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presentations
> AAC&U 90th Annual Meeting
Date: January 21-24, 2004Title: "Educating Students for Social Responsibility: A Model for Collective Action and the Critical Reflection of Our Practice" Presented by: Peggy Chang (Executive Director, The Venture Consortium), Ken DeBlois (Program Coordinator, The Venture Consortium), Sean Flaherty (Professor of Economics & Director, Service Learning Program, Franklin & Marshall College), Pamela Kirwin Heintz (Director, Center for Community and Public Service, Syracuse University), William C. Meinhofer (Director, Donelan Office of Community-Based Learning, College of the Holy Cross), Sam Speers (Director, Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, Vassar College). The following notes and excerpts are from Sean Flaherty's and Sam Speer's portions of this presentation. They represent part of the dialogue that Venture colleagues have with each other and the larger discussion that occurred with those gathered at this presentation. Sean Flaherty: Good afternoon. I'm an economics professor, first and foremost, and more Johnny-come-lately the director of Franklin and Marshall College's service-learning program. I'd like to talk about three things here today. The first is that we at F&M were very pleased to host a meeting of faculty and administrators from Venture Consortium schools last Spring. Hosting that meeting fulfilled a grant obligation we had to the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), from which we have received a generous Learn and Serve grant. Our agreement with CNCS called for us to bring people from other institutions together with our own to talk about the successes and failures, if you will, and more broadly the challenges of implementing service-learning in a liberal arts setting. When Kent Trachte, the Dean of the College and Venture's (then) board chair, asked me if I would consider merging his need to host a Venture conference with the service-learning program's plans for an intercollegiate conference, I jumped at the chance because it offered such a potentially fruitful prospect. And, indeed, it did turn out to be just that. We had very interesting and useful discussions among, for the most part, like-minded faculty and administrators, who brought their own institutional experiences to bear on the common questions and challenges that we all face as we seek to find new and better ways to educate our students with an aim toward informing and enhancing their sense of social responsibility and active citizenship. The conference yielded much good conversation and two-way learning. And Bill Meinhoff tells me that the two faculty members who attended from Holy Cross judged that get-together perhaps the best small conference they had ever attended. It was indeed quite invigorating , and that experience gives me hope that we can continue in the context of the Venture relationship to talk together and perhaps even to develop common curricular and co-curricular programming that we can use to improve the education for civic engagement that we provide to our students. The second thing I want to discuss, from a faculty perspective in particular, is some of the challenges I face both in my context as a teacher of service learning courses and also as the representative of service learning on my campus. I don't know how many of you have in fact taught a service-learning course, but you are all probably aware at least of the fact that service learning is by definition a credit bearing exercise whereby students, as part of their course experience, are sent off campus to serve real community needs and to learn while so doing. In this context, they presumably make meaningful connections between that experience and the texts, lectures and discussions that they are experiencing in the classroom itself. The challenge that I find most problematic for myself as a teacher of service-learning courses is the question of how to evaluate and support students as service -learners. It's easy enough for me in an economics class to determine whether my students are learning what they're supposed to be learning, whether, say, they know how to manipulate a supply curve or a demand curve to determine whether a certain circumstance should lead to an increase or decrease in the price of widgets, or what have you. The challenge in service-learning courses that I find most stressful, if you will, is my much greater sense of insecurity about whether my students are indeed learning as opposed simply to 'experiencing.' My concern is with whether I can give them the kind of reflective response and feedback to their own reflections that helps them to solidify the learning that I hope they might get as a result of their experiences. What you don't have in a service-learning course is a kind of 'common text' or 'common experience.' I'm not with my students as they experience the world beyond the classroom. So I don't know for sure what it is precisely that they have experienced. I don't know what, if I were there with them, I would have expected them to be able to understand and draw out and connect to what we are reading and studying in the course in question. And so, it is with a sense of unease that I attempt to evaluate what they have done when they in fact report back to me via reflections or discussions, or otherwise, what they claim to have learned. The other part of my unease or of the challenge that I face with respect to service-learning is representing the pedagogy of service-learning as a worthy contender to the more traditional pedagogy of the academy and of my particular institution. While there are a growing number of my fellow faculty at F&M who are enamored of the possibilities of service learning, having tried it once or twice and being encouraged to carry on, there remains nevertheless a substantial body of faculty who are reluctant to do so or to welcome its growing presence within the College's overall curriculum. These people recognize and hold out to me what, as an economist, I recognize to be the 'opportunity costs' of service-learning, both within a particular course and across the curriculum as a whole. Bona fide service-learning, in my opinion, does indeed come with costs attached in terms of some necessary truncation of coverage of the traditional material that one can honorably think ought to be presented in a particular course or in an entire college curriculum. Issues such as this present intellectual challenges that I don't know quite how to solve on my own, so I do very much enjoy and appreciate the exchange of ideas that happens at meetings such as this and with my colleagues from the Venture Consortium. The last thing I want to mention is that this very semester, just a week old, I am along with Kent Trachte and another colleague teaching a new course called the Citizenship Seminar. In this course we have brought together a small group of juniors and seniors to read and discuss just what this thing called 'citizenship' is all about, and to consider whether they have been well and properly educated in their undergraduate years to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. We have just finished reading Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity, a classical defense of reform in liberal education, in which she articulates a powerful argument in favor of the kinds of liberalizing reforms within the undergraduate curriculum that call for the greater interaction of our students with 'the other,' at both the local and the international level, and for their deepened practice of Socratic introspection. This, of course, requires the help of their professors to teach them how to use rationality and logic to examine their own ideas and beliefs as well as those of the others whose ideas they must be challenged to explore, all toward the end of establishing themselves as caring and informed 'citizens of the world.' We have -students and faculty alike- found this Citizenship Seminar to be a very interesting and gratifying experience. I want to end by mentioning the hope that I've expressed to Peggy Chang and to several others in the group here that faculty and administrators across the Venture Consortium institutions will continue to engage in cross-fertilizing work and ongoing discussions about the best ways of engaging the 'educating for citizenship' question at our respective institutions. (back to top) Samuel Speers:
I approach the questions we're asking about education for engagement from my perspective as a director of religious and spiritual life. My office is working to ask the question of what it means to make both democratic formation and spiritual formation a part of the liberal arts education Vassar offers. Of course linking democratic formation and spiritual formation at a college that understands itself as a secular institution is itself an interesting project. We could talk at length about such questions - and I appreciate the Venture Consortium because it's been open to them. I'm also excited to see these questions are themselves being addressed at a number of sessions here, including Sandy Austin's presentation of trends in student spirituality (though I also note that there is no category for whatever nomenclature we give to campus spiritual leaders these days in the AACU website registration - clearly the reconsideration of spiritual life in the liberal arts is a new conversation). I mention my office's interest in both spiritual and democratic formation at the outset, because both kinds of formation open up in different ways a set of conversations I take it we are here to address - which is the question of praxis, or, as Michel de Certeau notes, of how action is a way of knowing. As de Certeau also observes, there is a close bond between decision and knowledge. The old community organizing adage puts this link in plain language: 'It's not that we think our way into new ways of acting, but that we act our way into new ways of thinking.' My office's overview statement in your handout gives you some sense of the programs through which we are trying to help students act their way into new ways of thinking. We place a strong emphasis on introducing students to the language and insights of asset-based development. We're developing ongoing co-curricular materials and workshops around such critical questions as: race and white privilege, contemplative practices and social engagement, coalitions and collaboration, and more. We also have found hands-on projects in public art to be an exciting way for students and community members to experience their power - we point to the transformative energy of such projects with another motto, 'when we make things together, we discover that together we can make things change.' If I told any story about what this pedagogical approach to community engagement can look like, I'd include a student who got it that our programs in public art are really about community change. She was the driving force in persuading the college to turn an empty lot near campus it recently bought into a community garden for community arts - my office is serving as a kind of incubator for the project as the group develops enough strength to be self-sustaining. It's a nice parable of a student turning her training in assets-based development into a new way of seeing not only her community, but also the college itself and its resources. If I can point, as can all of my able colleagues here, at specific program successes, I don't want to end here. For what I've found helpful about the Venture consortium is that we are colleagues who respect each other enough not to be defensive about the challenges we face. Such colleagues are invaluable, because defensiveness stifles creativity and thoughtfulness. One challenge we're trying to face on a campus that is justly proud of its progressive history, has to do with the ways, to re-phrase Marx' famous saying, that we make 'programming the opiate of the masses.' I realize there's a certain irony in a religious life director transposing Marx like this. But it's important to say this pointedly. Programs do become opiates for us when we think that we've done something just because we've done a program. Our temptation, perhaps especially for the idealist in us, is to fill the anxiety and outrage we have about the brokenness and injustices of our time with too many vague programs that lack a clear sense of goals and hoped-for outcomes. As Thomas Merton has famously noted, one sign of the violence of our times is the readiness of the activist to take on too many causes. So one of the questions we are trying to ask is not how to stop doing programs, but how to turn our programs into pedagogies. How do we see our programs as part of a strategy? How do we make sure that our programs, our meetings, our conferences, are not ends in themselves, but goals that are part of strategic planning with ongoing expectations and evaluations? So one way we are challenging ourselves to turn programs into pedagogies is to begin asking ourselves, with every program, what are the concrete changes we envision, and what are the steps we need to take to get there. When this way of programming becomes habit, we'll be well on our way to learning accountable and institutional processes for specific social change in our neighborhood. (back to top) |
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