Conference Agenda

This contribution examines Service-Learning (SL) as a didactic procedure for democracy education, with particular attention to the reflection step, the moment when community engagement becomes explicit civic learning. Rather than presenting a single case study, the paper synthesises the procedural knowledge generated within the Erasmus+ GIRLS project, including the Service-Learning Course Handbook, curricular implementations in the partner countries, and the international activity carried out in Morelia and Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico.

The study is grounded in the GIRLS SL sequence: observation of community needs, preparation, action, reflection, data registration, evaluation, and recognition. This sequence was used to guide students from identifying authentic social needs to co-producing meaningful services with community partners. In Mexico, 20 students from Portugal, Spain, Romania, and Mexico, enrolled in engineering, health sciences, and language-related programmes, worked with local partners on public health education, kidney health awareness, water consumption issues, statistical analysis, and intercultural communication. Reflection was deliberately intensified through individual, small-group, and collective moments, following the Think-4-Share methodology, and generated a substantial corpus of written and oral data.

Methodologically, the paper combines reflective practice analysis with qualitative content analysis of student reflections and pedagogical artefacts produced during the GIRLS project. The analysis focuses on what students did for the community, and how the structured reflection step helped them reinterpret service experiences in terms of democratic competences: empathy, solidarity, critical awareness of inequality, intercultural dialogue, shared responsibility, communication, and civic agency.

The emerging results suggest that reflection operated as a transformative didactical device. In the Mexico corpus, students’ reflections evidenced learning outcomes, ethical awareness, perceived social impact, challenges and adaptation, cultural awareness, civic engagement, communication skills, and personal transformation. These outcomes indicate that democratic learning was not produced automatically by “being in the community” but by guided opportunities to question assumptions, listen to others, connect disciplinary knowledge with social vulnerability, and articulate responsibility towards collective well-being.

The paper contributes a transferable model for designing and assessing SL in higher education by showing how reflection prompts, dialogue routines, and learning rubrics can make democratic competences visible, discussable, and pedagogically intentional.