Service-Learning at Castleton

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SERVICE-LEARNING

What is service-learning?
Service-learning is a curricular innovation that endeavors to meet specific educational objectives of courses and curricula through work by students in, with, and for the community.
Critical to successful service-learning is the notion of mutual benefit. The activities and projects that are developed as part of service-learning courses must result in educational benefit for students in ways that tie directly to critical learning goals of the curriculum, but they must also contribute to meeting important needs identified by one or more community agencies.
Consistent with the spirit of mutuality, service-learning activities should be collaboratively planned through a process that begins when college faculty, on the one hand, and community agency representatives, on the other, separately identify their needs. The faculty member identifies learning objectives of his/her course that could possibly be met through work in the community; the community agency representative identifies agency needs that might be met by students working in a project within that agency.
Once these needs have been identified, the faculty member and agency representative sit down to discuss their respective needs and how, through a service-learning project, these needs might be connected.

What service-learning may or may not be?
"Community Service." Community service is an important value and one that our college will support concurrently with its efforts to expand service-learning. In the case of community service, however, only half of the above defined equation has been completed. Community service activities always endeavor to meet community needs - and students can learn much from community service involvement - but community service activities are typically not planned with an explicit, specific tie to the objectives of academic programs. In addition, community service is normally engaged in on a strictly voluntary basis, while service-learning activities are required components of the syllabus.
It should be added, however, that not all practices can be defined as either strictly community service or strictly service-learning. There are examples of faculty, at Castleton and elsewhere, who have offered students the opportunity to pursue community service as an elective component of the course syllabus; others, while doing this, have also required students to either keep a journal or write a reflective essay. These latter practices, particularly, begin to approximate some of the integrated benefits that service-learning provides.
"Internships or Field Experience." These are typically well-defined components of degree programs; the structure and goals of which are determined by the educational and programmatic needs of the curriculum. While planning these experiences, faculty may or may not view the needs of the community agency as secondary to the educational objectives of the curriculum. There certainly are instances in which internships and field experiences can be designed in a way that is consistent with service-learning principles, particularly field experiences found in programs such as nursing, education (student teaching), social work, criminal justice, etc., are the best examples of service-learning practices as the major purpose of these professional degrees is to prepare students for a career in community work/service.

The importance of partnerships.
The approach to service-learning that Castleton State College is pursuing emphasizes the development of long term partnerships with community agencies. This is in contrast to regarding each service-learning activity as a separate project.
In addition to long-standing college/community partnerships, the college has contacted most of the larger area community service organizations, invited them to learn about what it would mean to be a service-learning partner with Castleton, and asked them to indicate their interest. The kickoff meeting on this topic included a presentation about service-learning by Ed Zlotkowski and emphasized that the college wanted to engage in broadly focused, long-term relationships with community agencies. As part of his contribution to the evening, Ed taught us that higher education institutions and community agencies often need to learn how to talk to each other and work together. Sometimes their understanding of each other’s cultures and constraints is not clear.
Yet a key ingredient of successful, enduring partnerships is learning enough about each other to develop respect for the other organization’s values and priorities. This can take place only through deliberate effort sustained over time. Through a continuing relationship, not only will representatives of the college learn how a given community agency functions, but they will also develop a more sophisticated understanding of its needs and learning opportunities.
Community partners, on the other hand, may be more likely to support service-learning activities that, in and of themselves, do not meet pressing agency needs because those partner liaisons will understand that, over time, especially as advanced students become capable of near-professional quality contributions to the organization, far more of the agency’s needs will be met through the partnership. A long-term relationship, too, should lead to the development of trust, which will help both parties work together through the occasional "bumps in the road" that can develop in any matter as complicated as a college-community agency partnership.

Degrees of service-learning implementation.
There is a wide range of ways in which service-learning can be introduced in a college. At the simplest level, an individual faculty member could introduce a modest service-learning component into a single course, indeed, into a single section of one course. This is an important effort and one likely to reap benefits both for the students and the instructor, but such applications of service-learning principles tend to be ephemeral.

A second level at which service-learning might be implemented occurs when it is decided consistently to teach a particular course with a service-learning component. An individual faculty member could make this decision, if he/she is the only person who teaches the course, or might reflect the collective commitment of department or program faculty. Such an approach is more enduring in that the service-learning-enhanced course will, in all likelihood, be repeated, semester after semester, indefinitely. There is also reason to believe that the service-learning elements of the course will benefit from experience and, thus, be improved over time. Finally, when the addition of a service-learning component to a course reflects the collective decision of department or program faculty, presumably any new faculty who would begin to teach the same course would do so utilizing the service-learning component.

The third level of service-learning implementation occurs when faculty responsible for a given curriculum collectively decide to infuse that curriculum with the philosophy and practices of service-learning. Under these circumstances, faculty work systematically over time to develop service-learning courses at all levels of the curriculum, from freshman to senior years. With this collective, sustained, and comprehensive commitment to service-learning, it can be assured that students will progress developmentally from the easiest and the most accessible involvement in meeting community needs to, in their later years, solving important community problems through roles that approximate those of professionals in the discipline.

The fourth and most advanced stage of service-learning implementation occurs when faculty and students work together across disciplinary lines to solve significant community problems. A hypothetical, institutional response to a very real, recent community problem can illustrate how this might work.

Two years ago many in the Castleton area learned that residents of a low-income housing development called Parson’s Hill, near Castleton corners, were suffering from a suspicious pattern of illnesses that some feared might be the result of a contaminated water supply. Had Castleton State College been geared up to tackle community problems through service-learning, a coordinated institutional response might have resulted in the following activities.

- students in a chemistry class might have begun routinely testing Parson’s Hill’s water
supply

- nursing or health science majors might have initiated a series of health history interviews
of Parson’s Hill’s residents;

- geology students might have sampled soil in the area to see whether there was any
unusual incidence of contaminants in the ground;

- students in a statistics class might have analyzed epidemiological interview data to
determine whether any statistically significant patterns could be identified.

In addition to these activities, which certainly would have taught students much that related directly to the objectives of their courses, other Castleton curricula in sociology, social work, psychology, etc., may have found ways to connect to this community tragedy while also achieving important educational objectives. And, of course, in addition to the learning benefits for students, these projects collectively might have contributed critical information that could have benefited residents of the Parson’s Hill community.