Experiencing Service-Learning

Preface

Preface Service-learning engages university students with people from backgrounds often different from their own. In service-learning, students and a local partner co-create answers to problematic situations, and each learns from the other. Experiencing Service-Learning is a book primarily for undergraduate students about to encounter service-learning and for professors wishing to understand service-learning from the perspective of their students. While the book covers a number of basic tenets of systems theory and learning theory, its most notable features are the examples and cases presented throughout the text. These provide varied images of students engaging in experiences new and unfamiliar. These stories and vignettes capture the initial feelings of anticipation and anxiety as students develop comfort, energy, commitment, and pride as the semester progresses. In keeping with the active-learning tenets of service-learning, this is not a book to be lectured from. Covering basic concepts, initial experiences, the implementation of programs, and attempts at culture change, the text acts as a guide for sensing, reflecting, acting, and group discussion. Inequalities, moral reasoning, reciprocity, and understanding that the work is never done are underlying themes. From their service-learning experiences students coconstruct the knowledge base of the course. Students enrolled in our service-learning courses, the experiences of whom are shared here, come from departments across the university spectrum —from business to biology, from art to engineering to human resources management and public administration. Students want to be civically engaged ; they realize that democracy is not a spectator sport and that education is the heart of democracy. For them, service-learning meets their personal need to “give back” and serves as a springboard for lifelong learning and volunteerism. We have constructed this book based on seventy years of combined experience doing service-learning in counseling, medicine, and public administration . From our local, national, and international experience we have created and taught courses that are totally concerned with service-learning, as well as courses with a service-learning component. The student stories in this text come from these courses and inspire us to continue. x Preface Some Words of Explanation With a few obvious exceptions, we have refrained from using the full names of University of Tennessee–Knoxville students who participated in our servicelearning classes and programs and whose accounts of their experiences fill many of the pages that follow. Instead, in the interests of privacy, we have used only first names and last initials. Also, to protect the privacy of those with whom our students have worked, the names of schools, elementary students, teachers and administrators, and others have been fictionalized or omitted. Throughout the book, terms such as “full-service community school” and “university-assisted community school” (and the UT programs associated with these terms) appear repeatedly. Thus, some explanations up front are in order. Reflecting an idea that has been around for decades but began to gain special traction in the late 1990s, a full-service community school has been described as “a school which serves as a central point of delivery, a single community hub for whatever education, health, social, human, or employment services have been determined locally to be needed to support a child’s success in school and in the community” (Kronick 2002, back cover). In practical terms, this means that such schools offer services like health clinics, tutoring, and noncurricular activities that help keep at-risk children safe and engaged in learning. In Knoxville, a collaborative project has developed between the University of Tennessee and five nearby Title I schools; four of them are elementary schools and one is a preschool.1 This program is ongoing and centers particularly on the 3–8 pm hours, which are a prime time for juvenile crime. Because of the focus on how the university and its resources can help these vulnerable schools, they have become known as “university-assisted schools.” As this book will show, UT student service-learners have played a major role in this program. 1. Administered through the U.S. Department of Education, Title I funds are channeled to local school districts to help meet the needs of at-risk and low-income students. “Title I schools” are those with a high concentration of such students. Ninety percent of the students in Knoxville schools served by University of Tennessee programs receive free or reducedprice lunches. The mobility rate (i.e., students changing from one school to another) for these schools ranges from 35 to 52 percent during the school year...