Service-Learning in the United States and South Africa: A Comparative Analysis Informed by John Dewey and Julius Nyerere

in American higher education since its emergence in the early 1990s. The growth of service-learning in the U.S. is due, in large part, to (a) the work of Campus Compact, a national coalition of more than 1,100 college and university presidents supporting student education for responsible citizenship (see www.compact.org), and (b) the funding of program and course development grants awarded by Learn and Serve America, a program initiative of the Corporation for National and Community Service, (a U.S. agency of the federal government; see www.nationalservice.org). The leadership and work of these two organizations coincided with changes within higher education that focused on (a) an increased emphasis on engaged pedagogies (Edgerton, 1994) and active-learning strategies in undergraduate education (Marchese, 1997; Shulman, 2008) and (b) a resurgence of the public roles and responsibilities of American higher education (Boyer, 1994, 1996; Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont, & Stephens, 2000; Maurrasse, 2001). Service-learning has a presence in all institutional types and across all fields of study in American colleges and universities (Campus Compact, 2005; Zlotkowski, 2000), and has been said to have its roots in “the long established American belief in voluntary service... and in the conjunction of education and practice that lies behind the land-grant colleges of the nineteenth century, yet it has many genealogies in many traditions across the world” (Tonkin, 2004, p. 6). Service-Learning in the United States and South Africa: A Comparative Analysis Informed by John Dewey and Julius Nyerere