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!
Your post gives very specific guidelines which are very helpful. While I think that I have done all the things in the post, my take-away is that I need to make all parts (even programmatic ones) explicit–to my students, to myself and to community partners. I so Spanish community service learning, so my students’ explicitly stated learning objectives are to improve their Spanish language skills and cultural knowledge. However, I work towards many of the other items in your post, but my students aren’t always aware of some of the other goals. I will work on this!
Ann Abbott