Campus Compact » Program Models Service-Learning In Education Departments

Community Concepts course: developing civic competencies and civic habits

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The course uses the pedagogy of service-learning to address a general education requirement in “”Self, Society, and Equality in the U.S.”" which is intended to help students develop civic competencies and civic habits.

Community Concepts is an upper-division course based in the College of Education (EDUC 157) and cross-listed in five other colleges (Applied Sciences and Arts, Engineering, Humanities and Arts, Science, and Social Science). It is intended to provide mutual benefit to both community partners and students. For community partners, it responds to problems and issues which they identify as important, strengthening community resources. For students, its main goal is to enrich students understanding of themselves as citizens in an evolving multicultural society. It enrolls approximately 150 students a year. The course structure includes the following key components:

Fifty-two hours of supervised community service to a school or social organization that addresses the needs of an at-risk population.
A core reader with articles selected to help students understand their own service roles, the social forces that shape equality and inequality, and strategies for social action.
Large-group meetings to engage students in critical reflection through structured exercises with classmates at their own and other service sites
Weekly on-site seminars facilitated by community site coordinators to help students link their readings and experiences and to resolve problems.
Two papers plus weekly journal entries that require students to analyze their experiences in light of their readings and additional information gathered from individual library and internet research.

Through this course, our institution has created and sustained long-term partnerships with local schools and social service organizations, improved the condition of the community surrounding San Jose State University, and enabled students to encounter and learn from others different from themselves.

Contact person: Dr. Bob Gliner, Acting Faculty Director, Community Service Learning, rvgliner {at} email.sjsu(.)edu

CSU San Marcos America Reads Program

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Planning for the CSUSM America Reads program began in 1996-1997 and primarily involved service learning faculty from the College of Education, Dean Steve Littly (COE), the Financial Aid Office, and the Office of Community Service Learning. This planning was coordinated with the CSUSM Pre-Collegiate Academic Development program which also involved COE faculty as well as faculty from Literature and Writing and Mathematics, and staff from Student Outreach.

The result from the planning was the development of two service learning courses (one for America Reads and a second for PAD). America Reads Tutors are required to take their course during their first semester of work, as well as a second semester follow-up/monitoring course. The America Reads course teaches students about literacy development and provides training on tutoring, learning, and professionalism.

There are 25 work study students who perform 20 hours per week of literacy assistance in some 20 elementary schools located in Escondido and Oceanside. Students are selected from the list of potential work-study students who are Liberal Studies majors (pre-teaching). They are invited to an orientation session and then must apply. They also go through an interview process before they are selected.

Community Service Learning Program website: http://www.csusm.edu/ocsl/

High Schools in the 21st Century course: Pre-service teachers and K-12 Community Engagement

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Community engagement is an important element of education not only at the college or university level, but at the K-12 level as well. Through High Schools in the 21st Century, students in their first semester of teacher education at California State University, San Marcos, are introduced to concepts underlying community engagement in K-12 school reform. Students engage in a service project through which they identify and work closely with a local community agency. In reflecting on their experience, students explore how they could use service-learning placements in their own teaching, and develop lesson plans that incorporate the community agency they worked with as part of a hypothetical K-12 course.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Contact:
College of Education-Student Services
333 S. Twin Oaks Valley Rd
San Marcos, CA 92096-0001
(760) 750-4277

Community Service Learning Program website: http://www.csusm.edu/ocsl/

Instructional Support for Faculty

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The Service-Learning Center consults with faculty who request assistance in developing service-learning curricula. We can develop materials and approaches for specific courses or provide general information about service-learning, e.g. alternative program models, reflection activities, assessment tools, or recognized standards for quality programs. The Center currently works with a range of faculty in the humanities, sciences, and professional schools. We also sponsor the course, “”Service-Learning in Educational Reform,”" offered through the School of Education.

Website: http://gse.berkeley.edu/research/slc/

Developing alternative schools

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As school districts realize that they cannot give up on their failing students, new alternatives are being offered to help these youth succeed. In Colorado Springs, the University of Colorado is part of a team of community organizations and schools offering a new program specifically designed for students who have been expelled or adjudicated in the county. The program, which will serve 400 to 500 such youth, includes a number of educational recreational activities, lessons taught by various community organizations, mentoring relationships with college students, and an alternative middle school and high school in which students engage in hands-on lessons and are encouraged to pace their own learning.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Central Connecticut State University Campus-Community Partnerships

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At CCSU, community involvement is present at all levels and structures of the university. CCSU has a long tradition of campus-community partnerships, which are an integral part of many courses.

Some majors have community-focused internships that are applicable to the students’ program of study. For students in teacher preparation programs, there are unique opportunities for placement in a network of professional development schools. Students in majors other than teacher preparation also complete internships that involve volunteer community service as part of their program preparation. Some of the academic programs that participate are: art, criminal justice/criminology, English, environmental science, geography, political science, social work, sociology, and theater. Recently, the Psychology Department added a requirement for their BA program for students to take two courses that focus on ethical issues and require participation in student and/or community organizations.

Excerpted from Diversity Digest Summer 2001

“”Introductory Education”" course

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All students interested in studying education at Brevard Community College must take Introductory Education, which includes a service-learning component. Six service hours spent tutoring children in the Brevard County Public School System supplements time spent observing classrooms and reading and writing about teaching. This brief introductory experience can help avert the problem of students realizing only after it is too late that the real world of teaching is different from what they had imagined.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

WRITE TO READ

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Designed to target at-risk middle school students needing remedial instruction in writing and reading, the program works to improve student skills by one to three grade levels through twice-weekly tutoring/teaching sessions, matching GC&SU education majors with students in the juvenile justice system.

Contact: Teresa Taylor at (478) 445-5772 or ttaylor {at} gcsu(.)edu

“”Education in a Democratic Society”" course

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In the fall of 1998, the Department of Elementary Education launched a new curriculum that opened an exciting chapter in the history of American education. The department began in 1995 to create a curriculum that would equip teachers with new tools and new attitudes. Every early childhood and elementary teacher graduating from Ball State, we believe, should be prepared to be a reflective practitioner, a lifelong learner, and an active and thoughtful citizen.

EDEL 100, Education in a Democratic Society, offers an initial investigation into teaching and the teaching profession. The purpose of this course is “”to introduce teaching as a profession that is influenced by multiple factors including self, child, family, community, and society.”" Students participate in civic activities as a way of coming to understand children and the various conditions that influence the teaching profession. All prospective early childhood and elementary teachers take this required course.

In this service-learning course, students are required to provide a minimum of 50 hours of service in clinical field settings. Our early childhood and elementary education majors receive a variety of experiences representing a broad range of society. Their sharing during service seminars is exciting and their reflection papers are often impressive. They are being exposed to marvelous opportunities to look at the world in which our children are growing up. Through this course, most of our students expand their view of society and the civic role they can play as potential professional educators.

In teacher education, this union of service and learning is particularly important. By paving an avenue for students to reflect on how they themselves learn, service learning can help bring personal coherence to each student s understanding of pedagogical theories and practices. In addition, by immersing students in the community outside of the university or lab-school, service learning compels them to develop a broader picture of where schools and the business of education fit into the complex social and political system of American democracy.

Through these learning experiences, Ball State students explore trends which shape education in a democratic society, engage in civic activities which influence the lives of children, examine professional traits and strategies necessary for successful teaching and learning, develop an understanding of the complexities of teaching and learning, identify and reflect on personal education experiences that influence teaching practices, and begin an inquiry into the nature and aims of education in a democratic society.

Course instruction time includes activities to help students share what they are learning with others as well as to reflect on their work experiences in light of their academic studies. And through this course, Elementary Education faculty are themselves practicing service learning, renewing their interests in the themes of education and democracy, and becoming teachers of teachers for the twenty-first century.

Contact person: Lawrence Smith, Chair, Department of Elementary Education, lsmith {at} bsu(.)edu
On the web:
http://www.bsu.edu/news/article/0,1299,368~~,00.html
http://www.neiu.edu/~team/ripple/2000/miels.htm
http://www.iyi.org/press_releases/Larry.html

Education majors take on a K-12 service-learning project

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Service learning is changing education at every level: from kindergarten to graduate school. In Muncie, Indiana, 125 students at Northside Middle School got a taste of service-learning when their classes were transformed by the work of a class of education majors at nearby Ball State University. The university students worked with five classes of sixth graders, coming into their classrooms once a week to help them develop a service-learning project. In this way the college students, future teachers, learned the strength of teaching through service-learning, while helping a K-12 school to adopt this innovative teaching method.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

E-mail: Jill Miels, 00JCMIELS {at} BSUVC.bsu(.)edu

Educational psychology course: Knowing your own learning

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Students who enroll in The Psychology of Learning at Bellarmine College, incorporate service-learning as a natural extension of their coursework. Students document the learning that they experience in a service project of their choosing, and apply the educational principles of reinforcement, observational learning, and modeling in a paper that they write about the experience at the end of the class. In this way, students learn as much from the way they process the experience as they do from the experience itself, and recognize the importance of relating the two.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Website: http://cas.bellarmine.edu/departments/psychology/index.asp

An Education Department studies how to implement the principles of service-learning

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Interns from Loyola College with the administration and staff at Lansdowne Middle School engaged in a year long commitment to design and implement projects that would meet the Seven Best Practices Model of Service-Learning. Instructional workshops were presented throughout the year to train and assist teams of teachers and interns in how to view service-learning as an instructional method. This led to a better understanding of the guiding principles which enhanced the quality of the projects. Five teams of 6-8 teachers with interns mixed among the teams worked with students in grades 6-8. Each team gathered information from the students who live in the surrounding areas. This information led to a discussion and decision of what community needs could be addressed. The projects included environmental works in the community, family help and safety, understanding differences, (there is a large population of ESOL students in the school), to a walk-a-thon to raise money for the community. What we learned from the year long study was the need to continue professional development in this area, to align courses within Elementary and Secondary Education Programs to include the principles of service-learning and that finally, service-learning is a valuable way of connecting learning communities together. It is a labor intensive methodology, but the gains in student understanding, staff development and community involvement far outweigh the time it takes to design a quality project.

Service Learning Practicum for Special Education majors

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This service-learning course has been developed as a first of many practicum experiences courses for Coppin State College Special Education majors. Its purpose being to enhance these students in the areas of civic literacy, cultural diversity and social conscious. To this end, this course has been designed to meet the transition needs of children with disabilities from elementary to middle school. This project will provide: transitioning elementary school children with special education needs with

The aforementioned components of this service learning course will be conducted by the Coppin State College students enrolled.

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant in Service-Learning Program

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Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) in Service-Learning Program Community Service Programs piloted an undergraduate teaching assistant (UTA) for service-learning program in fall 1999. UTAs enroll in EDUC 388 Special Topics in Education and EDCI 498 Special Problems in Teaching for a total of four credits. The program meets three objectives: provide assistance to faculty who integrate service-learning into their teaching; help students explore the art of teaching, especially using service-learning pedagogy; and support students and faculty as partners in connecting service-learning theory and practice.

UTA-SL program web page: http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/FacRes/CTE/utaslcover.html

For further information, contact Marie Troppe at mtroppe {at} accmail.umd(.)edu

English as a second language tutors and mentors

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Every year, Jody Euteneuer, the service-learning coordinator at Moorhead State University in Minnesota, makes the rounds to education classes recruiting students to serve as tutors in English as a second language. Between 200 and 400 students participate in the program each semester. The program starts with training from local organizations that serve non-English speaking populations. Students then enter high school classrooms, where they serve as mentors to youth while providing them ESL education. The mentors, many of whom are current or potential education majors and often find that the time helps them evaluate their own ability as teachers.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

SLATE Subgrantee Institutions: Strengthening and Assessing the Integration of Service-Learning into Teacher Education

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Over 500 students per year enrolled in Augsburg s Teacher Education Program. The program is particularly focused on education in the urban environment and the curriculum emphasizes multicultural education, active learning and the development of the classroom teacher. Augsburg has received service-learning grants from Lean and Serve America through AACTE which has enabled the Education Department to build a core of faculty committed to making service-learning an integral part of the curriculum. Integrating service-learning into Teacher Education at Augsburg has encompassed both using service-learning as a pedagogical technique in the higher education setting and preparing pre-service teachers to integrate service-learning into their repetoire of teaching strategies for use with K-12 students.

Website: http://www.augsburg.edu/education/s-l/

Various service-learning opportunities for students

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The mission of Concordia University, St. Paul is to prepare its students for thoughtful and informed living, for dedicated service to God and humanity and for the enlightened care of God s creation. In light of this mission, from the first day students set foot on the Concordia campus, they are presented with opportunities to engage in extra-curricular activities on campus and in activities that serve the community. These extra-curricular opportunities prepare them for achieving academic goals, as presented in the philosophy and practice of Campus Compact.

Service learning at Concordia University, St. Paul is incorporated into the curriculum in a variety of ways. As in many institutions, some professors and some courses lend themselves more effectively to such academic involvement in community issues. For example, students in the College of Education and Director of Christian Education (DCE) programs complete 100 service learning hours as part of their Human Relations course requirements.

Among the many service learning opportunities available, students may assist in the classrooms at neighboring Higher Ground Academy, tutor students at Central High School or work with teens in the Future Force program. Particularly helpful is nearby Skyline Towers, a low-income housing development at which more than a dozen different languages are spoken. Students have been involved in research about the challenges and strengths of new immigrant families. One recent student, as a result of her participation in this type of research, changed her vocational goal from being a family counselor to being an international family counselor. Other students have conducted research and interviews to gain a better understanding of the relationship of immigration, global economics and global politics. Through education courses students are better able to understand the changing challenges in education and the different learning styles of individuals. They also become aware of how community and family pressures have an impact on learning.

Concordia University faculty and staff lead by example, making it clear to students that involvement and commitment are the keys to civic responsibility. Concordia encourages its entire campus community of students, faculty and staff to connect with their campus and their community, thereby building a solid foundation on which to build a life of service to others.

K-16 Service Learning Collaboration

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The Education Department of the University of New Hampshire and the Eastern Region School-to-Work Partnership proposed to develop a K-16 Service Learning Collaboration to facilitate the integration of service learning within the teacher education programs at the University of New Hampshire and to serve as an effective organizational framework for K-16 educators involved in developing service learning opportunities for their students. The AmeriCorps Member assisted in the development of the project and had primary responsibility for organizing service learning workshops and forums, organizing informational resources, supporting new and existing projects, developing selected school based pilot projects, working with teaching interns to develop new projects, coordinating communications between university and school based faculty, students and administration, and ongoing project evaluation.

Project SO-PREPARED: after-school enrichment program

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Project SO-PREPARED for Citizenship is a Rivier College service-learning initiative presently entering its fifth year of operation in the greater Nashua, New Hampshire area. Drawing on the talents and energy of both college and high school students enrolled in service learning courses, this weekly after school enrichment program offers citizenship training and character education to students at two local elementary schools.

At the heart of Project SO-PREPARED is the four-person learning team. Education majors, students from other majors at Rivier College, and students from Nashua High School and Bishop Guertin High School work with students from Dr. Crisp Elementary School and Presentation of Mary Academy in weekly after school meetings to develop skills, tutor, socialize, and engage in recreation activities. Through these activities, the program seeks to build character and create responsible citizens by working on such skills as collaboration, problem-solving, active listening, and mentoring through various projects in art, mathematics, and literature. The after school lessons are coordinated with monthly character education themes from the formal elementary level curriculum.

The after school program is supported by over thirty service-learning courses at Rivier College. Service learning is a graduation requirement for Rivier students, and most fulfill this curricular obligation by taking a “”plus one”" credit option attached to one of their regular classes. Under this arrangement, students earn an additional academic credit for a class by performing a service activity (such as Project SO-PREPARED) and doing additional readings, papers, journals, portfolios, etc. related to their service project. Faculty development of the “”plus one”" options was made possible by generous funding from the Lilly Endowment and the Council of Independent Colleges. Alternatively, students may enroll in SL 100 Learning and Serving in Community, an independent one credit service class specifically geared to Project SO-PREPARED, which is also open, free of charge, to the high school students participating in the program.

Administration and coordination of Project SO-PREPARED is under the able leadership of Professor Howard Muscott of the Education Department, in cooperation with Rivier’s Center for Peace and Social Justice. A formal planning and implementation team, composed of representatives from Rivier, the two high schools, and the two elementary schools, oversees the ongoing progress of SO-PREPARED.

Contact person: Darlene Nadeau, Coordinator for Service Learning
Service Learning home page: http://www.rivier.edu/academics/service-learn/

Service Learning: A Partnership in Education course

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Many schools of education use their local school districts for teacher training. At New England College, instead of using local schools, they partner with them. Professor Deborah Nitschke-Shaw teaches a course entitled Service Learning: A Partnership in Education. Through the class, collaborative teams are formed, made up of Professor Nitschke-Shaw, three students, a K-8 teacher, and a supporting AmeriCorps member. These teams have developed new after-school activities and K-8 leadership programming at local schools, created a training module for teachers to use service-learning in their classrooms. The course continues to foster a new sense of sharing and collaboration between school and college.