*Bringle, R., & Hatcher, J. (1995, Fall).
A service-learning curriculum for faculty.
Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 2.
pp. 112-122.
**Weigert, K.M. (1998).
Academic service learning: Its meaning and relevance.
In Rhoads, R.A., & Howard, J.P.F. (Eds.).
Academic service learning: A
pedagogy of action and reflection. (75)
San Francisco: Jossey Bass, pp. 3-10.
Return to Top
In answering the following questions, the presenters drew
from their experience and the resources available in the draft of the
Service-Learning Tool Kit distributed to each participant during the Friday
sessions. Some of the answers refer
to pages in the Tool Kit. We asked
participants to rank-order the questions; the list below represents the most
popular questions and their answers.
1.
Question: Is a service-learning project something that should be
required of every student? Do
we make it part of a required course that everyone takes?
Or is a capstone experience best with flexibility in projects?
Answer: Several years ago
at the National Summit on Volunteerism in Philadelphia, while thousands joined
four U.S. Presidents and Colin Powell in a call for greater service, many
protested against service as a requirement for high school graduation.
In
the communication discipline, the answer is "all of the above."
In the course abstracts (Tool Kit, pp. 23-34), most of the assignments
are required. Students often have
several service options, but some service is required to complete an
assignment. Shirlee Levin points
out that if S-L is one of several projects or assignments in a course, it may be
offered as an alternative. She
says, "If students really objects to doing S-L, then I'm not sure I want
them doing it."
Some departments have used a "service-learning across the
curriculum" model, where at least one class in every track is a S-L course.
Some colleges, such as Regis College, require every course in the
university to have a S-L component. Other
departments use a capstone experience (see Tool Kit, p. 25).
2.
Question: How does
service-learning differ from other experiential activities, especially
internships and other activity-based assignments?
Answer: Another ongoing
discussion in service-learning. The
Tool Kit editors, in offering a definition of S-L, root it in experiential
learning and offer some useful distinctions (pp. 3-5).
Two
interrelated distinctions are (1) the role service plays in the course and (2)
who ultimately benefits from the experience.
In an internship, the student is the ultimate beneficiary of the
experience, with some benefit going to the organization using the student.
In S-L, both the community and students benefit.
With traditional activities like public relations projects, one element
that often is missing is reflection, especially reflection that goes beyond
simply reporting activities or applying course concepts and into deeper
consideration of community and social issues.
Many essential service-learning readings address these distinctions (see
the annotated bibliography here and the Tool Kit, pp. 41-42).
3.
Question: How do you
handle liability issues and other legal concerns?
Answer:
This is, literally, the $64,000 question--the NCA Service Learning Survey
(Whitfield and Smith, 2001) found that nearly one third of the respondents did
not know how liability was handled at their institution.
In some respects, there is no single answer, since liability laws vary
widely, and institutions have adopted various means of addressing this.
The survey found that about 38% of the respondents rely on university
liability policies. The Tool Kit
(p. 9) offers some suggestions for managing risk and learning more about
liability.
Shelly
Hinck, former campus service-learning coordinator at Central Michigan
University, recommends that instructors talk to their risk liability officer,
the director of the state's Campus Compact organization, or the local volunteer
center director in their college or community.
4.
Question: Even
volunteerism costs money, and developing a service-learning program may require
financial resources for faculty incentives, course development, and project
support. Where do you find the
money for these activities?
Answer:
One by-product of the growing awareness and use of service-learning
across the academy is the growing number of resources for financial support.
Colleges face pressure from parents, politicians, and communities to be
more engaged, and S-L offers an ideal way to do this.
Thus, your classroom efforts have some positive publicity benefits to
your institutions, and you might be able to secure some funding on that basis.
Here are a few ways to receive help for S-L:
·
Look for faculty development funds from the institution, either
through a campus wide faculty teaching improvement center or from the chief
academic officer (provost).
·
Look to the campus community service office for help in
identifying contacts or sharing in financial resources.
·
Seek help from campus organizations, especially those which
reflect the community populations your students might be serving (e.g., the
Black Student Union).
·
Look for local organizational or corporate support, especially for
projects (e.g., Target, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, etc.).
·
Ask the community partner to pay for things produced for them,
such as brochures, Web sites, newsletters, and the like.
·
Look to the state Campus Compact organization.
Many of them award grants for course development.
·
Look to local service-learning or community development
coalitions. For example, in
Philadelphia, there is PHENND: the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for
Neighborhood Development, which is a consortium of colleges and other partners.
Mike Smith has received or administered several grants from PHENND, which
went toward course development and campus-wide faculty service-learning
workshops.
·
Work-study programs require a certain number of community service
hours; you might be able to hire a work study student to assist with some of the
administrative tasks your project entails.
·
Kim Cuny suggests getting a student to work for independent study
credit whose sole responsibility is promoting projects.
5.
Question: Are
S-L projects better for first and second year students, or for upper class
students? What about graduate
students?
Answer:
Service-learning is used at all levels with all kinds of students.
The answer depends on the role service plays in the class. If students perform direct service and use it as a basis for
applying communication concepts, then any student at any level can do it.
If it is service where students produce something (e.g., print materials
and videos), then they should have the skills to do it.
Therefore, students might need an introductory course before they get
into a service-learning course. For
an account of how S-L is used at the graduate level, see Perkins, Kidd and
Smith's chapter in Voices of Strong Democracy.
6.
Question: What is the
ideal class size for a class with a service-learning component?
Answer:
Again, the answer is "it depends."
During Friday's sessions, we heard about classes that had as many as 40
students doing service-learning. However,
there are some factors to consider. First,
what is the "carrying capacity" of your community partners?
You don't want to flood community partners with more people than they can
use, since both students and the partner will be dissatisfied.
Second, you should consider the kind of assignment you expect students to
produce from their service. For
example, shepherding 30 students through individual research papers is a
different task than guiding 6 groups through projects.
Finally, you should consider your own ability to handle a number of
students and projects. One reason
why Mike typically does only one service-learning course a semester is that the
projects in one tend to be pretty time consuming, and he personally doesn't feel
he could handle many more projects.
7.
Question: How many
hours per week should students spend in service versus in class work?
Answer:
A popular question with no single answer.
The Tool Kit provides some guidance (pp. 10-11).
Some of the courses described in the Tool Kit require a certain number of
hours per week. This is especially
true with direct service assignments. For
other courses/assignments, the out of class commitment varies.
In-class
time may include not only time to complete assignments, but also time for
orientation to the site or service, as well as time for reflection.
The NCA Service Learning Survey found that about 30% of the respondents
required 10-20 hours per semester, while another 20% required 20 to 30+ hours.
Finally, remember that "traditional" assignments require out of
class time to complete, such as reading, studying for tests, conducting
research, etc. It seems to us that
the expectation used to be 3 hours outside of class for every hour spent in
class; so a 3 hour class requires 9 hours outside of class to complete
assignments.
Return to Top
The following Guiding Principles and Recommendations for
service-learning were developed at the summer conference. They represent
recommendations of the conferees and planners of this strand topic. They
are provided to inform engagement in the praxis of service-learning. However,
they have not been reviewed and endorsed by NCA.
Guiding Principles
1.
Service-learning addresses the mission of higher education by preparing
students to become engaged citizens working toward a better society.
2.
Service-learning allows students to:
·
Enhance communication skills,
·
Make research-informed connections between course content and
service experiences,
·
Build relationships among community partners, and
·
Become responsible stewards to the community.
3.
Service-learning includes experience in the community connected to course
objectives; on-going, guided reflection about the experience; and planned
assessment of the experience.
4.
Service-learning creates an opportunity for all participants to benefit
by meeting community needs, institutional mission, instructor expectations, and
student learning.
5.
Service-learning may develop:
·
Future leadership abilities;
·
Social justice awareness;
·
Responsible citizenship;
·
Ethical communication skills; and
·
Diverse perspectives.
Recommendations:
Based on the preceding principles, the participants in the
service-learning strand offer the following recommendations:
1.
An institution using service-learning should provide faculty development
opportunities and support.
2.
Service-learning programs require continuing advocacy of their benefits
and outcomes to faculty, students, community partners, and institutions.
3.
Communication departments should ensure that students have the
opportunity to experience service-learning as a way to reflect on their
communication knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
4.
Institutions utilizing service-learning should reward participating
faculty by including service-learning in promotion, tenure, and retention review
decisions.
5.
The NCA should continue to support programs and services related to
service-learning.
6.
The scholarship of service-learning should be a part of graduate
education and research.
7. NCA should encourage additional
publications related to service-learning.
8. NCA should continue to seek
partnerships with other organizations encouraging service-learning.
9.
NCA should encourage the presentation of programs and development of
guidelines and resources about risk and liability issues.
10. NCA's Educational Policy Board should form a task force to
encourage research assessing the outcomes of service-learning on students,
community partners, faculty, and institutions.
Return to Top
Introduction
Community Service-Learning has
moved from an idea to a movement to an accepted academic pedagogy over the past
15 years. With philosophical and
theoretical roots dating back to Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, and John
Dewey, service-learning seeks to link meaningful community service with academic
course objectives.
That service-learning is
experiencing increased use and study is evidenced by the number of research and
study programs sponsored by national education associations, such as the
American Association for Higher Education, pedagogical groups, such as the
National Society for Experiential Education, and field-related academic
societies, such as the National Communication Association.
Indeed, NCA is recognized as one of the leading disciplines in the study
and development of discipline-specific service-learning methods.
Although the term “symbiotic”
is oft-used and abused, there truly exists a symbiotic relationship between
service-learning and communication. Service-learning
is an ideal way for students, faculty, and community partners to develop
communication skills and gain a deeper understanding of communication concepts.
Conversely, communication is seen as an essential element in developing
successful service-learning experiences, regardless of the discipline.
This symbiosis can produce better students, better citizens, more engaged
departments and campuses, and—most significantly—tangible progress in
meeting community needs.
Integrating service-learning into
the curriculum is not without challenges, however. Creating meaningful and manageable experiences requires a
significant amount of planning, coordination, and flexibility.
Often, what some communication faculty label “service-learning” is
missing one or more key elements. This
strand explored some of the common challenges facing those who wish to embrace
this pedagogy.
Friday’s session featured four
presenters with experience in service-learning, including involvement with NCA-supported
programs such as Communicating Common Ground and the NCA Task Group on
Service-Learning. The
presenters addressed four challenges common to developing service-learning
courses:
1.
developing service-learning assignments:
What kinds of activities can communication faculty use to link community
service and course objectives?
2.
finding and developing relationships with community partners:
How do you locate suitable community partners and other supporters?
How do you maintain relationships with partners?
3.
integrating reflection into course assignments:
How do you deepen students’ experience and help them link their service
and the course concepts?
4.
assessing the outcomes of service-learning assignments:
What effect did the experience have on our students, communities, and us?
After reviewing some “best practices” in each of these
areas, the presenters encouraged audience discussion and questions and developed
a set of Frequently Asked Questions.
During the first hour of the Saturday morning sessions, the stand leaders
and facilitators offered an interactive workshop in developing service-learning
courses. Here, participants and
strand leaders worked in small groups to think of ways service-learning can be
integrated into participants’ courses. Approximately
12 conference participants left with specific ideas to bring home to their
classrooms. During the second hour,
we collaborated in developing guiding principles for service-learning.
Service Learning Strand Agenda
I.
Sharing Best Practices (Friday)
A.
Developing Service Learning Assignments and Activities—Michael Smith,
La Salle University
B.
Developing Mutually Beneficial Relationships with Community Partners (and
others!)—Kimberly M. Cuny, Monmouth University
C.
Providing Opportunities for Structured Student Reflection—Shelly Hinck,
Central Michigan University
D.
Assessing Project Outcomes for Students and the Community—Shirlee
Levin, College of Southern Maryland
II.
Course Construction Workshop, FAQ’s and Guiding Principles (Saturday
Morning)
III.
Refining Guiding Principles and Recommending Action (Saturday Afternoon)
The following summaries highlight the important ideas each
presenter shared. These ideas
served to stimulate Saturday’s discussions and help conferees develop Guiding
Principles and Recommendations.
Developing
Service-Learning Assignments in Communication Courses
Michael F.
Smith
La Salle University
Service-learning, by definition, links meaningful community service with
course goals. All instructors,
whether they use service-learning or other pedagogical methods, face the
challenge of developing assignments that help students achieve course,
department, and institutional goals. However,
developing service-learning assignments seems more daunting because of the
necessity of working outside the comfortable classroom confines.
An additional challenge communication educators face is that some courses
seem better suited to a service-learning experience than others.
For example, public relations and organizational communication courses
offer opportunities for students to develop "deliverables" to
community organizations, thus helping them achieve the goal of addressing
community needs. But what can students in communication theory contribute to
the community? Moreover, what do
they learn about communication theory by participating in service?
Happily, the evidence suggests that service-learning assignments can be
developed in classes across the communication curriculum.
A survey that Toni Whitfield, University of West Florida, and I conducted
for NCA found that service-learning courses exist in nearly every facet of the
communication discipline. The courses discussed in Voices of Strong Democracy
(Droge and Murphy, 1999) and the recent special issue of the Southern
Communication Journal (Conville, 2001) also run the curricular gamut.
Finally, the Service-Learning Tool Kit distributed during the conference
featured 43 course abstracts, representing everything from advertising to
theatre studies.
In this summary, I will review the principles for developing effective
service learning assignments. As
part of the conference presentation, I distributed
a draft of a typology of service-learning courses in communication.
Anyone wishing a copy of the typology can e-mail me at msmith@lasalle.edu.
Some Principles
for Developing
Service-Learning
Assignments in Communication Courses
Based on experience, literature reviews, and samples of
other courses, I propose the following seven principles for developing
service-learning assignments:
- Effective
service-learning assignments should meet course, student, and community
partner goals.--By definition, service-learning requires service in the
context of course learning objectives. It is important to understand that students and
community partners also have goals that must be addressed. For example, while service-learning advocates tout the
development of civic responsibility as a student outcome, students
themselves may be more concerned about developing professional skills.
Additionally, much of the literature suggests that the best
service-learning assignments address needs that the community itself
identifies.
- The
service performed be within the instructor, student, and community partner's
"comfort level." (Important
caveat: One purpose of
service-learning, and education generally, is to comfort the afflicted and
afflict the comfortable.)--A couple of years ago, my students thought
that a good idea for promoting an Earth Day run would be to stage a mock
race a week before the real event, in which they would run around a central
square in the city wearing gas masks, thus illustrating the organization's
goal (clean air) and promoting the run.
Our partner organization was uncomfortable with this idea, because it
did not fit its character. Students
can be uncomfortable with certain kinds of service placements; community
partners may be uncomfortable having students do certain kinds of things.
However, an instructor should be prepared to challenge students and
partners to reach beyond their comfort zones to the point where real
discovery can begin.
- Ideal
service-learning assignments should form the basis for mutually beneficial
relationships among community partners, students, your institution, and you.
--As Kim Cuny illustrated in her discussion of forming partnerships,
everyone should win in a service-learning experience.
Students performing service is just the beginning of your
relationship with the community and your institution.
Service-learning courses can form the basis for helping your
institutions and your communities co-exist.
- Implementing
service-learning assignments requires structured flexibility. --One of
the scariest things about service-learning is that you are not entirely sure
what will happen. A chance
encounter, a missed deadline, a change in the partner organization can
create opportunities and challenges unforeseen in traditional courses.
An instructor's task is to build as much structure into the
assignments as possible, then be flexible enough to guide students when
things do not go as planned. At
the very least, the goals of the assignment and requirements for its
satisfactory completion should be spelled out.
- Students
completing service-learning assignments require preparation (e.g., previous
course work, in-class instruction).--Students should possess the skills
required to complete assignments and provide meaningful service.
For example, my students must complete the public relations writing
course before they take the seminar in which they complete projects for
community partners.
- Service-learning
requires orientation for all parties. This
includes orientation toward service, toward the partnership,
and toward the assignment itself. --Clear, realistic expectations
are essential for satisfying experiences.
This means that all parties (students, faculty, community partners)
need some orientation meant to develop these expectations. Everyone should
have an understanding of the service to be provided (e.g., what tasks will
be performed? With whom? When?).
There should be some discussion of the partnership between students and
community organization (e.g., what is the organization's mission?
What services does it provide? What challenges does it face? Who does
it serve?). Finally, all
parties should understand the assignment(s) that will be developed from the
service experience.
- Instructors
need to develop methods/procedures for monitoring and evaluating both
product and process. --The need for assessing and evaluating students'
work is clear, and the Tool Kit contains many examples of assessment forms.
Equally important is the monitoring of student progress throughout
the term. For example, journals
not only offer a way for students to reflect on their experience, but also a
means to report on what they've actually done.
Some service-learning programs have weekly or bi-weekly reporting
sheets to account for student hours. Some
instructors have used on-line discussion software to ensure that students
are contributing to group projects.
Developing Mutually Beneficial Relationships with Community Partners
(and others!)
Kimberly M Cuny
Monmouth University
The information presented is from personal experiences
resulting from one year of planning followed by one year of team teaching The
Power of Story with Claire B. Johnson at Monmouth University.
The Power of Story is a Communicating Common Ground (CCG) partnership.
Information about CCG can be obtained by visiting http://www.monmouth.edu/~story.
Like the hub to the spokes of a bicycle wheel, the
faculty member serves as the point person who keeps the service and the learning
working together towards a common goal.
Some Qualities of
Good Partners
Trust -
The faculty member needs to trust the community partner(s) and the partner(s)
needs to trust the faculty member.
Flexibility – Starting with the faculty member,
all parties must be flexible if the S-L partnership is to be a success.
Similar Interests – The faculty member needs to
understand the goals and views of the community partner to ensure that all
parties involved have similar interests.
Similar Expectations – Relating to the S-L project
itself, faculty member must be sure that all parties have similar expectations.
Enthusiasm for the Project – The community partner
needs to share the faculty member’s enthusiasm for the project.
If the partner's enthusiasm happens to lessen, the faculty member will
need to work on regaining it (assessment helps here).
Follow-through – The partner needs to be committed
to letting the faculty member work the project through to its completion.
Seven Partners of The
Power of Story
National Partners
National Communication Association
(NCA)
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
American Association of Higher
Education (AAHE)
Campus Compact (CC)
Local Partners
Atlantic Highlands Elementary
School (AHES)
Atlantic Highlands Leos Club, an
affiliate of Lions Club International (Leos)
Monmouth University’s Partners
in Learning Program (PAL)
-plus-
Corporate Sponsors/Donors
GPU Energy
Atlantic Highlands Teachers
Association
Pathmark, Inc.
Mutual Benefit
Faculty looking to design a new S-L course or add S-L to an
existing course must ask:
“What do I need from a community partner?”
For
the storytelling project at Monmouth University we needed kids to serve as
audience members for our telling(s) and a commitment to the CCG national
project.
Just as important, faculty must ask:
“What can I offer the community partner beyond the
obvious benefits of the course work?"
The Storytelling Project has kept its commitment to the
pursuit of local and national press coverage to ensure mutual benefit for all
partners.
-
In the
past year the project has been featured in 8 newspaper, magazine, and new media
articles and has appeared on UPN 9 News in the NY tri-state market.
-
Articles
are currently in the works for The Storyteller and Teaching Tolerance national
magazines
-
All
partners are also featured on the story web page (http://www.monmouth.edu/~story)
Additional benefits to individual national partners
include:
SPLC
·
Increase their sphere of influence on a local level
·
Taking small steps towards their goal of teaching tolerance
·
Reinforce, at a local level, their national efforts to combat
hate, hate speech, and hate crime
AAHE
·
Serve as a model for activism and community service to other
professionals in this interconnected world
·
Practicing their goal of students learning and being assessed
in non-traditional ways
CC
·
Serve as a model for their goal of promoting college and
university civic responsibility to the surrounding communities
NCA
·
Promoting communication scholarship and education
·
Raising the awareness level of communication as a field of
study and a means of actively connecting people
Benefits to local partners include:
AH Elementary School
·
SPLC resources - optional
·
Teacher training – we have offered training
·
An exciting learning activity for the kids
·
Opportunity for kids to interact with college students – in
the comfort of their own classroom
·
Newsletter article – written by Monmouth Professors - for their
publication
·
Television crews in the classroom – the
kids loved seeing the crew doing their job
·
General Mills Box Tops – from time to time we make small contributions to
their collection for school computers effort
·
Substitute Teacher – Some tellers are now certified to substitute at AHES
·
Mouse pads & pens – to thank the teachers at the school for working with
us (the pens and pads say MU Department of Communication on them)
·
Library Books – recognizing the need for the tolerance themes we
teach to be present in the school all year long, we have solicited donations to
purchase books for AHES’s library. To
date we have collected $1100, which has made possible the purchase of over 80
books.
·
Community outlet – at the request of AHES we are currently working on
finding a new home for their unwanted social studies textbooks.
Leos
·
Interaction with college students who are doing community
work (role models)
·
Visit to a college campus – we hosted them during our regular class time
in the fall
·
Storytelling training – while on campus, we taught them how to tell stories.
Now, when the Leos make their regular Thursday evening visit to their
local senior citizen center, they use the skills we taught them to tell stories.
Also the Leos can better appreciate the real life stories the seniors
tell them.
·
Support the overall goal of individual community involvement
of Lions Club International
·
When the Leos help our storyteller in the classrooms at AHES,
it increases their visibility and boosts their recruitment efforts.
PAL
·
Interaction with college students
·
Entertainment
·
Tolerance education
Mutual
benefit does not have to be as multi-layered as CCG.
When
working on an S-L component for my nonverbal communication course, I found local
ESL students simply asked for a tour of our historic campus in exchange for my
students interviewing them about the nonverbal behaviors of their country of
origin. The ESL students will come
to campus, get a tour, visit my class during our regularly scheduled meeting
time and I will send each ESL student a personal thank you = mutual benefit!
Issues
we have faced (related to community partnerships)
·
Scheduling elementary school visit – we
are all on different academic calendars
·
Miscommunication!
·
Last minute elementary school changes – turns
out the kindergartners will have gone home when we arrive
·
Leos adult advisor is hard to reach – after
many attempts, we found fax and email were the best channels
·
Good news, the press is coming. Bad news, we need permission from the parents of the
elementary school kids who might be seen on the news - in two days' time!
·
Assumptions made – turns out college students don’t necessarily
know how to communicate with kids
·
PAL – very flexible and understandable
·
Donations – create an unimaginable bureaucracy
Tools
and techniques
·
Thank your partners – and do it often
·
Communicate – let everyone know what is going on
·
Get flexible – no matter how flexible you think you are, you will
need to get more so
·
Involve your campus public affairs office – contact
them early, as they will need time to properly support your efforts… they
thrive on new story ideas for the media
·
Alumni Affairs – most have an electronic or print outlet for a feature
article
·
Become a cheerleader – talk your project up to everyone!
·
Solicit help - Find a mature, responsible, student with strong
interpersonal and written communication skills. Sign the student up for independent study credit and appoint
him/her your coordinator of promotions and special events.
You will appreciate the help if you are careful to recruit the right
student.
·
Find out
if your campus has a “Public Relations Student Society of America” if so,
get them involved
·
Seek web
assistance (your projects should have a web page) from your campus instructional
support department
·
Approach
the best journalism student your department has and ask him/her to write for you
(the serious student knows how important it is to develop a portfolio)
·
Believe – in yourself and in your students
The Role of
Reflection in Service-Learning
Shelly S. Hinck
Central
Michigan University
The process of reflection is the element essentially separates
service-learning from other forms of pedagogy. While
students often report on their experiences in experiential learning, reflection
in service-learning courses asks students to make explicit connections between
course concepts and their service experience, to address their own reactions and
development in the context of the service experience, and to ponder larger
questions about social issues and their causes.
More specifically, "Reflection is a process of self-analysis
directed to the development of awareness and attitudes.
It has been used to describe a cognitive process and a structured
learning activity" (Driscoll, et al, 1996). According to Cooper (1996), reflection promotes
academic learning, personal development, and program development.
Best Practices in Reflection
The best reflection is continuous in time frame, connected to the big
picture information provided by academic pursuits, challenging to assumptions
and complacency, and contextualized in terms of design and setting.
A number of reflection activities exist.
These include:
- Written
Exercises
[Editor's note: Shelly
discussed two popular forms of reflection, journals and group discussion.
For a copy of the handouts she developed for this session, contact her at
Shelly.S.Hinck@cmich.edu.]
Works Cited
Cooper, M. (1996). A
faculty guide to reflection: The
five W's and the H. Miami:
Florida International University.
Driscoll, A., Messer, B., Svoboda, M., & Boucher, C.
(1996). Insights about reflection:
Lessons from faculty and students. Expanding
Boundaries: Serving and Learning,
42-43.
[See other sources on reflection in the Annotated
Bibliography.]
Assessment of
Service-Learning:
What We've Got and What We
Have Not
Shirlee A. Levin
College of Southern
Maryland
Since nearly all service learning
articles are written by service learning practitioners, it makes sense that they
all tout the glories of doing service learning. Frequently, they will state how everyone benefits from doing
service learning: the students, the faculty, the institution, and the community.
However, after studying service learning assessment for more than two
years for the National Communication Association grant from the American
Association for Higher Education, it has become painfully obvious to me that
many of the broad statements being made are merely assertions, not backed by
serious methods of assessment. In
fact, while there is some qualitative assessment and even more anecdotal
information, there is very little quantitative assessment.
However, as colleges and universities begin to institutionalize service
learning, they want more evidence that this is a pedagogy that works.
Outcomes assessment is the name of the game at most institutions.
In the NCA Service Learning Toolkit, you will find copies
of most of the types of assessments that I have discovered during the past two
years. You will find there are many
types of assessments for students, but only a few that assess the impact on the
faculty, the institution or the community.
The following is a list of some of the types of assessment
you will find:
Assessment of
Students, Including Self-Assessment
1.
Student self-assessment of their experience
2.
Faculty assessment of the student project, including written work
(journals, reflection, time logs, etc.) and performance (presentations, papers,
etc.)
3.
Community organization assessment of student work
4.
Student assessment of the service learning program and placement
5.
Standardized assessments of changes in students with a pre-test and
post-test
6.
Student self-assessment of changes in self-concept, attitude toward
volunteering, diversity and multi-culturalism, and attitude toward civic
engagement
7.
Student assessment about their majors
8.
Student assessment of the nonprofit organization and helpfulness of the
staff at the organization
Assessment of
Faculty
1.
Student assessment of faculty helpfulness
2.
Nonprofit organization assessment of faculty placement of students
3.
Faculty assessment of the college service learning program
Assessment of
Institution
1.
Nonprofit organization assessment of institution’s service learning
program
On page 6 of the Toolkit, there is a list of benefits from
doing service learning that echoes what many
articles say. Those of us who
practice service learning believe that this is true.
However, current assessment does not prove
that these statements are true. Our
task in the future should be to find ways to prove, through assessment, that
what we say is true, IS true.
Return to Top
The following were selected as essential reading and
resources for anyone interested in engaging in the praxis of service-learning.
General Resources
Conville, R.L. (Ed.). (2001).
Service-learning in communication studies. [Special issue]. Southern
Communication Journal, 66 (3)
A great collection of theoretically grounded, research-supported articles
about using service-learning in communication courses. Includes practical examples of syllabi and assignments for
courses ranging from organizational communication to research methods.
Droge, D., & Murphy, B.O.
(Eds.). (1999).
Voices of strong democracy: Concepts
and models for service-learning in communication studies.
Washington: American
Association for Higher Education.
A volume produced
in cooperation with NCA, this volume is the definitive book on S-L in
communication. Chapters provide an
overview and rationale for service-learning in the discipline, models for S-L in
various programs, and several articles that give examples of service-learning in
courses across the communication curriculum.
Michigan journal of community
service-learning, 7 (2000, Fall).
This journal is one of the oldest and most respected devoted specifically
to service-learning pedagogy. Each
issue features sections on research and theory as well as pedagogy. Information
about the journal is available on-line at http://www.umich.edu/~mjcsl/
Rhoads, R. A., & Howard,
J.P.F. (Eds.). (1998, Spring).
Academic service-learning: A pedagogy of action and reflection.
New directions for teaching and learning. (73). San Francisco: Jossey
Bass.
An excellent starting point for those seeking a “big picture” view of
service-learning. The eleven
articles in this volume cover everything from the theoretical underpinnings of
service-learning pedagogy to issues such as reflection and research.
Course Construction and Community Partnerships
Campus Compact (2000).
Benchmarks for campus/community partnerships.
Providence: Campus Compact. The key to successful service-learning is establishing mutually
beneficial relationships with community partners.
This guide discusses some of the characteristics of successful
partnerships.
Heffernan, K. (2001).
Fundamentals of service-learning course construction. Providence:
Campus Compact. A newly-published guide based on a review of over 900 service-learning
syllabi. The book provides 6 models
for course construction, and sample syllabi and assignments.
While not communication-specific, syllabi from a range of disciplines are
included.
