Service Learning
By Mark Isham
This summer I participated in
the Service Learning Institute sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for
Teaching. I did not anticipate how much service learning would involve me in
thinking deeply about the nature of education (learning) and connections with
the community (service). Another
unanticipated result of my service learning involvement was how much I begin
thinking about my old teacher Sherman Paul and the Emersonian tradition.
I am following in the footsteps of Teresa Mangum who
participated in the Institute in the summer of 2005 and taught a course,
Literature and Society: Articulating the Animal, where students deepened their
understanding of animal representation in literary texts by reflecting on their
work with real animals in
Why did I get involved in
Service Learning?
I became involved with the Service Learning project because I wanted to enhance the contacts my students have with clients from the community. Students solve communication problems for businesses and organizations in my course 8N: 133: Team Writing and Document Design. Their clients already include service organizations like the Humane Society, The Red Cross, and The American Cancer Society. Service learning seemed a way to push students to think more about their clients and more about the community that they live in.
What do I mean by Service
Learning?
My course already involves active learning—learning by doing--but I wanted to make sure that students were leaning more than marketable skills. The skills are fine: writing, design, teamwork, and leadership. But what values did they take away from the course? I used the word marketable and my students are thinking about employment. Am I only reinforcing the values of the marketplace? Writing, working with teammates, working in the community can involve that but they involve more than that.
I
recalled Repossessing and Renewing, a central collection of Sherman
Paul’s essays. He wrote, “Emerson
created a vocation and a form, both in response to the spirit of the
times.” The response was to “want of
faith in the force of the individual man, in the rectitude of his character, in
the certainty of the moral law which sustains the universe…” “Vocation” and “response” are typical Sherman
Paul vocabulary. Paul wrote that Emerson
was his “scholar-hero” because ‘he taught us how to reattach our selves to life
and to renew ourselves in vital experience.”
All this ties in with Paul’s interest in Thoreau since “all his work was
devoted to telling not only how he had lived but how alive he had been…” We are
“called” (vocation) and must “respond”.
Service
learning centers upon a transformative experience that asks us to examine
our vocation and respond to our times. The
act of service itself can be learning, as Paul might tell us, since we often
learn by doing. However, reflection
on that experience fully enriches it. Paul quotes Thoreau, “It is not simply
the understanding now, but the imagination that takes cognizance of it.” Then you have “the flower and fruit of man”.
The imagination involved in reflecting (writing) on a significant experience
was missing in my course.
The
Green tradition that Paul sought to revive was not only some ecological idea
but centered on the growth of women and men in vital experience. We all hope that the ideas that we introduce
in class are pretty vital but ideas must also be lived and taken inside and
then made one’s own.
In
one respect my turn to service learning was easy. I was simply recognizing a great source of
clients for whom my students could exercise the academic skills, which I was
teaching. However, experience is more
than transaction. To stay with us, it
must be transformative. We must respond
to that call of our times and the call from within ourselves. The proposals my students write, the research they perform, the
projects they complete, and the reflection they do offered an opportunity.
How do we offer the
opportunity for a transformative experience?
We
design courses. This was an opportunity
for me to design a course mindful of learning, of service, and of learning from
service.
I
have been contacting service partners in the community that teams of my
students can choose to work with in solving communication problems. I must now sheppard students through a
significant experience that involves more than transacting with clients but
offers an opportunity for transformation.
Students
do the transforming and they must propose, design, implement, and evaluate a
project that will give them that experience.
I can design opportunities.
I
spent a week with other faculty under the leadership of Edward Zlotkowski and
the sponsorship of the Center for Teaching defining service learning, learning
about and finding resources for forming community partnerships, designing
assignments and opportunities for reflection and assessment, thinking about the
place of service learning in the university, and forming a network with other
faculty and campus services interested in service learning on this campus.
Edward
Zlotkowski, an English Professor at Bentley College and a leader in the Service
Learning field, provided the Institute with number of materials Campus
Compact’s An introduction to Service Learning Toolkit: Reading and Resources for Faculty, for
example, and also introduced us to a series he edited, The American Association
of Higher Educations multi volume series Service Learning in the Disciplines
which provides essays on service learning teaching in a number of
disciplines.
The
Center for Teaching, (4039 Main Library, www.uiowa.edu/~centeach)
has created a resource library of materials about service learning that any
UI instructor can use. The Center staff
members also consult with faculty who want to teach service learning and provide
helpful advice in creating a course (jean-florman@uiowa.edu)
Mary
Mathew Wilson coordinates the Civic Engagement Program at the