In 1991, Bentley Professor of English and Media Studies Edward Zlotkowski had a vision for incorporating community service into collegiate education, and for infusing service activities with educational objectives. Zlotkowski was joined by a small group of other Bentley faculty, staff and students, and from their vision came the Bentley Service-Learning Center, still celebrating its 25th anniversary under the newly expanded title of the Bentley Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Center.

As founding director of the Bentley Service-Learning Center, Zlotkowski has created a legacy represented in academic publications and presentations as well as in communities that extend far beyond Bentley, Waltham, and Boston. As Jonathan White, the current director of the center, puts it, “Edward is a founding father of the international service-leaning movement. He helped put it on the map; it exists at colleges and universities and in service to communities around the world in large part because of his work.”

Today, the Bentley Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Center is the largest academic program on campus, touching every academic major, with more than 100 faculty involved and more than 1,000 students participating in a service-learning program of one kind or another per year.

Mutual benefits

Zlotkowski’s guiding insight 25 years ago was that community service by college students needn’t be “merely” volunteering, but that such efforts could be powerfully linked to educational objectives and outcomes. Hence, the term “service-learning,” with both sides of the equation acting in a mutually beneficial relationship. This ethos of mutuality is woven throughout the courses overseen by the Bentley Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Center today and guides all of its interactions with community partners. Bentley students are expected to give of their talents, time, and expertise and to learn from their community partners in ways that enhance their Bentley education and personal and professional development.

As one would expect at a business university, many of the center’s courses and credit options have a strong business-learning component to them. Many include an analytical component, such as an examination of a nonprofit’s management structure, and all must include a reflective piece in which the students think critically about the impact the course has had on them.

Students as colleagues and leaders

Another aspect of Zlotkowski’s work is the idea that service-learning can be student-directed, with the students themselves directing programs with community partners in a student-leadership model supported by the center’s professional staff. Building on Zlotkowski’s vision, today’s Bentley Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Center is run by approximately 130 student program managers, four student directors, two graduate student directors, one AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, and five professional staff working with more than 80 partner sites. The center’s partners come from local, national, and international communities; Bentley students work with public service agencies, schools, after-school programs, governmental programs, and nonprofit corporations.

A legacy of research

From the academic research perspective, Zlotkowski’s work in service-learning theory and pedagogy has literally defined the field. Zlotkowski served as general editor of a 21-volume series on Service-Learning in the Disciplines (Stylus Publishing, LLC). He has also served as a senior faculty fellow with the Project on Integrating Service with Academic Study at the National Campus Compact and has published widely on service-learning and civic engagement, serving as editor of Successful Service-Learning Programs (1998), Service-Learning and the First-Year Experience, 2002, University of South Carolina), and as co-editor of Students as Colleagues: Expanding the Circle of Service-Learning Leadership (2006). Over a dozen of his most significant essays have been included in Higher Education and Democracy: Essays on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement (co-authored with John Saltmarsh, 2011, Temple University Press). Now a Bentley Emeritus Professor, Zlotkowski last year received the Distinguished Career Research Award from the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement.

Bentley faculty who’ve taught courses affiliated with the center have produced more than 100 scholarly publications and presentations on their work, demonstrating that service-learning can be performed with academic rigor and that community outcomes, pedagogical outcomes, and other research outcomes can—and should—coexist and inform each other. (You can view a partial list of the publications and presentations here.) As Zlotkowski envisioned from the start, today’s service-learning and civic engagement courses at Bentley put real-world impacts at the center of their teaching and research.

Community impacts

In one example from recent years, mathematics professor Charlie Hadlock’s students enrolled in an applied mathematics course that focused on using mathematical modeling to better understand environmental issues. The three main topics were groundwater contamination, air pollution, and hazardous materials management. One year, students in the course helped the Waltham Fire Department assess the risks associated with a rule change related to the transport of hazardous materials in Massachusetts. In particular, the students conducted fieldwork along Route 128 to identify by trucks’ safety placard numbers the types and quantities of hazardous materials being transported along that roadway. For the major chemicals they identified, they then developed mathematical models to show the flammable or toxic risk from such chemicals if they were to spill in a major accident.

In another course, students studying performance management and evaluation under finance professor George “Skip” Hachey worked with the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance to examine the cost structures of social service agencies. One year, students worked with a partner organization that serves the homeless, the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, to estimate the costs of their programs and processes according to management best practices.

Other courses have included a wide range of service-learning endeavors with real-world impacts, from international service-learning trips to developing nations, to community literacy and computer literacy programs, to studies on gender equity and discrimination, to work with municipalities to redesign their downtowns, to supporting health clinics in Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (To learn more about current partnerships, click here.)

The next generation of service-learning

As Bentley looks back on and celebrates a quarter-century of Zlotkowski’s vision for service-learning and its impact, we also look to the next frontier. Just as Zlotkowski himself is staying active and expanding his interests in the field with work on children’s literacy, the field itself is poised to grow again: one of center director Jonathan White’s outside initiatives involves working with the College Board to develop Advanced Placement curricula for service-learning so that high school students across the nation can also participate in this powerful learning model. In both theory and practice, Zlotkowski’s legacy seems bound to continue to flourish.