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The American Psychological Association's Board of Educational Affairs (BEA) and the Education Directorate launched a new initiative in 1998 entitled, " The Psychology Partnerships Project: Academic Partnerships to Meet the Teaching and Learning Needs of the 21st Century (P3)." The P3 project was designed to foster collaboration among psychology teachers in high schools, two-year colleges, four-year colleges and graduate schools and between psychology teachers and other psychology professionals, teachers in other disciplines, business organizations and community groups. In June of 1999, 118 invited psychology teachers convened for The National Forum on Psychology Partnerships held at James Madison University. During the week-long forum, participants were assigned to a working group to address one of nine critical educational issues: assessment, instructional technology, curriculum, faculty development, academic and career advising, diversity, research, partnerships, and service learning. The fact that service-learning was included as one of the nine critical issues for the new century indicates that the American Psychological Association recognized the value of service learning in meeting future disciplinary priorities and needs. Although service-learning was included as a critical issue in The National Forum on Psychology Partnerships, the 11 members of the service-learning working group discovered that there was marked variation in the understanding of service-learning among the four high school teachers, the two community college professors, and the five college and university professors that made up our group. Through our meetings, we learned more about how the cultures of each educational setting supported or discouraged the use of community work. We also realized that many of the other 118 participants at the forum did not know much about service-learning. During lunch or discussion groups, team members would often be asked, "What exactly is involved in this service learning? It's just like volunteering, right?" In preparing our team proposal for further work we realized that it was critical to address the basic question of what is service-learning, how do you do it, and why do it. We also recognized the many ways in which the service-learning approach could complement and expand the other eight issues being studied at the forum. We defined service-learning and attempted to place it in the broader context of psychology education. Following the June meeting we scaled down our ambitious proposal for the P3 forum to what seemed more manageable. We focused on the development of teams in our local communities so we could experience first hand the process of collaborating across academic levels on service-learning projects. Around this time the Campus Compact, a national organization dedicated to supporting service-learning, had received funding from The Pew Charitable Trust to develop service-learning in and through the academic disciplines. Our P3 project seemed to fit with the aims of the grant so we applied and received joint funding from Campus Compact and the American Psychological Association to complete our projects. The purpose of the Campus Compact/APA grant was to establish service-learning as a credible pedagogy within the discipline of psychology reflecting the developmental continuum from high school through graduate school. Our objectives were:
We attempted to meet these objectives through three different levels of collaboration. During our stay at the P3 forum in June 1999, our working group began to address these issues through group discussions. These discussions continued throughout the year via conference calls and a listserv. The second level of collaboration took place in local communities through finding team partners and the creation of a workable project. The third level of collaboration involved connecting to other initiatives at the American Psychological Association that could sustain and enhance service-learning approaches. The present website represents a final product linking service-learning and psychology and celebrating the work begun by the service-learning working group at the P3 conference in June 1999. Members of the Service-Learning Working Group
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