Faculty who teach a professional trade can use service-learning to help students recognize the public impact and potential public purposes of that trade. Many students at Hocking College who take the course on environmental restoration are studying to work in mining, or are former coal miners themselves. In this course, they render mined land environmentally viable by working on abandoned coal and strip mines. The course continues over a two-year period, but many students do not complete it: before the two years are out, they have been hired to do similar work professionally.
From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy
Web site: http://www.hocking.edu/natural_resources/environmental_restoration.htm
