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I have done community service before, but it was always "band-aid" work or fundraising. Now that I see what a difference one can make on this level, and how crucial knowledge of the issues is, I will definitely continue this type of work.
--SPCH 61 Student
Service-learning, the newest name for a teaching strategy that has been used successfully by some UNC faculty for many years, integrates community service into a traditional academic curriculum. Courses that have a service component can help students connect material learned in class and experiences acquired in their placements. Ideally, this should be a two-way process: students should apply what they learn in class to their placements; they should also use their placement experiences to gain a deeper understanding of the material covered in class and readings. In addition, service-learning introduces students to a community outside the university, which might otherwise remain invisible to them. Successful incorporation of service-learning into a course will enable: instructors to accommodate different learning styles; students to acquire practical experience; the university to serve the needs of the community.
This monograph is based on discussions with instructors who have used service-learning successfully in their courses. They reveal the basic steps necessary for integrating community service into a course:
In addition, they discuss the difference between service-learning and simple volunteer work and some of the pitfalls they have encountered along the way.
The goals of your course represent the knowledge, thinking skills, and practical skills students should acquire by the end of the semester. Keep in mind that goals and objectives should focus on what students are expected to learn. When writing goals, also keep in mind whether service-learning is required for all students or is optional. One way to establish goals is to ask yourself how students should be different after taking your course. Do they need to master a clearly defined body of knowledge? Do they need to apply theories to particular situations? Should they be able to evaluate a situation or set of ideas? Or should they acquire skills that they will need in their professional careers? At the same time you should determine and articulate the degree to which participation in community service relates to these goals. The nature of the relationship between class goals and service can be divided into three main categories:
Gerald Unks, Education, wants students to understand how a child's economic background can affect his or her ability to succeed in the school system: "Many UNC students live in an insulated world. Throughout their school experience, they seldom meet kids who aren't academic winners. I was looking for a way for them to encounter kids who were having difficulty rather than success with the school system. I believe that students who have tutored have more insight into what we've been talking about in class, and more insight into themselves, than students who have not tutored."
By the end of the semester, students in Rachel Willis' "Gender and Economic Decision Making" course should know how to make choices about resource allocation in a real or hypothetical economy. While they should understand that there is no single right answer, students should have the tools to make an informed choice about allocation. In addition to exams, Willis' students must give a class presentation based either on a group project or on their service-learning experience. Students who work on group projects design and analyze specific economic models that deal with gender issues. Students who opt for service-learning apply skills and knowledge gained in class to the specific projects they are assigned at the community agency.
Students in Robert Cox's Speech 61 course should, by the end of the semester, be able to determine whether spoken or written materials will lead people to take a more active role in issues that pertain to their lives. "The course focuses on social movements. From the very beginning we have encouraged students not only to study the process of grass-root social change, but also to participate, and this course encourages them to do that. That's what I like about service-learning; not only is it a mechanism for placing students and giving them credit, but it's integrated into the course itself."
A student involved in a service-learning placement will produce real-life material that can be evaluated on its actual effectiveness within the community: "The objective is for students to contribute their own study of rhetorical principles, strategies, audience adaptation, etc., to the agency and to learn from the agency how to adapt a message to real-world audiences, how to put ideals into words that can be understood by various special-interest groups."
Insuring that there is a connection between community work and coursework will depend not only upon careful planning of the course content, but also on the selection of placements. You need to find or develop community-service placements that will provide students with the activities or experiences that help them achieve the course goals you have defined. Willis: "I made it clear to the agency that it wasn't getting a free clerk typist, that the students had to be assigned a specific project, and that it had to be a professional contribution to the work of the agency. That doesn't mean there can't be some garbage work, but the students had to have some specific output so they could say `I did this at this agency.' Projects that I suggested included data collection, data analysis, report writing and developing brochures. Those sorts of things work."
Your own past contact with community groups could be a good starting point for locating appropriate placements. Local community agencies which have supported service-learning include: The Center for Peace Education, Chapel Hill/Carrboro Head Start, The Association for Minority Business of Orange County (AMBOC), The Rural Opportunities Corporation (ROC), and The Chapel Hill Public Housing Residence Council.
Keep in mind that the placements you arrange should fulfill a need at the supporting agency as well as allow your students to acquire experiences related to course-work. Cox: "We tried to locate groups, agencies, advocacy groups that deal with civil rights, the women's movement and the environmental movement--the three movements we concentrate on in this class. In order to guarantee that students get the most from their placements, try to determine in advance exactly what you can expect a student to learn with a particular group and then communicate those expectations to the agency. The clearer the assignment, the less chance there is for confusion and a disappointing experience."
According to Willis, "The key is that a specific, tangible output has to be decided upon and identified before the placement to the agency is made. The agencies can't work it out later. I had nine students placed, and I would say seven worked out fine; the other two had trouble because the agency had too grand an idea about what the students could accomplish." One way to insure that all parties understand and fulfill each other's expectations is to have students and agencies develop a contract specifying responsibilities on both sides. Cox uses such contracts and "monitors them so that the students are getting good experiences and not just doing clerical work."
Unlike independent volunteer work, service-learning is an integral part of a student's learning experience in a given course. The work that students perform in their community placements informs their understanding of the material presented in class. The instructors we spoke to agreed that it is best to develop a detailed teaching strategy for the course that includes both classroom and community service activities.
Joel Schwartz, Political Science, says "There's got to be a very conscious, deliberate connection made between what the students are doing out there in community-based service-learning, and what we're talking about in class." Conversely, coursework should prepare students to be more effective in their placements. Willis has this to say: "In the class I teach, students are typically being asked to perform economic analysis. They have to be learning economic analysis in class or have those skills going in. Otherwise it's impossible for them to do the service-learning project. It is my responsibility to give students the groundwork they need to work effectively in the agencies. I do this by covering relevant topics and including articles in the syllabus that they can read if they need information before we cover it in class."
Cox uses a similar approach to emphasize the connection between coursework and the real world. Students participating in service-learning help him to make this point by relating their experiences to their classmates: "Each class period has an announced lecture and discussion topic, often with documentary films or guest speakers. As we study each movement we have the service-learning students share their experiences and relate them to the focus question for that day. I think that reminds students daily that there are struggles continuing in the real world, and that ordinary people can be empowered."
Careful planning will not only insure that your use of service-learning is educationally sound, but, according to Cox, it will also attract interested students: "When the students heard about these real-world experiences and the connection with the course, I think they got excited because they saw opportunities for themselves to go beyond the class and their experience at Carolina to serve the community in a meaningful way."
The next step in incorporating service-learning into the class is to select a method of evaluating student achievement of course objectives. Methods of evaluation for service-learning could include: written and oral exams, papers, interviews, observations, questionnaires, skill assessments, and classroom presentations.
In Willis' class, the optional service-learning component is a substitute for a group project. In all of Willis' upper division classes, between 25% and 40% of the grade is earned as a group. "Students identify a relevant topic, and perform an economic analysis: data collection, a class presentation, and a paper." The service-learning students also do a group presentation based on their experiences at the community agency.
Cox evaluates his students in a number of different ways. Students involved with service-learning keep a journal to document their work with the community agency. They are also required to submit a report at the end of the semester assessing the rhetorical effectiveness of the agency, in terms of its goals and the audience it was trying to reach. Finally, the service-learning students make a panel presentation to the rest of the class to share their experiences.
In Joy Kasson's American Studies 40 class, service-learning is mandatory, and counts for 10% of the final grade. Students in her class also keep a journal, and there is a question on the final exam in which students are given the option to incorporate their service-learning experiences in their answer.
If service-learning will be mandatory, you should make this clear from the first day of class. Schwartz considers service-learning essential to his course and, therefore, makes it mandatory for all students. This may not always be practical, especially in large enrollment courses. It will take a great deal of time and effort to find and set up placements for 100 students as opposed to 20 or 30. More importantly, service-learning enables instructors to create courses that take into account a variety of learning styles. Some students learn well by reading, taking part in class discussions and writing papers and exams. Others are more successful when they gain hands-on experience that enables them to put abstract ideas into context. Students in the former category might not be comfortable in a work environment until they are confident they have mastered the course material.
If you decide to accept a fixed number of students to participate in community service, you need to work out some type of selection process. According to Willis, it was not necessarily the students with the best G.P.A.'s who made the best volunteers: "I didn't want to pick the students with the highest G.P.A.'s. There are a lot of people with great G.P.A.'s that are going to have a hard time on the job market because they don't have skills like cooperation and commitment. I also wanted people who had a real desire to give to the community, and sometimes they are academically weaker students." She developed a self-selection process whereby students had to meet a deadline in order to be considered for the service-learning option. After handing out a description of the placements she had arranged, Willis told her students: "`If you want to participate in a.p.p.l.e.s., you have until the beginning of the next class to give me a one-page typed paper explaining which agencies you would like to be placed with, why, and what you have to offer them.' They came back and I had nine." Not only does this strategy limit the number of students, it also weeds out students who might not have the skills necessary to become effective volunteers: "They have forty-eight hours to type that one page. If somebody can't find a typewriter or word processor on this campus in forty-eight hours, I don't want to place them in an agency. These agencies will be telling them `we have to send our needs assessment to the Human Services Board of the town or we don't get our allocation.' This is not a term paper that you can get an extension on."
Willis also suggests that students be placed in pairs. Once they graduate, students will have to adapt to situations where their success will depend on how well they cooperate with their co-workers. "I would recommend to anybody that the placements be paired. It develops cooperation skills in students. We tend to neglect that in teaching, and most people in their jobs, in the rest of their lives, have to cooperate with people, they have to get along. Their success depends on the productivity of others and how well they can motivate them." There are other benefits to pairing students. For the agencies involved it saves time: orienting two people takes no longer than orienting one, "and they're going to get two people's worth of output for the time they're investing." Pairing also makes the learning experience more effective since the students can collaborate on a final product and turn to each other when one of them has a question.
Service-learning will not be appropriate for all courses and all instructors. Finding placements, keeping track of students and integrating community service and course materials will take a considerable amount of time and planning. In addition, it is possible that logistical problems will arise, especially if this is your first experience with service-learning. One UNC professor who was disappointed with service-learning advises others not to underestimate the time commitment involved: "To make service-learning a valuable experience, a lot more leg work has to be done from the outset in selecting and working with the agencies."
Despite these potential difficulties, most instructors agree that the experience was well worth the effort. Service-learning can be advantageous to students as they pursue professional careers. As Willis says, "These are things that students can put on their résumés that distinguish them from every other Econ major who has a 3.6 GPA." Unks emphasizes how community service provides a unique perspective on material he presents in class: "It teaches them something I could never teach them in a classroom. All the anecdotes in the world, all the movies in the world, would not substitute for their actually having contact with less advantaged kids in need of help and having difficulty." Schwartz agrees: "A lot of students said that doing this community service project really taught them more, had a more lasting imprint on their personal and intellectual development, than anything else they did in the university."
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