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The purpose of this paper is to provide a context for the compilation of papers and commentaries included in this International Journal of Organizational Analysis special issue on “Scripting the next wave of exigent issues for service‐learning in our unscripted future: when technology, globalism, and community engagement collide.”

The authors of this paper are the Guest Editors for the special issue. As such, in this paper, they provide a brief history of why the special issue was created and how it serves as an extension to the first special issue (Vol. 17 No. 1, 2009).

There are five papers and six commentary pieces included in this special issue. Each raises a charge, or challenge, to the reader in terms of moving forward with service‐learning in the uncertain, complex, and highly unscripted environments.

The practical implications of this paper are those that relate to future research and practice in the service‐learning domain. This is contextualized as part of the collective challenge as the author move forward in a world where local, regional, national, and international connectedness intersects with social, economic, and technological pressures.

As the introduction, this paper is unique in that it provides an overview of the contents for the entire special issue.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the International Journal of Organizational Analysis special issue, “Shaping our unscripted future with service‐learning: when technology, globalism, and community engagement collide.”

The authors of this paper are the Guest Editors for the special issue. In this paper, they provide a brief history of why the special issue was created – what questions it was designed to address, what issues it was designed to highlight, and what future work it was hoped would arise from this collection.

The four papers that are published in this special issue are described and contextualized in terms of the issue's theme. The three commentary pieces that are included are also briefly summarized, as are their respective contributions to the issue.

The practical implications of this paper are those that relate to future service‐learning research and practice, as it is extended into the world of global and technological interconnectedness that it faces as part of our unscripted future.

As an introductory piece, this paper is unique in that it provides an overview of the entire special issue.

Sustainable and effective university‐community partnerships are not easy to create, yet they are an integral part of student community‐based learning as they are uniquely designed to educate students about their roles as members of their local, national, and global communities. The purpose of this paper is to review the extant literature on effective university‐community partnering and draw out key themes to assist practitioners and researchers who are involved in the design, execution, and analysis of partnership programs. Following the review, a model partnership program focused on increasing students' knowledge and skills in the area of international citizenship, called the global leadership and service project (GLSP), is presented as an innovative service‐learning design template.

The paper presents a review of the literature, key themes drawn from the literature, and a case study for use as readers consider, adapt, and integrate tools for effective, partnership‐based service‐learning projects into their curricula.

Sustainable, effective, and partnership‐oriented service‐learning projects are difficult to design and execute yet they are extremely effective at enhancing students' awareness, learning, and development as global citizens. The model presented through the GLSP provides a useful framework for adaptation in other university and professional settings.

The paper focuses on the community organization side of effective service‐learning partner‐oriented program design and provides a case study example of how such programs can be executed in a sustainable and contributory manner, each within the context of enhancing student learning as members of our global and interconnected society.

The purpose of this paper is to review – from the perspective of nascent academic practitioners – the promise and challenges of service‐learning as an instructional methodology. The paper is contextualized in terms of preparing students of business and management with the requisite skills for coping and thriving in the unknowns of the unscripted future.

The approach is a review of the context of the unscripted future and the considerations involved in determining the viability and appropriateness of service‐learning from the perspective of faculty who have not previously used this approach.

Although there are numerous challenges and considerations involved in the use of service‐learning, particularly for faculty members who are new to this instructional method, thoughtful perseverance and attention to the issues inherent to this teaching tool can yield a powerful approach that is well‐suited to meeting the learning needs of students facing an unscripted future.

The paper provides not only a literature review of the current thinking in the service‐learning domain but also a set of resources relevant to the topic from the perspective of a nascent practitioner. The paper is designed to illustrate the unique challenges and strengths of faculty members who are considering implementing service‐learning in a management or organizational sciences course.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a re‐scripting of how it should educate students in light of a changing environment.

This paper shares a conceptual framework and provide examples from the service learning (SL) courses and data from students (from course‐based reflection and evaluation) to support the framework and recommendations.

Through the experiences, SL to transform students' learning and ability to adapt to the changing, global marketplace has been found.

The paper hopes that faculty and educational institutions will consider the outcomes and recommendations to challenge traditional modes of educating and utilize SL as one means for building competencies that facilitate personal and professional success in the current environment.

The paper challenges the prevailing wisdom about the role of curricula to focus primarily on knowledge and skills. The context of the unscripted future can quickly render knowledge and skill sets obsolete. Due to this age of uncertainty, it argues that curricula be built around capabilities (adaptability, behaving morally, cultural sensitivity) that enable students/future employees to adapt to a changing, global marketplace to leverage the knowledge base, and that SL be utilized as a meaningful pedagogical approach to instill this capability.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce service‐learning 2.0 model based on four new paradigms in the global business landscape: connectivity, creativity, community, and complexity.

The paper reviews four paradigm shifts and their effects on service‐learning practices and methodology: wikinomics and mass collaboration, collective intelligence and open innovation, appreciative inquiry and positive organizational scholarship (POS), and self‐organizing systems and the new sciences.

Service‐learning 2.0 can be used to develop our students' twenty‐first century thinking skills through applied community engagement projects, namely: interactivity and interconnectedness, innovation and insight, and inspiration and intuition, integrative and interdisciplinary thinking.

Service‐learning 2.0 principles and pedagogy can help students appreciate and prepare for increasing complexity and paradox of management and organizations in the light of global, social and organizational changes of the twenty‐first century.

Service‐learning 2.0 model represents the pedagogy, principles, and processes that are better suited to the global, technological, and social changes and challenges of the 21st century.

Education scholars have recognized the current cohort of university students as the “always-connected generation” (Bull, 2010). As a result, selecting appropriate and yet targeted teaching tools for this generation is both “challenging our notion of a teaching environment” (p. 634) and raising questions about how to best “mitigate the negative impact of new technologies on learning” (Billsberry & Rollag, 2010, p. 635). One of the negative impacts that arise from the intersection of technology and education is cyberbullying. It is this extremely important and often difficult to predict element of online-based communications – cyberbullying – that serves as the focus of this chapter. The chapter is divided into three main sections. First, we present research regarding the prevalence, forms, and associated consequences of the mobile and online technologies being used by young people today. Second, we provide a definition of cyberbullying as well as a discussion of its pervasiveness and ways to address it. Finally, as a tool for moving forward with respect to the issue of addressing cyberbullying in university environments, we describe a university-based service-learning project aimed at increasing students' understanding of the variety of forms and the severe consequences of cyberbullying.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) interactive qualifying project (IQP) as a unique, project‐based service‐learning opportunity that offers teams of undergraduate students the opportunity to frame and investigate complex, unscripted problems with social and technological dimensions for non‐profit organizations and government agency sponsors.

The paper discusses the relationship of the IQP to the service‐learning literature, describes the proposal and delivery phases of the IQP, and then offers two short illustrative cases.

The paper concludes that IQPs teach students how to frame and use background research to investigate unscripted, real world problems. It teaches students to think critically, to improve their presentation skills, and to become more aware of the social and cultural dimensions of technology. For faculty, IQP advising enriches their relationships with undergraduate students and can sometimes lead to co‐authored publications. For the university, the IQP program is a source of positive publicity and good will from project center communities around the world.

The findings of this study might be useful to those schools and faculty interested in starting a service‐learning project program with a technological focus.

Projects can provide a unique service‐learning experience for undergraduate students. By focusing on problems at the intersection of society and technology, the WPI IQP sensitizes engineering and science students to the human dimensions of technology. It teaches students to grapple with unscripted problems that require an extensive background research, rigorous data collection, and thoughtful analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a review of the history of the service‐learning movement, a description of the contemporary philosophical models of service‐learning, and an interpretation of which futures are implied in each model's learning objectives.

A historical and philosophical review of service‐learning is conducted.

Current service‐learning practice has a 40‐year history, evolving from a social movement to a more mainstream pedagogical method. Historical and contemporary versions of service‐learning show three separate models with different assumptions about the purpose of service‐learning. The models are the professional model, which focuses on career training with cognitive learning goals; the civic engagement model, which focuses on developing active and engaged citizens, with affective learning goals; and the social change model, which focuses on empowerment and social justice, also with affective learning goals. While the civic engagement and social change models represent the historic values of the service‐learning movement, evidence suggests the professional model is most common.

To meet the demands of the unscripted future(s), individual teachers and institutions should reflect on their assumptions about the connection between service and learning to ensure that their learning objectives are aligned with their practice.

Teachers benefit from understanding the range of assumptions and values represented in service‐learning, and from the increased personal awareness from comparing their own views and service‐learning objectives with those of the larger field.

This investigation sought to identify learning outcomes for undergraduate students at a US college enrolled in community‐based learning courses. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to examine the similarities and differences between American students' and international students' development of leadership skills through senior level service‐learning (SL) courses and analyzed the role of teaching methods on those outcomes.

Over 150 SL courses from students representing 30 countries were examined at a major university in the USA. US and non‐US student leadership and learning outcomes were cross‐tabulated with instructional techniques to analyze for statistically significant differences.

Facilitating leadership skill development is a function of utilizing transformational rather than traditional classroom teaching techniques.

Transformational teaching and learning methods such as collaborative projects, student‐selected readings, and group decision‐making in SL courses help transform students' views of themselves, their communities, and the world as they consider their roles as leaders in an unscripted future.

Few studies have examined the instructional elements in SL that transform student knowledge and leadership skills especially across such a breadth and variety of SL courses and student cultural backgrounds.