Service-Learning as a Team Sport

The story of Service-Learning at PolyU in its present form can be traced back to 2010, when Professor Walter Yuen was installed as our Vice President of Academic Development. It was barely 2 years before we had to change our undergraduate programs from 3 year programs to 4 years.  Prof. Yuen set up a Task Force to study the feasibility of incorporating service-learning (SL) as a core General Education subject for all undergraduate programs.  The Task Force drafted a policy paper which Prof. Yuen tabled at the Senate at the end of 2010.  The Senate, chaired by the then President Prof. Timothy Tong, approved the proposal after a lengthy and intense debate.  

The policy governs the offering of SL subjects at the university.  Professors teach these subjects.  Before they can teach, the professors have to send the proposals to be approved by a sub-committee in charge of vetting these SL subject proposals.  This sub-committee effectively evolved from the original Task Force. All SL subjects have to be administered by the Academic Registrar, just like all other academic subjects.  When the students are properly taught and prepared, they can go to the service site to carry out the projects, e.g., installing solar panels to generate electricity for developing countries, …  These projects have to be facilitated by local NGO partners.   Before the students can travel, they also have to be vaccinated against infectious diseases and take other precautions, with the help from the University Health Service. 

Many of the projects involve travelling, equipment, materials, and other expenses.  The university finances a large part of that.  The rest are financed by donations from alumni, individuals with a good heart, corporate civic responsibility programs, and government initiatives.  Our Alumni Office and some senior academics help a lot in soliciting these funds.  The Finance Office is involved in all aspects of the financing.  

Throughout this whole process, the Service-Learning and Leadership Office (formerly the Office of Service-Learning) is instrumental.  The SLLO seeks out the professors who might be interested, advices the professor on writing the proposals, supports them in their teaching, develops e-learning material to facilitate teaching cultivates relations with NGO partners, ventures into foreign countries to seek opportunities for projects, trains the professors and students in designing projects, assists the professors in teaching and supervising the students, assists in soliciting funding, works with the doctors at the UHS in preparing the students, works with the AR in administering the subjects, collects data on the implementation, researches on suitable pedagogies, builds alliances with foreign universities, and creates new programs to take SL forwards. 

Just like all the best models in science and engineering, this is just an abstraction which tries to capture the salient features, while leaving out other details. 

Service-Learning at PolyU is truly a team sport.