A Goodbye

I am coming to the end of my term of service as an AmeriCorps*VISTA here at Clarkson College. While I haven’t been able to keep the blog as current as I would have hoped, I have truly enjoyed my time here. I have learned so much about Service-Learning and education.  I am leaving our blog in very capable hands.  I can’t wait to continue to watch and see what becomes of the program at Clarkson.

I’ve seen our program revamp the Service reporting system and really get a more cohesive idea of what Service is to our Clarkson College community.  It’s been very rewarding!  I’ve seen our students complete 8417.5 hours of Service over the Fall and Spring semester serving approximately 63,000 people.  It’s amazing the impact our students can have!

I’ve learned so much from so many of you. It’s been so wonderful to see Service from your varied perspectives and I’ve learned so much.  Thank you for sharing with me. I hope we can all continue to provide wonderful Service experiences for our students!

Identifying the Learning in Service-Learning

Welcome the third post in a three post series to help you decide if Service-Learning is appropriate for your curriculum and how to best implement it, thoughts on how to redesign your course to fit Service-Learning, and how identify what learning you will be facilitating through the project.  Be sure to check out the first post on whether or not Service-Learning will work in your class and the second post on what course design questions you should ask when adding Service-Learning to a class.  These posts are based on information from a worksheet produced by Ed Zlotkowski of Bentley University and all information is credited to him.

The last part of Ed’s process deals with how you will facilitate the learning that will take place during your Service project.  First, you need to identify what learning will actually be taking place or what you would ultimately like your students to get out of your course.

Begin by identifying some course related topics and competencies that could be related back to the Service project.  These are things that your students should be able to articulate in a class discussion, a writing assignment, or some other reflective component.  For instance, in a class on childhood development, identify some theories that the students would be able to apply to their work in a community setting with children.  It is often helpful to look at your course objectives again when trying to determine this.  With these identified, you have a physical thing that your students can use to illustrate the connections they are making.  This provides you a way to grade the learning they are achieving as opposed to the Service which is often much more difficult to assess.

Most instructors that use Service-Learning often hope that their students will gain more than just hands on application of classroom knowledge.  One thing we are frequently looking for is awareness of social issues and civic skills.  You will want to look at how this project you are proposing will help the students understand social issues better.   Will working in a low income neighborhood help them develop empathy and understanding skills?  In terms of civic skills, do you want the students to develop a better sense of how policy affects everything, better conflict resolution skills, or simply the confidence to speak up for issues they care about?  Identify and articulate these skills before you begin.  Having these expectations clearly put forth will help both you and your students to understand what they will hopefully get out of the project and what will be expected of them.

Instructors often cite personal growth as another reason they use Service-Learning.  Again, it is important to identify if there are specific areas you have in mind for the personal growth of your students.  Ed suggests picking three.  These personal growth areas that you are identifying may come in handy when you are designing critical reflection prompts for your students.  It will help to elicit the responses you need from them to prove a depth of understanding and learning.

As we all know, assessment is a key piece of Service-Learning and can be the most difficult piece.  Mr. Zlotkowski acknowledges this by suggesting that you identify the specific student and project outcomes you hope to achieve.  These need to be assessable.  To that end, be sure to create measurable indicators for yourself.  For instance, you want to increase the number of students that can be helped by a specific after school program, you will need to have a set increase you are aiming for (project outcome) and a way to measure any increase that may occur (project outcome indicator).

There are a lot of factors to consider before undertaking a Service-Learning course.  While these 3 posts haven’t touched on every aspect, we hope that they have helped you in your own process.  Please leave us some comments and let us know what you think!

Questions to Ask When Designing a Service-Learning Course

Welcome the second post in a three post series to help you decide if Service-Learning is appropriate for your curriculum and how to best implement it, thoughts on how to redesign your course to fit Service-Learning, and how identify what learning you will be facilitating through the project.  Be sure to check out the first post on whether or not Service-Learning will work in your class.  These posts are based on information from a worksheet produced by Ed Zlotkowski of Bentley University and all information is credited to him.

Today’s post will deal with Ed’s ideas on redesigning your course to fit a community-based activity.  Once you have ensured that a project is a good fit for your class, it is sometimes difficult to decide on the format.  For instance, should it be mandatory or elective, group project or individual project, a major course component or a minor one?  It is important to make sure that you have a good rationale for your choices.

For example, if you decide to make the service project mandatory, what current piece of your course will it replace?  Service-Learning is meant to be a tool, not an extra something to add to a class.  Could Service-Learning help your students learn some of the principles of your course that you used to assign in a paper?  On the other side, if you made the project an elective part of your course, how do you ensure that the entire class will benefit from the experience?  Would they benefit from an online forum discussion?

The same thought processes apply to determining rationale for individual vs group project and major vs minor course components.  It will depend on the course objectives you are trying to meet and the type of project you are doing.  It may be easier for you to keep track of 10 groups than it is to keep track of 50 students.

Another question to consider is whether or not you need to adjust what will be going on in your classroom to better fit the community-based components of your course.  For instance, you might want to move some of your syllabus items to earlier in the semester to address situations your students may encounter in the community.

As educators, most of our time is spent preparing our students for something: the next phase of the course, a profession, life in general.  Before we set our students loose on the community, we need to ensure a level of preparedness on our students part.  We need to identify the content-related knowledge they will need before they leave the classroom.  If they are working with a non-profit to help them build a website, do they have the proper tools?  Another area of preparation that is sometimes overlooked is personal and social preparedness.  Stereotypes, safety, and anxieties will need to be discussed before students begin their projects.  If there are special or unique situations that will be encountered, would it be wise to bring in a community member to assist with some of the preparation?  It might benefit the students to be able to ask specific questions of someone familiar with the organization they will be serving with.

There are so many questions we must ask ourselves before we can fully integrate a successful Service experience for our students!  I hope these posts are helping to spark that inquisitive nature we need to possess sometimes!  Stay tuned for our next post which will talk about facilitating the actual learning through community-based learning.

Can Service-Learning Work for My Class?

I am sometimes approached by faculty members asking if Service-Learning would work for their class.  In truth, it won’t work in every situation.  We’ve put together a three post series to help you decide if Service-Learning is appropriate for your curriculum and how to best implement it, thoughts on how to redesign your course to fit Service-Learning, and how identify what learning you will be facilitating through the project.  These posts are based on information from a worksheet produced by Ed Zlotkowski of Bentley University and all information is credited to him.

The first part of Ed’s development exercise deals with establishing a Community-Based Project and it’s value.  Before this can be done however, you must identify your course objectives.  Make sure they are clear, measurable objectives.  Now taking those objectives, can you identify a community project that could complement those objectives?  If you can’t find a project that meets your objectives then Service-Learning is probably not a good fit for your class.  That’s okay!  Service-Learning won’t fit every situation.  It’s a tool and like all tools you can’t use the same one for everything.

If you have come up with a potential project for your class great! Now, how will the project enhance your class?  Really think about this and come up with some concrete reasons.  This may be in the form of reinforcing course content or skills such as critical thinking.  Think about what you will tell your students.  What is the rationale you would give them for doing this project?

The last piece for today involves your community partner.  Have you talked to them at all? If not, now is the perfect time!  Have a discussion with them about whether or not they have needs that can be met through your proposed project.  Establish the concrete benefits for the community agency and/or the community in general.  In order for Service-Learning to be effective, all partners must benefit equally so this step is key. (Check out #4)

Our next post will discuss course design so stay tuned!!

5 Places to find Service Opportunities

Service-Learning and community service each have their own difficulties but one that they share is finding an agency.

Faculty and students often struggle with finding community agencies to work with for community service or Service-Learning projects.

There are many things to consider when looking for agencies.  It is important to be sure that the values of the agency align with the mission and values of your institution.  There may be some guidelines you have to stay within for your service to be accepted.  Be sure to check with your institution!  It is also important to ensure that there is open communication between you and the agency.  You want to be sure that you are meeting needs that they have (see #4 in this post).  Otherwise, what is the point?  You may have 15 fans to donate to a homeless shelter but if they don’t need them, finding storage or selling them may be more of a hassle than anything else.  So to help you find an agency and be sure you are meeting their needs, here are 5 resources to help you!

I thought I signed up for service-learning

Being the good little social media monitor that I am, I have a twitter search set up for “service-learning“.  I was browsing through that today and came across this tweet by @trucarisma:

Now obviously I don’t have all the circumstances behind this tweet, however this got my brain going. Have we let service-learning focus too much on the final project versus the process, the actual service itself?

At Clarkson, we ask our students to fill out forms after their community service and service-learning projects to log their hours.  This helps us keep track of who is going where, how many hours are being done, and the types of projects our students are creating and participating in.  One of the fields on our form reads “Provide a short description of the service you performed”.  We frequently receive responses such as “I gave a PowerPoint to the class talking about what I did” or “I did a poster presentation on my time at (agency name) and handed it in”.  Our students are, in some cases, thinking about service as the final project instead of an ongoing event.

Why is this a problem?  We want our students to understand what they are doing.  We want them to understand the definition of service-learning and what benefits it has for the community.  If they think service-learning is a final project or presentation, they may be missing the civic engagement/responsibility piece we want them to take away.  We want to bring the connection back to how what you learn in class can have concrete benefits when applied in the community.

What can we do to change this impression?  Well some of this may be coming from the students’ own understanding of service-learning.  We can help by making sure we fully explain what service-learning is and what it means to our class.  We need to be mindful of how we refer to these culminating projects at the end of service-learning as well.  By calling that final project “your service-learning project” it may contribute to the impression that service-learning is more about the final project than the process.  We want to emphasize that service-learning is an ongoing event, not just a final project.

What do your students do as a final project?  Tell us in the comments : )

So What is that Orange Button Anyways?

Some of you may have noticed the big orange buttons on the top right of the blog. They look  like this:      

Ever wonder what it does?  If you click on that button, it will bring you to page where you can subscribe to our RSS feed for free.  In other words, you will updated automatically when something new is posted here.  You can subscribe in a feed reader or through your email.  Want to know more about RSS feeds?  Check out this In Plain English video.

There are many different types of feed readers out there.  I like to use Netvibes but there are lots of great readers and aggregators out there.  When you click on the RSS feed button, it will bring you to a page that will allow you to pick your feed reader from the list presented there.  If your reader of choice isn’t there, you can grab the url from the address bar of your browser and add it manually to your feed reader.

Feed readers are ideal for people who follow lots of blogs because they can help you manage multiple subscriptions.  You have options to mark the posts  you have read and haven’t.  It lets you keep your fingers on the pulse of what you are interested in.  For instance, if you are into quilting, you might follow five quilting blogs.  A feed reader will pull all of those feeds into one central location for you.  Instead of visiting five blogs, you only have to visit one page.

The email subscription option delivers our new blog posts right to your inbox as soon as they are published.  This is a great way to keep up with blogs if you are only following a small number of blogs.  As long as you only follow a small number of blgos this way, it will keep you informed but won’t overwhelm your inbox.

So subscribe today and don’t miss a thing!

Clarkson’s Mini Grant Process

Have a great service-learning project in mind but concerned about the cost?  

Have you considered applying for a mini grant?

Hopefully you have heard that Clarkson College has an institutional service-learning grant from the Midwest Consortium.  This grant allows us to give mini grants to faculty and supervised student groups or clubs who need funding to assist with service-learning projects.  We have $8,500 to give out in amounts up to $1,000 per project.

In order to qualify for a grant, a project must meet the following criteria:

• The project should exhibit a connection between theory in the classroom and practice in the community.
• The project must meet at least one course objective.
• The project should involve working with an external a community agency.
• The project should demonstrate that it is meeting a need identified by the external community agency.

The application is very short.  It requires basic information about who is involved in the project, what the project will entail, and the budget section.  When the project is complete, a brief narrative is required to outline what the project accomplished and how the money was spent.

If you are interested or have questions, please contact service@clarksoncollege.edu.

Photo credit: jenn_jenn

Service-Learning, service learning, service-Learning, Service-learning

What is Service-Learning?

You may or may not have noticed the slight differences, but the small changes in case and punctuation can mean a big difference when working with Service-Learning.  Many times what is offered to students varies depending on the semester and the opportunities available.  But understanding the differences in Service-Learning, service learning, service-Learning and Service-learning can truly impact what the students and community agency gets in return for the experience.

In 1994, Robert Sigmon introduced a typology to help differentiate the types of Service-Learning.  This form helps to distinguish the the goals of the experiences and what the participants – students or community agencies, may receive through the experience itself.

• Service-LEARNING: Learning goals primary; service outcomes secondary.
• SERVICE-Learning: Service outcomes primary; learning goals secondary.
• service learning: Service and learning goals completely separate.
• SERVICE-LEARNING: Service and learning goals of equal weight and each enhances the other for all participants.

This typology helps clearly express the differences among other types of experiential education such as community service and internships and helps establish criteria for the Service-Learning experience itself.  While many definitions exist for Service-Learning, the typology may help you better understand the Service-Learning you wish to employ in your classroom.

For additional information on the Service-Learning differences, check out what Andrew Furco has written.

Picture credit z6p6tist6

How is Service-Learning like Punxsutawney Phil?

Punxsutawney Phil

As a young child I would rush to get up in the morning on February 2 to find out what Punxsutawney Phil had to say about the weather.  Would we have six more weeks of winter or an early spring?  My usual hope was for the ol’ groundhog to see his shadow and scurry back in to his burrow on Gobbler’s Knob.  Six more weeks of winter always meant the possibility of more snow days from school.  I was always amazed at how that unusual little creature could predict the weather – and he was always correct!   (How does this relate to Service-Learning?)

So yesterday while I was getting ready for work I began thinking about Punxsutawney Phil.  Every year hundreds of people gather in Punxsutawney (as many as 35,000 one year) to partake in the festivities.  If the sun shines bright during the morning light, then Phil retreats to his burrow for another six week stint in hibernation.  (Again, how does this relate to Service-Learning?)

Service-Learning

So, how is Service-Learning like Punxsutawney Phil, you may wonder.  Well, Punxsutawney Phil comes out once a year to predict the weather.  Once he has done so, he retreats to his comfy burrow hoping not to be bothered again until the spring weather arrives.  Oh, yes, he makes his occasional appearances on television and the Oprah show.  But we usually hear of his escapades only once a year, in the cold morning on February 2.

Is that how Service-Learning is viewed?  Is it really only addressed once a semester or so?  What is it really all about?  I mean Punxsutawney Phil surely has other things going on in his life besides what he does on February Two.  Isn’t there more to Service-Learning than the announcement that there is grant money available and examples of what students have accomplished through Service-Learning?  Of course there is!!

So why not start a blog to help share some of that information?  Through this blog you will find some useful information regarding Service-Learning – what it is, how to incorporate it into your course, what impact it has on student learning, and more.  On the right you will find various links to sites and information you might find useful and we will continue to update you with new and interesting items.

So join us on this Service-Learning – uh, journey? expedition? cross-country trek? - as we begin to explore the many facets of Service-Learning.  Hopefully, next year when Groundhog Day rolls around, we will no longer be comparing Service-Learning with Punxsutawney Phil and Service-Learning will no longer be a once a semester announcement.

Picture credit ~Sage~