Engaging Students in Service Learning Rhrough a Management of Gender-Based Violence Module

Background

South Africa is a country that is undergoing transformation. Transformation is currently taking across all margins of society. Higher Education is not excluded from this transformation process and remains crucial to achieve transformation in South Africa. This makes it imperative for educational institutions to facilitate South Africa’s plan of transformation in South Africa (Luvalo, 2014). Higher Education Institutions adopted community engagement as one of three core responsibilities of higher education, alongside research and teaching and learning (Hall, 2010). CE defined engagement as “the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching, and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good” Community engagement is scholarly and is an aspect of learning and discovery, and enhances collaboration between society and higher education resulting in social development of communities and it is beneficial for student learning.

Service Learning (SL) is a category of Community Engagement (CE) and has been widely used to achieve outcomes in educational programmes. Service learning is a credit-bearing educational experience, a pedagogical framework of experiential learning, and it is a teaching method that combines academic instruction, meaningful service and critical reflective thinking to enhance student learning and civic responsibility (King, 2004, Pearce Corps, 2006).

Gender Based Violence is a pervasive problem in South Africa and South African women continue to face extraordinarily high levels of violence (Physical abuse and rape are the forms of such violence which have been most clearly described in South Africa)(Kim & Motsei, 2002). A module named, Management of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) module has been designed to equip students with essential skills and knowledge to ensure that nurse graduates acquire skills to recognise, identify and appropriately manage and refer the survivor.  The module is offered using SL as teaching and learning pedagogy.

Objectives

The purpose of the paper/ poster is to outline the process of SL and also to reveal how service learning unfolds through the framework of experiential learning in an educational program addressing gender based violence as a public health issue.

Methods

Service learning has been used as way of creative teaching of a module in a nursing program. Partner in the community has been identified and through a needs analysis the students were engaged in communities to uplift the community and achieving their educational outcomes.

Results

The end result illustrates service learning in action. It also displays service learning as a relevant and current teaching and learning strategy embedded in experiential learning and how students acquire skill and knowledge through service learning ensure enhance the quality of an educational outcomes.

Conclusion

Service Learning is planned educational activity which success depends on the service learning facilitator/champion, community partner and the student involvement. Service Learning (SL) is one form in which CE can take place and provide opportunity to simultaneously engage students in the community, having structured learning objectives to achieve and meeting the needs of the community.