Leadership qualities as a foundation of service learning

In many adolescent developmental models, serving others is regarded as an important attribute of healthy development of adolescents and young adults. Besides, programs promoting university students’ service to the community, such as service learning subjects/programs, are developed. In this paper, it is argued that to facilitate community service competence of university students, there is a need to cultivate their basic leadership competencies, including intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies. At The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, a 3-credit subject entitled “Tomorrow’s leaders” was developed to promote leadership competencies in students. In the past five years, different evaluation strategies have been used to examine the impact of the subject. Evaluation findings consistently showed that this subject was able to promote psychosocial competencies and ethical leadership qualities after students took this subject, which forms a solid foundation for students to undertake their service learning projects.