European student reflections and perspectives on service learning

This chapter explores the service learning experiences of university students from 11 European countries that participated in the Erasmus+ funded Europe Engage Service Learning Study Tour at the National University of Galway in June 2017. It offers reflective insights into the students’ experiences following their service learning engagement in Ireland, and to compare their individual service learning experiences prior to their arrival at the study tour. The reflective data encompassed the students’ perspectives on the issues that they felt most impacted upon the future implementation and mainstreaming of service learning across Europe. The students agreed that service learning has many advantages over the more historic, traditional, and didactic methods of teaching and learning that have tended to dominate Western higher education for centuries. The students reported that transferrable skills can arise from service learning and these included, for example, communication skills, technological familiarity, time management, leadership, project budgeting, and implementation, among others.