Enhancing Leadership Talents in RN to BS Students with Service Learning Projects

Service-learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.  Morrisville State College RN to BS nursing students engage in meaningful service activities that contribute to the good of the community as an extension of their formal academic study in nursing.  Among the benefits to the student are expanded development of moral judgment, civic duty, cultural competence and global sensitivity.  Service learning provides nursing students with opportunities to develop the core values of caring in professional nursing, which include altruism, autonomy, human dignity, integrity, and social justice.  Nursing educational efforts and the process of socialization into the profession must build upon, and as appropriate, modify values and behavior patterns developed early in life.  By making students aware of social and ethical issues in a real-world, meaningful way, students become nurtured in becoming aware of their own value systems, as well as those of others.  By reflecting on their service learning activities, students also extend their ability to understand the process of clinical judgment, and “…advance their clinical knowledge through expert faculty guidance and coaching, thus becoming habitual in reflection-on-practice,  …and will have learned to think like a nurse.”   Participants will examine the processes used by faculty mentors to guide students in writing clear, concise reality based and business-focused proposals for their  projects then applying best practice leadership skills in service to their chosen community.