Anticipated Challenges for teachers
(Centre for Teaching Excellence, 2019)		Solutions
1. Time-consuming to co-ordinate service activities with community partners. Build relationships with community partners so that workload decreases when the course is offered in subsequent semester. If you have troubles looking for community partnerships, feel free to reach out to CLEAR, we have a handful of community partners who are committed to engage in CUHK’s service-learning activities.
2. Service opportunities may not progress as planned or provide the anticipated experience.Communicate with students and community partners often; use reflective activities to help students understand and critique their experiences; ask students to evaluate service experiences at the end of the course.
3. Concern about the allocation of the course’s service portion and allocating students to SL activities.Be flexible early in the semester in case students need to be re-assigned to a different project or community partner.
4. Difficult to quantify / evaluate students’ service contributions.Evaluate students on the “learning” portion of their SL experience, not the “service” portion (e.g. evaluate a presentation based on their service experience), CLEAR will take over the evaluation and assessment to ease teachers’ concern on such regards.
5. Community partners hesitant to engage due to multiple requests and inadequate human resources.Reach out to CLEAR, we coordinate and maintain relationships with collaborated SL community partners.*
*Teachers have their freedom to approach and connect with other organisations who can meet their interest and SL curriculum.
6. Lack of designated funding sources focusing on SL initiatives, not enough fund for hiring additional supporting staff to organise SL activities. Communicate with college head office to seek available funds for hiring. The university also offers some teaching grants for facilitating service-learning courses and activities, click here to learn more.

References

  • Centre for Teaching Excellence , “Incorporating Service-Learning into University Courses.” 1 Mar. 2019.