Factors affecting teachers’ continual engagement in service-learning

Abstract

This qualitative study aims to identify the factors that motivate and deter faculty’s continual engagement in service-learning (SL) in an Asian context.The results showed that 21 out of the 24 respondents (87.5%) indicated their willingness of continual engagement in SL. The three key motivations were ‘facilitating student learning and development’, ‘personal commitments to their service recipients, their own subject, colleagues or the University’, and ‘personal interests or growth’. On the other hand, heavy workload and lack of recognition from department deterred few teachers from continuously engaging in SL. It was interesting to find that very few respondents mentioned their motivation for continual engagement was related to the benefits of SL to the community even though it is a key beneficiary of an SL subject. Future studies can focus more on the community dimensions of SL. This study provided some insights to address the gap of scanty research on teachers’ continuous SL engagement in Asian contexts.