Faculty and Student Perceptions of How Service-Learning Enhances Student Resilience

Abstract: A growing number of students in US universities report mental health issues and struggles to complete academic and other obligations. Resilience—being able to regain or sustain levels of healthy functioning following exposure to adversity by using individual, community, and societal resources—is an important predictive and protective factor to help students succeed personally and academically. What features of service-learning might enhance student resilience and wellbeing? This research presentation reports on findings from a qualitative study at one US university investigating the ways in which faculty and students perceive that service-learning courses positively impact student resilience. Thematic analysis, coding and triangulation of responses from focus groups with faculty (17 participants, five groups) and undergraduate and graduate students (8 participants, three groups) with recent service-learning experience found key themes illustrating how service-learning may enhance student resilience. These included exposure to peer, instructor, and community models of resilience; building stronger personal connections between faculty and students; opportunities for overcoming challenges inherent in community-based activities, as well as enhanced student motivation to persevere to meet the community need; and the value of reflection in helping students perceive mastery and resilience. Implications for practice will also be shared.

Narrative: This research presentation reports on the process and findings from a multi-year study investigating the ways in which faculty and students perceive that service-learning courses positively impact student resilience.

Nearly half of young adults reported experiencing mental health issues in 2021 (Adams et al., 2022). Even after emerging from pandemic-related disruptions, many students in US universities report struggling to complete their coursework and to balance school and other obligations (Ezarek, 2022), and campuses report a growing number of students seeking mental health services (Abelson, Lipson & Eisenberg, 2022).

Similar to the concepts of "mental toughness" (Gucciardi et al., 2015) or "grit" (Duckworth et al., 2007), resilience (e.g., Henderson, 2007; Masten, 2011) entails regaining or sustaining levels of healthy functioning following exposure to adversity (bouncing back), using individual, community, and societal resources. Resilience has been studied substantially in psychology and human development and has been shown to be protective and predictive in enhancing performance and wellbeing. However, little to no research has directly investigated how service-learning (SL) might support college student resilience, despite some conceptual arguments (Daniels et al., 2015; Mercer, 2010; Swaner, 2007) that SL should do so. In fact, institutional research on our campus found that over 80% of student respondents in campus-wide surveys across multiple semesters consistently agreed or strongly agreed that the SL component helped them develop resilience. What features of SL might account for this?

Our basic qualitative study used faculty and student focus groups at one large, Carnegie CE-classified, public research university in the southeast US, to explore and triangulate perceptions of how SL impacts student resilience. Faculty participants included 17 tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty (16 disciplines) who had taught SL in the past two years, in 5 Zoom focus groups. Additionally, 8 undergraduate and graduate students (6 disciplines) who had taken SL in the past 2 years took part across 3 Zoom focus groups. Semi-structured questions asked participants for examples of resilience, how they felt SL influenced student resilience, what differences between SL and non-SL courses might help explain their perceptions, and for recommendations for practice for enhancing resilience. Transcriptions were cleaned and reviewed by the authors (members of a SL research faculty learning community); emergent themes in the first three faculty focus groups were independently identified, then collaboratively finalized and analyzed by the team, using Dedoose software. Themes were further investigated for saturation and confirmed via the additional 2 faculty and 3 student focus groups. All data were collected with IRB approval and participant informed consent.

Themes resulting from the focus groups indicated that both faculty and students perceived five key ways in which SL supported student resilience: (1) SL allowed students access to models of resilience, in peers, the instructor, and/or community partners; (2) the less-hierarchical student-faculty relationships typical of SL allowed students and faculty to get to know each other in more authentic ways, in particular in situations where the instructor was on site during service experiences, leading to greater trust, sharing and activation of resources; (3) the complexities inherent in community-based work naturally created challenges (or even "failures") that students were tasked with overcoming; (4) the accountability of SL to external stakeholders and its "real-world" impacts further motivated students to persevere to accomplish these challenges; and (5) reflection helped students understand that they were developing resilience, particularly when explicitly focused on overcoming obstacles and demonstrating mastery. The study also found that students and faculty sometimes disagreed on the appropriate level of challenge and support needed.

These findings relate well to the theoretical model proposed by Daniels and colleagues (2015), which suggested that SL could build student resilience through providing opportunities for developing self-efficacy/mastery, opportunities for service, opportunities to connect to others, and opportunities for reflection. Additionally, the study's findings provide implications for practice and guidance for SL course development in order to more intentionally develop student resilience through challenge and choice, access to intra- and inter-personal resources, and reflection.

Key Words: resilience; college student outcomes; focus groups; service-learning practices

References:
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