Service Leadership Community: A Seedbed of Nurturing Service Leadership Mindset in Student Learning

The service leadership mindset, unlike academic subjects, has proven difficult to “teach”. To seed this mindset of service leadership in students, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) strategizes the creation of a cultural environment where students understand the need to serve, and more importantly, service occurs naturally – a Service Leadership Community (SLC). The Community provides various approaches for students to achieve three different levels of service leadership learning (i.e., Service Leaders, Service Leadership Practitioners, and Service Leadership Apprentices). To help students become service leaders, two types of courses are designed for them so that they can later take an active role as learning experience designers in service leadership. For the practitioner level of learning, a peer mentoring program and a service learning course are available to engage students with an interest in services and practicing service leadership. To serve as a scaffold for average students to have an apprentice level of learning about service leadership in their university life, a well-designed leadership corner located at the Engineering Commons has been set up to raise their awareness on service leadership. This three-level design of learning is intended to sustainably nurture the service leadership mindset in students. Several components of the SLC are evaluated and some recommendations are given to enhance the influence of SLC on student learning.