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What is RSL?

Research service-learning (RSL) is an exciting emerging practice that connects service-learning with the mission of research universities to create new knowledge. In the RSL process, students, faculty, and community partners study a question of shared interest. Research is conducted in the context of a service-learning experience, where the research components (problem analysis, synthesis, and conclusions) become an integral part of the service provided to the community. Students participate in a structured process of critical reflection on the ethical, intellectual, and civic aspects of their experiences while also producing a tangible research product for their community partner.

Traditional service-learning programs have been criticized for immersing students in direct service experiences such as tutoring or working in soup kitchens without pushing them to analyze and understand, much less to seek to influence, institutional structures, social attitudes, or public policies. RSL takes seriously the importance of this critique and addresses student learning, faculty engagement, and community needs from a different perspective. With RSL, students are challenged to identify and pursue deeper problems in an intellectually rigorous way. Faculty develop connections between their students' service activities and their own scholarly commitments and interests. And community partners are not only asked to provide an educational setting for students but are also invited to collaborate in articulating needs, developing strategies, and setting goals, while being given an opportunity to benefit from the knowledge-generating mission of the academy.

Research service-learning is a promising pedagogy because it makes service-learning and civic engagement an organic part of a university’s research mission, not peripheral or antithetical to it. In doing so, it hearkens back to the origins of research universities in a vision of scholarship in the public’s service. But the value of a successful model for research service-learning is not limited to research universities. At institutions across the country, service-learning practitioners are looking for ways to deepen student, faculty, and community partner engagement and to produce more tangible and lasting benefits to communities. By combining the strengths of service-learning and of research, research service-learning can serve these multiple goals.

1 Timothy Stanton, Dwight Giles, and Nadinne Cruz, Service-Learning: A Movement’s Pioneers Reflect on its Origins, Practice, and Future (Jossey-Bass, 1999), esp. pp. 216-224.