Effective Strategies for Building Capacity for High-Quality Service-Learning in a Novel Context: An Exploratory Study

Abstract: This paper presents an exploratory study of the first university-level service-learning program in Saudi Arabia, addressing the research question:
What are the most and least effective factors in building the capacity of faculty, students, and community partners for high-quality service-learning in an environment that has no past experience in service-learning?

The program drew on the expertise of pioneers of service-learning, literature on best practices, and resources on faculty development approaches, adapting them to the Saudi context. Twenty-five faculty joined the program, engaging 575 students and 30+ community partners, involving a great diversity of colleges, departments, ages, genders, and kinds of service. Our capacity-building program included faculty workshops, a WhatsApp group, a written guide, and a two-step critique of syllabi. The faculty were responsible to explain service-learning to their students and community partners, and to distribute our written guides on service-learning
relevant to their different roles and responsibilities.

We documented each step of program development, including our own observations, faculty reports and focus groups, and separate assessment surveys for faculty, students, and community partners.

Faculty drew on examples from other cultures to forge viable, culturally-appropriate models to meet high standards of quality service-learning through their own perseverance and creativity, and our insistence that they do so.

Our research approach provided important evidence of the most and least effective factors in developing quality service-learning that can help us improve and expand our program in Saudi Arabia, and also be applied to other contexts with little-to-no service-learning experience to draw upon.

Narrative: Purposes and Goals of the Study
This paper presents an exploratory study of the first university-level service-learning program in Saudi Arabia, providing an important opportunity to address the research question that guided this study:
What are the most and least effective factors in building the capacity of faculty, students, and community partners for high-quality service-learning in an environment that has no past experience in service-learning?

Theoretical/Conceptual Framework
In 2022, Ghadan, a consulting agency focused on civic engagement, sought to implement the first university service-learning program in Saudi Arabia. This required developing a comprehensive strategy to build the capacity of faculty, students, and community partners to conduct high quality service-learning. The Ghadan Program Manager, Ms. Joumanah Jamal, and I (the project’s service-learning consultant) incorporated a research approach into the project to support the program’s future development. We drew on the expertise of pioneers of service-learning (e.g. Timothy Stanton and Andrew Furco), resources on best practices for service-learning (e.g. the Wingspread Special Report and Campus Compact), and the literature on service-learning faculty development approaches (e.g., using a learning community cohort model as described by Furco & Moely, 2012), adapting these resources to the Saudi context.

The criteria for faculty selection included English language proficiency to give them access to supporting materials online. Our capacity-building program for faculty included in-person and online workshops, a WhatsApp group, a written guide, and a two-step critique of syllabi. A final session brought the faculty together again to share their experiences, participate in focus groups, and receive certificates in recognition of their pioneering efforts.

The faculty were responsible to explain service-learning to their students and community partners, and to distribute specific written guides to them that addressed the basic elements of service-learning relevant to their different roles and responsibilities.

A training session was organized before the academic term for representatives of a civil society network, but we could not invite the actual community partners that would engage with the faculty and students, since faculty had not yet designed their service-learning requirements. Some of the students attended an online session early in the term to answer questions that arose from the service-learning requirements of their diverse courses and to help them understand their guide.

Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources
Ultimately 25 faculty (9 females/16 males) joined the program, engaging 575 students (245 females/330 males), and 30+ community partners. This higher-than-expected participation brought with it greater diversity of colleges, departments, ages of students, numbers of students in a class, genders of both faculty and students, types of community partners, and kinds of service than we had anticipated.

We documented each step of program development from the start, including our own observations, faculty input in training sessions, and faculty action reports. We conducted focus group interviews of faculty and three separate assessment surveys: one for faculty (24 of the 25), a second for students (121 out of 575), and a third for community partners (2 out of 30+), adapting many of the questions presented in Gelmon et al. (2018) “Assessing Service-Learning and Civic Engagement: Principles and Techniques”. The low response rate from community partners reaffirmed our findings that our efforts to engage and support community partners was the least effective strategy of our program.

No funding was provided for a systematic analysis of the data, so that the project manager and I primarily drew on our own observations, our review of faculty action reports, and the simple statistical analysis provided by the online survey program.

Based on the data collected, we created an operational guide of all stages in the program, which included lessons learned and recommendations for the future.

Results/Conclusions
Our analyses revealed key factors that were most and least effective in building the capacity for high quality service-learning. The effective factors for faculty included the workshops, the two-step critique of their syllabi, and the faculty guidebook, while negative factors included the shortness of the quarter system, a lack of locally-based mentors and models, and difficulty recruiting appropriate community partners. For students, the student guide and online discussion were among the effective factors, while lack of direct training, and time and transportation constraints were among the least effective factors. For community partners, effective factors included their guide and student enthusiasm, while ineffective factors included lack of training, minimal communication with faculty, and difficulties overcoming the differences between volunteering and the service in service-learning.

Our study confirmed that many of the capacity-building elements that are touted in the extant literature have applicability to advancing service-learning within the Saudi context. While certain social and cultural constraints created challenges for the program, the pioneering spirit of the 25 faculty in this study drew on examples from other cultures and then forged viable, culturally-appropriate models to meet high standards of quality service-learning through their own perseverance and creativity and through our insistence that they do so. Their syllabi can now serve as a nascent clearinghouse and they can serve as mentors that will be able to support an expanded program in the future when we open the program to non-English speaking faculty who will have less access to online resources that English-speaking faculty benefit from.

Despite the challenges that participants in the program faced, 77% of students who completed their survey said they would like to take one or more service-learning courses if they are offered in the future. Faculty were even more enthusiastic, with 23 of the 24 instructors who completed their survey indicating that they would like to teach another service-learning course. And all 24 said they would like to participate in expanding participation at the University and activating service-learning at other universities.

Significance of the Research Study
Our research approach provided us with valuable evidence of the most and least effective factors in developing quality service-learning in the Saudi context. We believe these findings can not only help us improve and expand our capacity-building program in Saudi Arabia, but also be applied to other contexts worldwide with little-to-no service-learning experience to draw upon.