Introduction to SULAM@Service Learning Malaysia

The Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) and the Department of Language and Linguistics (DLL) of UTAR organised a workshop on SULAM@Service Learning Malaysia via Microsoft Teams on 29 April 2022. The objective of the workshop was to help all lecturers to understand the philosophy behind SULAM@Service Learning so that they could learn and apply it in the programmes.

Dr Vishalache during the workshop

Service Learning Malaysia-University for Society, also known as SULAM, is an innovative teaching and learning strategy or pedagogy in the educational field that integrates meaningful, structured and graded community service. SULAM@Service Learning Malaysia has been officially introduced as a pedagogy in all public institutes of higher learning since 2019 and is currently encouraged in all private institutes of higher learning.

Dr Vishalache giving definition and background information on SULAM

Dr Vishalache explaining the difference between SULAM and other service programmes

Dr Vishalache explaining the people involved in SULAM programme

Delivering the workshop was Assoc Prof Dr Vishalache Balakrishnan, the director of Universiti Malaya (UM) Centre for Research in International and Comparative Education. In her talk, she explained how SULAM was different from community services, volunteerism, internship and field education. She provided the participants with some ideas and resources to get started in SULAM or to enhance the SULAM work if they were already involved. She also addressed the concept and the philosophy of SULAM, explaining that it supports humanistic and value-driven education by integrating love, happiness and mutual respect.

She shared several approaches to SULAM as well as the main components of a SULAM course. “The SULAM course must be part of the curriculum of a programme that is intentionally designed to achieve certain learning outcomes,” she said. She further shared seven principles to facilitate success in SULAM and talked about potential student learning outcomes for SULAM such as the gain of digital skills, numeracy skills, leadership, autonomy and responsibility, personal and entrepreneurial skills.

She also talked about critical reflections in SULAM. She explained that it was a process of analysing experiences to create a meaning of the experience. Furthermore, she shared alternative assessments in the SULAM Course with some examples. The webinar then ended with a Q&A session, followed by a group photography session.