Description
This volume offers hands-on guidance for creating effective service-learning courses in the community college setting. Themes addressed include syllabus design, course models, learning outcomes assessment, and documenting innovative teaching for faculty advancement.
By Donna Duffy, Robert Franco, Amy Hendricks, Roger Henry, Marina Baratian, and Tanya Renner, with a foreword by Kay McClenney.
What leaders in the field are saying about Service-Learning Course Design for Community Colleges:
This book, like the diverse student population served by community colleges, provides wide-ranging perspectives on service-learning. From developing models to assessing outcomes, the chapters focus on providing beneficial learning experiences to community college students. As this book demonstrates, even with the family and work challenges faced by many community college students, service learning can be a meaningful part of their education.
Jane Karas
President
Flathead Valley Community College
A book long overdue that moves the field forward. Filled with theoretical and practical information, Service-Learning Course Design for Community Colleges is useful for the beginning or experienced service-learning practitioner and suffused with strategies and tools for all. A must to have in your bookcase, classroom, and office. It will not get dusty!
Roger Henry
Director, Service-Learning
Brevard Community College
See also: The Community's College: Indicators of Engagement at Two-Year Institutions.
Sample Chapter
Introduction
Campus Compact, Service-Learning, and Community College Engagement
Donna Killian Duffy
Why is there a need for a book on service-learning course design specifically for community colleges? By incorporating community work into the curriculum, service-learning not only addresses community needs but also helps students acquire hands-on experience that enhances academic learning. In the community college setting, service-learning thus can provide a valuable link between students' academic and community lives. Other benefits of service-learning, from retention to workforce readiness, are also well suited to the community college experience. Although many resources are available to help campuses incorporate service-learning into the curriculum, including several seminal works from Campus Compact (see, for example, Fundamentals of Service-Learning Course Construction, Heffernan, 2001), few address the specific needs of community colleges.
The idea for this book grew out of Campus Compact's Indicators of Engagement Project, which documented and disseminated best practices of civic engagement at different institutional types, including community colleges. This multi-year project examined engagement "indicators" across five broad categories: institutional culture, faculty roles and rewards, mechanisms and resources, community-campus exchange, and curriculum and pedagogy. One of the resulting publications, The Community's College: Indicators of Engagement at Two-Year Institutions (Zlotkowski et al., 2004), provides models and best practices within each category of engagement, drawn from community colleges across the country. The current volume delves more deeply into "curriculum and pedagogy," focusing on the practical aspects of implementing curriculum changes to support engagement at community colleges.
Faculty at community colleges contribute to engagement strategies at many levels, but their main focus is on creating engagement and community with students in their classrooms. As Spitzberg and Thorndike (1992) have written, "the classroom is the most logical, most visible, most ubiquitous, and most neglected place for community on campus. It is a lost opportunity of the first order" (p.116).
Faculty members can use service-learning to enhance the classroom community as well as to support civic engagement in local communities, but they have many questions about how to design courses in order to maximize both learning and community. The goals of this volume are to assist faculty in answering their questions about service-learning course design and to guide them in using the curriculum to advance engagement on their campuses.
The Next Level of Excellence
In Creating Significant Learning Experiences, Dee Fink (2003, p. 174) notes:
Teaching well, to use an old adage, is not a destination but a journey. Even though there will likely be very good experiences along the way, one has to always look at oneself and in essence say: "This was good but not as good as it could be. I need to keep on working at it, to find some way of taking it to the next level of excellence."
Faculty engaged in service-learning at community colleges are committed to creating significant learning experiences for their students. These professors often report exciting experiences on their learning journeys but also report having limited time for analyzing such experiences because of the demands of high course loads and diverse student needs. In this volume, several practitioners with wide experience have stepped back to reflect on their service-learning work and to offer strategies for moving to the next level of excellence.
As educators we are part of a larger system of higher education with a unique opportunity to fulfill the community college's role. A key aspect of this role is to create a "genuinely egalitarian system of education that fosters the development of a citizenry fully equal to the arduous task of democratic self-governance" (Brint & Karabel, 1989, p. 232); bear in mind that community colleges were initially referred to as America's "democracy colleges."
The opportunity to serve as a democracy college can be overlooked by faculty as daily pressures to organize classes and correct papers demand immediate attention. Yet this opportunity is critical. As Robert Franco suggests in Chapter 1, "community colleges can catalyze ideas, issues, practices, and policies so that a renewed civic energy results in stronger citizens and communities." How can we be more deliberate in constructing service-learning courses into attainment pathways both for baccalaureate success and for civic outcomes? One practical suggestion is to assess the learning outcomes of courses?and to examine these outcomes within the broader student experience. As Franco emphasizes, for service-learning attainment pathways to be successful, "faculty and community partners need to take collective responsibility for helping students learn collective responsibility." In the following chapters of the volume, each author shares an aspect of teaching practice that will help in moving students closer to the goal of learning collective responsibility.
In Chapter 2, Amy Hendricks provides a detailed guide to designing a course syllabus that includes a service-learning component, with concrete advice for those new to this process as well as strategies for experienced practitioners to take this work to new levels. Having a vision of our institutions as democracy colleges is uplifting, but it needs to be supported with concrete ideas for dealing with a classroom of diverse students who may vary widely in their passion for significant learning experiences. Often community issues that resonate with students' lives provide excellent ways to engage students in learning course concepts. But, as Hendricks states, the issues addressed by students' service must come from the community, not from students or faculty. Given this reality, how can faculty select community sites that will help students achieve their course objectives? What types of activities at the site will have the greatest impact on students' learning? This chapter reviews such questions and includes examples from a wide range of courses to provide answers.
The majority of community college students are juggling multiple responsibilities in their lives. This means that most classes at community colleges include service-learning as an option in the course, rather than as a requirement. However, as Marina Baratian demonstrates in Chapter 3, creating a course that requires service as the main focus can result in a customized experience unique to the personal needs and goals of students in the class. This chapter presents a continuum of choices for stand-alone courses, from a three-credit Community Involvement course to an Honors Community Involvement course to a Service-Learning Fourth-Credit Option. Baratian includes specific details about each of these alternatives so readers can easily employ the model or adjust it for different course needs. Faculty who have been using service-learning as a course option for some time may find that moving to a stand-alone model represents a way of taking their effective practice to Fink's "next level of excellence."
In Chapter 4, Tanya Renner focuses on the importance of assessing service-learning outcomes and notes that through such assessments, institutions may find that they are simultaneously assessing results related to efforts to become more learner-centered. The emphasis on assessment of student learning outcomes is central at most community colleges and, as Renner suggests, may help to demonstrate why service-learning is an effective vehicle for creating significant learning experiences. Renner cites concrete examples of assessment work and urges community college faculty to move beyond local knowledge. As she states, "Our expertise in community partnering and practical measures of learning are fundamental to understanding the impact of service-learning. We have a responsibility and an opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way to the research on this topic."
Chapter 5 shifts the focus from students to faculty by suggesting ways that practitioners engaged in service-learning can add to the growing knowledge of the scholarship of teaching and learning. It notes that just as students involved in service-learning gain insight into their experiences through reflection, faculty engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning gain insight into their practice by analyzing and reflecting on student work. If faculty can begin placing the local findings they observe in classrooms within a larger framework of research, their work will have more value for the broader academic community.
Community Colleges as Service-Learning Leaders
Community colleges can make important contributions to service-learning in higher education through a deeper analysis of student learning and a clear explanation of practices for strengthening communities in and outside of classrooms. Faculty can serve as bridges between high schools and universities, as comfortable partners with the local community, and as reflective practitioners who demonstrate in concrete ways how service-learning can create transformative learning experiences for a diverse population of students. We hope this book will help them achieve all of these goals.
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