Promoting Citizen Leadership among Students through Service-Learning

Abstract

Today’ssocieties needcitizen leaders to address the complex and fast occurring challenges.Service-learning is growing as leadership development pedagogy. Engaging students in service-learning creates a synergy toacquire essential leadership skills necessary for them to enter the job market upon their graduation. This paper discusses the possibilities of transforming the students into active citizen throughservice-learning. Previous research suggests that incorporation of service-learning in higher education has proved to be efficacious to prepare the students as future leaders and vibrant citizens.Much literature is available on the relationship between service-learning and citizen leadership from the developed world perspective. However, little studies exist on this field of research in developing world perspective, especially in the context of Pakistan. This concept paper critically assesses how such innovative pedagogies can play significant role to prepare an arsenal of citizen leaders in higher education of Pakistan. Based on this assessment, the paper addresses the need of higher education in Pakistan for developing leadership skills of graduates to prepare them as future active citizen leaders.