Abstract: As social work education moves to a competency-based approach, faculty are increasing their use of pedagogical tools designed to provide students with opportunities, in addition to traditional field placements, to develop practice skills. Faculty are no
doubt turning to service-learning, and other forms of experiential education, to provide these opportunities and to offer an additional means for departments to demonstrate and measure student practice behaviors. To help focus the use of service-learning in social
work education, this article uses sources from the larger service-learning field and from social work scholarship to examine the nature of service-learning, to review current service-learning trends, to summarize its use in social work education, and to raise
questions about its goodness of fit with competency-based education.