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Service and empathy: a comparison study of intercultural experiences among students at Mississippi College

Service to the community is a key element in mission statements of public and private universities. In the 21st century, higher education shifted by establishing community engagement offices and encouraging student community service through service-learning. Previous literature indicated that experiential learning increased ethnocultural empathy and volunteerism among college students. This study compares two experiential learning programs’ influence on the ethnocultural empathy development among college students at Mississippi College, a private, religious-affiliated university to explore how this empathy increases community service. 38 students were asked to complete the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (Wang et al. 2003) and were interviewed about their service-learning and mission experience. This study found that service-learning students develop more cultural empathy than mission trip students. These findings show that applying anthropological methods to evaluating service-learning programming can help understand how it develops cultural empathy and give insight into how to continue to increase intercultural competence among students.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:MSSTATE/oai:scholarsjunction.msstate.edu:td-4925
Date13 December 2019
CreatorsMarshall, Victoria Rose
PublisherScholars Junction
Source SetsMississippi State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceTheses and Dissertations

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