ISI Faculty Resource Center

Granting your premises, Gerson, what sorts of guidelines would you propose to determine which sorts of activities count as legitimate service experiences? I'm not terribly familiar with these initiatives, but I imagine that a lot of the activities that fulfill service learning requirements at most schools are useless or worse.

Christopher Newport University has recently begun a service learning center on campus, which is called the CNU Center for Service Learning and Social Entrepreneurship. Here is the link:

http://service.cnu.edu/index.cfm

It is not part of our general education curriculum, but we do have a leadership program on campus and those students in it are required to engage in some activities that include outreach to the local community.

Some academic classes, moreover, have what are called "service components" embedded in them. For instance, my department's Public History course has a service requirement that students must complete. Working in teams of three along with staff members from the Mariners' Museum (located near our campus), they are writing and producing podcasts which will highlight certain exhibits in the museum. Those podcasts will then be posted on the Museum's website.

The exercise gives students hands-on experiences working with others in the community and their efforts will help highlight this museum's outstanding collection maritime artifacts.

Many of the service learning projects including working with disadvantaged people in the community, but the general purpose is to help establish campus-community partnerships as well as provide students with the opportunity to apply what they learn in the classroom with real-life experiences.

I haven't been involved in the Center and I'm of two minds about it. I think the experiences students gain can be highly useful and beneficial, especially in terms of them gaining a deeper understanding of their larger community and its needs; but like Patrick pointed out, I also believe that service-learning programs in general -- unless rigorously overseen and monitored -- can indeed degenerate into useless activities or worse.

Coming from a large state university, and speaking from the experience of having been involved in a teaching training program that included service learning, all I can say is that these programs may sound all noble, but they are absolute nightmares. In short, they quickly become conduits for professors to fill their pet social causes with worker bees. The educational value to the student is virtually nil (except that they learn that coerced voluntarism is a really bad idea). We went through the "service learning" fad in the late 1990s and it seems to have fizzled out except among a couple stalwarts.

I remember being taken on a tour of one of the service learning sites for a class on global hunger. The site was a local food bank. Students were required to pack grocery bags for about 2 - 4 hours per week. First, I'm not sure how packing groceries at a local food bank helps people understand global hunger, but it is what it is. Second, and more damning, I had the nerve to ask if students got to interview or just talk with the food bank clientele as they came it. "No! Absolutely not! That would violate confidentiality!" Okay, so all students did was hang out in the back room putting cans of Nally chili into bags. They would have been better off doing this at the local grocery store and learning how to budget themselves on an entry-level salary. That would be infinitely more instructive than providing unpaid labor at a food bank.

I could go on with many more stories, but the bottom line is that students really don't get enough exposure to charitable work for them to really understand what they are doing. Plus, the whole idea of doing community service for a grade takes away the understanding of what true charity is.

If I had to assign students to do a service learning project, I would assign them to be waiters or waitresses at a Denny's restaurant. There they have to learn how to deal with people like me and still keep a smiling face. Actually, that is not hard since I love Dennny's (Grand Slam with bacon and biscuits!) and I enjoy talking with the wait staff. I think half the prima donna students that we have to teach should actually just be required to eat at a Denny's every week, and sit at the counter to talk with the folks who are there.

And I really pray to God that you are not taking all that philosopher king nonsense in Plato seriously. I find that too many academics that I know take it upon themselves to be the philosopher kings for the world and that has only resulted in the creation of an academic aristocracy that is undermining the core principles of freedom that our country was founded upon. I am horrified when students come to my office after having taken a political philosophy course and think that Plato's phil-king idea is a goal to strive for. I sit 'em down and tell 'em to get a good listening of Charlie Daniels 'cause he has a lot more sense than any of those ancient Greek guys.

There are dangers of service learning as described above, however, if done correctly, service learning can be incredibly beneficial to the students. The question is not only what sort of guidelines are in place for service learning but, more importantly, who is supervising these activities: someone who has the students' interests at heart or someone with a particular ideological agenda?

The idea of service learning sounds all nifty and such -- "putting ideas into action" -- but there is a basic limitation that any such program faces: time.

I teach on a quarter system and we have about 40-50 contact hours with students during a ten week period depending on the course. Assuming that students devote 2 hours of outside work per classroom contact hour, you can expect students to devote a total of 150 hours to your class. (If you disagree with these numbers, feel free to modify them to fit your situation or expectations).

If you plan to insert a "service learning component" into a pre-existing syllabus you have the choice of either increasing the work students devote to your course or reducing the pre-existing amount of work you expect from them. Let's think through this.

It was recommended at the service learning propaganda meeting that I attended that students have at least 2 hours of service per week. For a ten week quarter, that is 20 additional hours. Students would now be expected to devote 170 hours to the course. Some students may do this happily, but I am also betting that there will be some substitution between service hours and hours they devote to outside reading. Indeed, they may even start skipping lecture. If you don't think this is the case, I recommend you retake your micro-econ 101 class.

Alternatively, you could reduce the workload of students by about 20 hours by either cutting reading loads or cancelling some course meetings.

So that represents the costs of service learning in terms of time. What are the benefits.

Well, you could hope that the 20 hours of service students are expected to do will represent 20 hours of what you would have them doing before. But is two hours a week really enough to learn a practical skill? Doubtful. Consider that the average new fast food employee will have to undergo about 3 weeks of on-the-job training before they are even competent working at what we consider to be relatively "low skill" tasks. (I actually have a great deal of admiration for fast food workers by the way, having been a pizza guy once.) We are talking about 120 hours of training in the fast food joint compared to the 20 hours you are asking of your students.

In short, I think the minimum amount of time we could require for "service" is in no way compensated for by the costs incurred by changing your syllabus or have students change it for you.

Admittedly there are constraints with incorporating a service learning component into one's courses. In addition to what I have said about having the right faculty supervising service learning, I would add that service learning may be approriate for only certain type of courses and/or disciplines. For example, I could envision service learning being incorporate into an urban politics course effectively but it probably wouldn't work in a political theory course.

Lee,

I would argue from experience to tell you that the amount of time that you could get students to commit to service learning is not worth the time away from the classroom learning how to think -- even with classes such as urban politics. Seriously, what could students do in a "service" capacity in urban government for 2 hours per week that would help them learn something? Most city bureaucrats or politicians will consider having a student hanging around for 2 hours a week to be a total nuisance and will invariably give them nonsensical busy work (cf. my example of packing grocery bags at a food bank).

Any more time than 2 hours per week you might as well start asking a student to consider a full-blown internship instead.