences;

Provide 40+ hours of sensitive, culturally appropriate, passionate assistance to one of the many excellent non-profit organizations serving the communities of Chicago and our world.