Online Workshop Series: Service-Learning Approach at Salesian University, Bolivia

During April and May, CLAYSS delivered a series of online workshops for authorities, scholars and administration staff already managing, monitoring and evaluating the development of teaching, research and links with the community of the San Juan Bosco Salesian University of Bolivia. (https://www.facebook.com/UniversidadSalesianadeBolivia)

The workshops focused on training the university’s management teams, who intend to institutionalize service-learning in all their degrees. Sebastián Puglisi and Andrés Peregalli, from the CLAYSS and Uniservitate team, were in charge of the workshops.

At the end of the course, some of the participants provided feedback, highlighting in all cases the ‘before’ and ‘after’ aspects of this training:

‘Before, I thought that service-learning was any community activity. Now I think this approach is holistic and complex; requires planning time to become a transformative, participatory and meaningful action; and has comprehensive activities —not isolated ones— in which the students are the protagonists of change’.

‘Until now, I thought that solidarity service should be based on a mere welfare-like approach; now I think that learning can include solidarity service as a way of interacting with society and strengthening the knowledge acquired during the academic path. It means you can fulfil an effective institutional philosophy while seeking community organizations that pursue the same goal’.