SLS-5c Inaugural Service-Learning Conference (ICSL 2014)

The Inaugural International Conference on Service-Learning (ICSL) 2014 was jointly chaired by Stephen Chan, Head of the Office of Service-Learning at PolyU, and Joseph Sun, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Engineering and Applied Science at University of Pennsylvania.  The opening keynote was given by Prof. Andrew Furco, then Associate Vice President for Public Engagement at University of Minnesota, a highly respected elder of the SL community.  Prof. Furco spoke on strategies on the core issues of research and scholarship.  His keynote was the beginning of a long term collaboration which has yielded many fruits, and he has visited PolyU several times since then.  The second keynote was given by Ms. Barbara Canyes, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Campus Compact, who spoke on the important topic of partnership, on which she provided a lot of insight from experience.   

We also organised two panel discussions.  One on the main topic of university service-learning, with speakers representing USA, Israel, Singapore and China.  A third panel on funding and collaboration created a dialog among speakers representing the donors, NGO partners, researchers and practitioners.  Then we had the bulk of 31 academic papers and 5 student presentations, covering a wide range of topics and representing many countries in the region.  

All in all, the USR summit and SL conference attracted 200+ attendees.  The vast majority of the attendees are administrators, academics and practitioners in the Asia Pacific region.  The summit/conference provide them with an opportunity to get to know each other, share experiences and research results, and make connections, strengthening our community.  We also brought in experienced administrators, researchers and practitioners, mainly from outside our region, as keynotes and panelists, so that people in the region can access valuable experience without having to travel very great distances.  Based on the feedback through the post-conference survey, as well as anecdotal comments, the conference was a great success and much appreciated by all who attended.  Hence we have been continuing to organize the conference roughly every two years since then.  

Accompanying ICSL2014, the "PolyU Serves Showcase" exhibited PolyU's accomplishments in service learning and efforts in nurturing students "To Learn to Serve". The Showcase featured a project exhibition on four main themes: “Education and Technology”, “Environment Improvement and Sustainable Development”, “Health and Wellness” and “Social Integration” with on-site demonstrations, games & workshops, students’ sharing and direct services. Vision screening and health check for the public were available to showcase how students integrates knowledge in serving the community.  It was part of our contenting effort to inform the university community what service-learning is.  We have organised a number of events like this over the years.  This year, the showcase was organised to coincide with the ICSL and USR Summit so that the events provide a fuller picture of the scope of related initiatives, and how they complement each other. 

Through the presentations made at the conference, conversations on the side, and other connections, we are forming a picture of the service-learning scene in Asia Pacific.  We learned that in some of the countries such as India and the Philippines, there is already quite a strong tradition of service-learning, driven, apparently, mainly by the Catholic universities, which has always stressed a strong culture of service.  At a number of universities in Indonesia, there is a distinctive practice of community service, sending students into immersive experiences in the villages to live among the villagers for months at a time.  In Taiwan, there is a government directive to promote community service at universities, making it prevalent among the universities - with a form of community service often involving serving their own campus community. In some countries, the universities are just getting started, and they are eager to learn. 

In many of the universities active in community service, however, there remains a lot of room to strengthen the academic learning in their programs.  Many of the academics there seem to be aware of that as well.  Hence there is strong interest in our implementation of credit-bearing academic service-learning.  We are highly encouraged by this development.  And we have since invested quite a bit of effort in developing staff development courses on service-learning.  More will come in later chapters.