According to an Association of American Colleges and Universities monograph, “Five High-Impact Practices,” there are four essential learning outcomes for college students. They are knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world, intellectual and practical skills, personal and social responsibility, and integrative and applied learning (Brownell & Swaner, 2010, p. ix). The use of high impact practices in the classroom can significantly increase student learning in these areas, if done well. Service-learning is listed as one high- impact practice with excellent results.

At the same time that higher education has begun to think about its pedagogy in a more intentional way over the last few decades, colleges and universities have also been called to “revitalize [their] civic mission” (Jacoby et al., 2009, p. 1). Only one of the high impact practices can do both the work in the classroom as a pedagogical tool to help students increase their capacity along the essential learning outcome spectrum and also the work to revitalize the “civic mission” (p. 1) of the university. This is a pedagogical practice whose time has come.