Percepciones del alumnado universitario sobre el aprendizaje-servicio como herramienta para su desarrollo personal y profesional

Résumé

This article presents a teaching innovation experience developed in the first year of a Social Education Degree at a public university in Spain, using a service-learning methodology. The experience involves two disciplines from this degree program working collaboratively and the results show students’ perceptions on the personal and professional skills they acquired. The proposal is based not only on the notion of SL as a tool for the construction of committed and active citizenship, but from the consideration of SL as a methodology able to produce authentic learning, which involves transformations that go much further than cognitive changes and affect students’ own personal construction. We have used two sets of students’ narratives: a questionnaire about their learning perceptions and another on their reflections throughout the experience. The data shows that students more emphatically refer to personal learning, followed by curricular-professional learning and finally learning about the reality. We also found that evaluation of the experience was mainly positive, pointing especially to the idea of learning by doing. We conclude that the methodology used generates in the students personal and social conceptions that go beyond what is achieved with traditional methodologies, showing that SL can be considered as an optimal teaching methodology to generate motivation for learning and commitment in future professionals.