Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The aim of the paper is to present an example of professional practice in the form of a programme based on the principles of service-learning in the period of crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in social work education at Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. The practical training of social work students is an integral part of their education and is focused on the development of those competencies that can only be developed through direct work with target groups. As it was not possible to complete the placement in the field at the time of the pandemic, it was necessary to look for new opportunities to meet the objectives of the placement. The ‘Ears to the Soul’ volunteer programme was created in response to the pandemic situation and its main goal was to help overcome people's feelings of loneliness by creating student-client contacts and providing regular telephone support. The programme was built on the principles of service-learning. The evaluation of the programme has shown that it can meaningfully meet the needs of target groups and has considerable potential as a form of education in social work.

The current social and health situation amidst the COVID-19 pandemic necessarily entails adjustments and changes in educational practices. The experience this paper relates took place at a time of preventive and compulsory social isolation in Argentina between March and July 2020. The experience was developed within the framework of a university interdisciplinary outreach project, based on service-learning, and it aimed at developing students’ generic competences, such as social responsibility, motivation, creativity, teamwork and the application of theory and practice, all within a virtual space as a consequence of the current context caused by the pandemic. The experience also aimed to foster students’ social responsibility with good practices for the prevention of COVID-19 and dengue fever. To evaluate the experience, different qualitative instruments were used, and, in all cases, they revealed that the proposed objectives were met, highlighting a high level of satisfaction with the virtual experience, not only among the student volunteers, but also among the children and their families. Virtual platforms enabled us to recreate face-to-face work without losing the university social responsibility, and they also helped to promote responsibility from childhood, motivating everyone to face the needs imposed by the current reality as a team.

This paper discusses a service-learning experience conducted as part of a virtual game library project called LUDOTENA, which involved children aged between five and thirteen who were considered socially vulnerable in the context of social, preventive and compulsory isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic between June and December 2020. The project was conducted as part of the curriculum of the bachelor’s degree in Occupational Therapy at the Inter-American Open University of Argentina. The project started with the creation of inter-institutional networks with community references who live, know and contribute to community development on a daily basis. Therefore, the relationship with the families is based on building trust with the community references mentioned, which contributed to successful implementation of the proposal. The project had three main purposes: firstly, to strengthen the academic performance of university students through their participation in authentic community projects that arise to meet needs created by social and health emergencies; secondly, to promote the articulation of theoretical frameworks within the current social reality and finally, to carry out effective collective actions that take into account the socio-occupational demands of the families that are part of the project, as well as the singularities of the subjects.

One of the main objectives of Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA) is to articulate and complement the academic training provided to its students with an authentic lifestyle choice , that would encourage them to build a fairer world by responding to the specific social demands coming from vulnerable sectors of society. The university has thus worked to respond to some of the new problems that now affect us as a society due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, strategies have been developed to allow us to continue working with the community even during this period of social, preventive and compulsory isolation. Within the framework of the program ‘UCA + Comunidad en época de pandemia’ (UCA + Community in times of a pandemic), UCA has developed a project that we will discuss in this paper: ‘UCA te da la mano’ (UCA gives you a hand). The project, was jointly carried out by the Department of Psychology of the Faculty of Psychology and Psychopedagogy and the Directorate of Social Commitment and Outreach of the UCA, and it had a dual objective: providing a space for reflection and orientation for first-line response personnel and becoming a learning space for psychology students.

COVID-19 has pervaded all aspects of higher education. Instructors are scrambling to ensure students meet predetermined learning outcomes through online communication and teaching. Students are trying to learn, collaborate, and communicate in new ways with fellow classmates and instructors. As `traditional´ service-learning activities shift to accommodate physical distancing measures and remote learning, and students wrestle with the seismic shifts in their socio-political, economic, and cultural lives, critical reflection is now more important than ever. In this article, we draw on their collective experiences to discuss the importance of establishing an open, honest, and trustworthy environment for students to thoughtfully and productively engage in domestic curricular service-learning endeavours. Specifically, we examine the challenges of facilitating service-learning reflection activities for a fourth-year undergraduate media studies course at Western University (Western), a large, research-intensive publicly funded institution in Canada. The article concludes by offering some key recommendations for how instructors can effectively engage students in critical reflection via online platforms.

Final-year projects in the Physiotherapy degree must focus on key content of physiotherapy theory and practice and they must also demonstrate students’ competences in research, development and professional communication skills. To achieve this, students may choose to develop their project via a service-learning programme conducted in collaboration with patient associations. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, contact with people was disrupted for several months, preventing the normal implementation of these projects, and thus educational awareness campaigns through digital resources were conducted instead. In order to analyse the experience from the perspective of both the students and the association’s users, a qualitative, descriptive phenomenological approach was used. After analysing the results, it was concluded that the implementation of online service-learning projects allowed the participating students to perform a service to the community and the users of the associations to acquire new knowledge related to the treatment of their pathology.

This paper reports how the ‘Luli in Service 2020’ service-community project experienced the critical moments of the pandemic and lockdown. The project did not shy away from reality, but rather responded to it by using existing digital capabilities in a campaign aimed at providing food security for low-income, vulnerable people, and in all stages of the campaign: from decision-making, empowering students to self-organize and forming alliances  with partners to providing accountability. With the lessons learned, the idea that motivated the group at the beginning was retaken: working with a remote community on the Ecuadorian coast.

In times of a pandemic, the ability of individuals, social groups, organizations, institutions, policies and governments to create and recreate learning, service and solidarity is severely challenged. Based on the framework of solidarity service-learning and a strategic organizational perspective, this paper analyzes the ‘Service-Learning in times of a pandemic’ map. Two hundred solidarity service-learning experiences were identified, explored and analysed, georeferenced in four continents and 22 countries, between March and September 2020. The thematic content analysis technique and the digital ethnographic perspective were used to systematize and categorize the experiences. The analysis shows the evolution of solidarity service-learning in times of a pandemic, its focal point, actions and goals, evidencing how the projects have remained focused on the learners’ central role, the bond with the community and the integration of solidarity service into the curriculum. The map denotes an organizational habitus (learning from and with others); its design and development supports the perspective of a collective construction of knowledge, which is shared and generates recreates hope and invites us to (re) build solidarity networks in times of pandemics. The map is evidence of the interweaving of solidarity service-learning citizenship (political action), rights and education, which systematizes and enhances a way of being-making-knowing that has been shared for decades between local and global actors and the networks that are configured in times of a pandemic.

This paper discusses an initiative through which first-year students of the degree in Pharmacy at San Jorge University (USJ) created educational videos about basic operations carried out in the laboratory, aimed at students in Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) at the San Valero Centre. In addition, the university students used English as their language of communication, demonstrated their skill in handling laboratory material and worked in groups, organising themselves with the aim of completing a common task. 95% of the participating ESO students rated the activity 8 points or higher out of 10, while 83% of the university students considered it suitable for the Degree in Pharmacy, rating it 8 points out of 10. It is worth highlighting that the students receiving the service pointed out the usefulness of the videos in learning how to carry out certain basic laboratory operations and that the teachers recognised that the videos have been useful and interesting for training the students.

The main objective of the research was to demonstrate the impact of the implementation of service-learning projects within the framework of university social responsibility in rural educational institutions in the district of Independencia (Huaraz, Peru). The data were analyzed from an explanatory level and the research design was quasi-experimental. The results of this research indicate that when service-learning is applied, the link between the university and the educational community is strengthened. In addition, there is an urgent need to design service-learning projects to strengthen the links between the university and the educational community, recognizing that service-learning contributes to solving problems that require the strengthening of rural educational institutions. This implies that institutions need to coexist, get involved with each other, work together and form networks to solve problems, to actively manage community activity.