The CEA Forum
Summer/Fall 2005: 34.2
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SERVICE STATIONS
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Getting Started
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I teach at a small school in rural Maine dedicated to service learning. As a school that specializes in Environmental Studies, Unity College even includes service learning in its mission and philosophy statements. My colleagues regularly include service in their courses, and we all pretty much agree that it is an integral component of the learning process. So when I agreed to author this new column for the CEA Forum, I thought, No problem. I'll offer a few definitions, add a couple of best practices, admit to some of my miserable failures, and we'll be all set.
However, as I sat down to begin writing, I soon realized why so much scholarship is dedicated to the subject of service in the classroom: there are no easy definitions or quick guides to best practices. Frustrated, I spoke to a colleague of mine who has been incorporating service learning into his classes for well over a decade. Surely he could get me started with a clear definition. His response to my request? “We know it's a good thing, it enhances learning and community involvement, and all of those things. But a better definition? I don't know. I suppose that's elusive.”
My colleague's response represents how many of us feel about service learning: we know it's a good thing, that it encourages learning and civic engagement, but anything more theoretical—or even pragmatic—can be difficult to articulate. As early as 1990, the pedagogical scholar Jane Kendall wryly noted nearly 150 definitions for service learning in existing literature. Fifteen years later, that number has grown exponentially.
And yet, for all of the ambiguities and myriad theories about service learning, there are some recurring ideas. Service learning, for instance, is about partnerships: it necessitates forging relationships with community stakeholders and finding ways to marry course outcomes with the very real needs of a community. As such, service learning is also experiential. At its core, service learning involves the application of course skills and dispositions to what my students like to call “the real world.” This application process is necessarily an active one: one that insists students leave their role of passive consumers and become participants within a larger community.
The benefits of experiential learning are probably too obvious to extol here. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that in lower-level courses such as composition and introduction to literature, service learning is often about engagement—about coaxing a student into a commitment to his or her education. In upper-level courses, service learning promotes depth of study and, in some cases, introduces students to their own skills as teachers and mentors. In both cases, a successful service learning experience strengthens course goals while demonstrating to students that they can, in fact, make a difference.
Achieving that successful experience can be a difficult endeavor. It is the goal of this column to explore techniques and pedagogical practices that will help inspire and facilitate service learning that is meaningful both for instructors and students. In my next column, I will explore some of the current theories of service learning in the English classroom as well as definitions of the different types of service often undertaken. Future columns will be devoted to specific areas of concern in service learning pedagogy as well as examples of exemplary (and imperfect!) experiences. I invite other readers to share their definitions, questions, and experiences as well. Ideas about service learning need not, as my colleague suggested, remain elusive. But he is right about two things: it almost always enhances learning and community involvement. As such, it has the potential to dramatically enhance our classroom experience as well.
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Kathryn Miles is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Environmental Writing Program at Unity College. You may contact her at kmiles@unity.edu with questions, comments, or ideas for future columns.
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