As president of Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, which has a tremendous focus both on teaching and research, I deeply respect the commitment to excellence in teaching that all of you participating in this conference make as faculty members. Students now coming to college not only are several generations into television, but are also comfortable with computers and computer games. Young people use time differently. Sometimes we accuse them of having short attention spans, but the problem may be only that our motors are not operating at the same high rate of speed as theirs.
Given that, we need to animate the learning setting so that it is more intense, engaging and demanding. That can happen through CD-ROMs, virtual reality or other forms of technology. But more profoundly, faculty, by devising service learning courses, can animate the learning setting by putting students in places where all of their assumptions are thrown off kilter, where they are in a high learning mode because they are in terra incognita, where the animation is within them instead of coming at them. Today’s students know how to handle books, lab manuals, maps and charts and even software — and how to keep them at a certain distance. They know how to skim. Service learning shakes all that up. Suddenly students are contending with new roles and off-campus settings that they need to talk about. Common risks and disappointments, victories and questions, make students reach out to one another and reflect together on a commonly shared venture off campus.
Students also increasingly need opportunities to engage others. Higher education is likely to create people who have power over the lives of others. Yet students from relatively privileged homes, with their own rooms and TVs and phones, have been able to control a lot. They might not have had to struggle to get to school on a subway or had to stay out of school because the responsibility for younger children kept them home. We must help them learn from people whom they thought they would feed, but who they discover, feed them. If the setting is sufficiently intense, the experience will remain a part of them.
Service learning: teaching in more profound ways
Since the Enlightenment, human societies have created structures for pursuing progress rationalizing, efficiency-optimizing, systematizing organizational structures bound by rules and contracts and algorithms for success. “Modernism” has brought us a very highly efficient society with technology, health and educational systems that are operating to optimize resources on behalf of goals. But societies also need to build and sustain trusting relationships among people. The pressures of modernism have tended to move us away from trusting relationships and from settings where people experience them.
As I think about the teaching transformations we must make to help our students and ourselves connect modern knowledge to trust-building relationships, I am struck that higher education has tended to prefer learning that is abstract, conceptual and theoretical over learning that is relational and experiential. This, however, may be a moment to choose not “either/or” but “both/and.” So I want to talk to you today about service learning in the context of an opportunity for teaching in more profound ways. Service learning is different from community service. After a decade of pressure and opportunity, most of us now have relatively elaborate community service projects on our campuses. The five hundred colleges and universities across this country that are part of the Campus Compact organization encouraged their students to engage in more than 19,300,000 hours of community service last year. This is an astonishing commitment by students to the communities around our institutions.
Then how is service learning different?
Integration. Service learning is a deep integration of service into the theoretical and pedagogical framework of a college course. It is not a simple add-on where students perform voluntary service on the side. A service learning course is a risk-taking and pioneering framework where action and reflection coexist and interact to enhance learning.
Mutuality. Students receive as much from the medical staff, social workers and welfare clients at the service site as they give.
Results. Service learning courses do not simply send students off to learn things and take them back to the academic site. That would mean pillage in the name of serving. The student volunteers need to leave behind tangible results.
Reflection. Students need an opportunity to engage themselves — in journals, in teams outside of class, and then within the class — in reflecting on the service situation, organizing and reviewing their impressions, gathering and exchanging views, testing conclusions and sorting out personal feelings.
Transformation. Service learning courses are transforming: transforming for student and teacher, transforming at the service site and, ultimately, transforming in the pedagogy and the discipline. Faculty often do not teach the same way after having a service site as another venue for course work. Colleagues who have repeatedly taught service learning courses are starting to question and restructure some of the theoretical frameworks of our disciplines.
Service learning in botany, economics, environmental studies and literature
I would like to offer some idea of what these courses look like across a range of disciplines.
Botany. At Connecticut College, Assistant Professor of Botany T. Page Owen taught a course on the theory and practice of electron microscopy, which includes a service learning component with a class at nearby Montville High School. The course involved a long-term study on the mechanisms of nutrient absorption in the glands of the carnivorous plant nepenthe. It also paired high school students with college students of similar research interests who taught them electron microscopy techniques. “By having you teach and explain the study of cell ultrastructure, you will ultimately become more learned with this material,” Owen told his students. At the same time, he added, “this program provides a service to a very talented group of students. They will benefit from exposure to science research at an advanced level, and you will be an inspiration to many of them as they pursue majors in science during their own college experience.” All through the syllabus, the students are pairing off and developing their own skills as teachers.
That’s service learning!
Pedagogically, the faculty member ends up spending less time teaching basic skills. He gets better results not only in his class, but in the students’ other classes, including their research with other faculty members.
Economics, government and sociology. These are among the most common kinds of service learning courses. We have courses in government and sociology where students work with a research and planning office of one of the local communities. Supervised by a faculty member, the students do a research project that advances the progress of the city on a problem it is facing and turn their research into a final paper. At the University of Pennsylvania where I was a faculty member, we had a series of similar courses that dealt with housing and urban problems in Philadelphia.
Environmental studies. The entry-level environmental studies course apprentices students as mentors to a middle school class in the city of New London. They develop projects with the middle school faculty and students. The middle school students are taught a series of skill-building approaches to science — running tests, creating hypotheses, developing an approach to proving results. In a sense, our own students are doing with their younger colleagues what is being done with them by their faculty members.
Literature. I am a professor of French literature and the history and philosophy of science. I also teach a service learning course called “Literature, Service and Social Reflection” developed with the assistance of Robert Coles at Harvard and Tom Ehrlich, a former president of Indiana University. My object was to create a literature course with attributes of service learning that I thought would make the study of literature a more powerful experience for my students.
We read a novel a week for, by or about people in difficult circumstances. We read novels like The Doctor Stories by William Carlos Williams, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, In Nueva York by Nicholasa Mohr, and Down These Mean Streets by Thomas Piri; stories about immigrants coming to the United States in the ’40s; poetry like “Lovers of the Poor” by Gwendolyn Brooks; and short stories like James Lasdun’s “The Volunteer.” We use ethical criticism as a framework for literary analysis. Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction is a priceless asset as we study the literature and the claims that the civic and spiritual frameworks make on the characters.
At the same time, students also read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, engaging in questions around “Who is my fellow citizen? What do I owe that person? What does he owe me and what is the social contract?” We read social commentary, including sections from Ben Barber’s “To Be An American” and Robert Bellah’s work.
We read in the religious framework around the question: “Who is my neighbor?” Not fellow citizens, but neighbors. So we read the eight stages of Tsedakah and Old and New Testament passages that address the question of responsibility to my neighbor, notably the story of The Good Samaritan. Then we read the chapters on charity from the Koran and similar chapters from Confucius.
Students are inspired to see that in the eight stages of Tsedakah the lowest level is doing good for your neighbor but doing it only when asked. Students know people who do charity work, but reluctantly — if they are asked, they do it, but they’re not pleased and feel that if the recipients had any guts they would get out of the circumstances of poverty. According to Maimonides, the highest level of response to a neighbor in need is a partnership that creates opportunity for the other to rise to his or her full potential, a partnership that one does without being asked. One sees a need and moves to address it, respectfully and generously.
Each week the students perform three or four hours of community service in a variety of volunteer settings monitored by our Office of Volunteers for Community Service. Some of them deal with children in schools or hospices, some with recent immigrants, like those from the former Soviet Union whom the Beth-El Synagogue is helping to settle. One student worked all last year with a young woman and her child at “A Mother’s Place.” That student helped the woman prepare for her GED exam while the woman cared for her baby and explored how to put the next piece of her life together.
Two journal entries each week help students reflect on the connections between their real-life service experience and their reading. One young woman wrote: “I just finished reading The Bluest Eye, and I’m on my way to Jennings School” (she was a teacher’s aide in a school with about 60 percent students of color), “and I know now that I am going to tell all my children that they are beautiful and smart. I never want any of them to think about themselves the way Pecola thought about herself. I can make that difference.”
How could this white woman from Maine know what an African-American or Latino child or a child from an economically-stressed life would be thinking and worrying about? She couldn’t. But Toni Morrison can do more than just tell her: Toni Morrison can put her inside the heart and head of Pecola so that Pecola transforms this young woman, makes her a different, wiser person. She now feels differently about the question, “Why read literature?” Why read? Because you bring people into your life who transform you forever, who make you more compassionate, more powerful in the world, more able to make things happen.
A young man had been doing EMT work for four years and had kept a log of all the interventions he had been sent on. The week we read Invisible Man, this student wrote in his journal: “For the first time tonight, coming back in the ambulance, I realized that I was writing the name of the kid lying on the stretcher in front of me. I noticed, for the first time, that in four years of entries I had written only ‘elderly woman,’ ‘drug addict,’ ‘gang member,’ ‘pregnant lady.’ Tonight, I wrote down the name of the kid because for the first time I got into a real conversation with a patient going to the hospital. Not just a whether-and-how-much-does-it-hurt conversation, but a real conversation. I didn’t realize that I was doing to other people what the invisible man had experienced in his life. I discovered that I don’t have to do that.”
In the students’ third and final paper, I ask them to communicate a text or part of one to their client in such a way that the person can engage the text and both people can write a paper about it together. The young woman working with the single mother read part of The Women of Brewster Place with this young woman, who then said “I want to read the whole book.” That caused a late paper, because the single mother could not sit down and easily read the whole book. The two wrote a late paper together about that book and the woman’s experiences. They produced an extraordinary piece of work. The student is editing it for publication.
Spreading service learning
Few courses would not benefit from a service learning component. However, I do not believe that service learning courses should be required, and I do not think that service learning ought to have a political agenda.
But what about integrating service learning with a seemingly difficult topic like epistemology? For instance, an Indian tribe might be in proximity and have, particularly among the elders, different ways of knowing than we who operate in an Enlightenment mode. Students could then offer members of other communities the result of their research and therefore help people understand their culture better.
Students might grasp the basic questions of epistemology more profoundly than in standard courses, and come back with more questions. The teacher would become a kind of consultant — a guide, a mentor, someone who is in a high learning mode with students, not the resident expert. Students should see faculty as dynamic learners, as risk-takers, as people whose education permits them to be continuous learners and of service to others. In a service learning course they can’t press us for expertise because we have not done epistemology with a native American tribe or someone from a Sikh community. We clearly are co-learning. We are travelers with them.
Higher education as a model for a balanced society
Service learning courses deepen learning by students and faculty, by students with faculty and the institution. This movement is at its very beginning and many different models need to be created in different settings. Service learning is going to be the next area of intellectual risk-taking that we will undertake with our students and, we hope, with our communities. If we do, the academic framework will become more responsive to the wider community, to building relationships, and to building caring as well as competence in our democratic civil society.