Adding a civic engagement element to your class: Dubious?

Overview:

I recently came up against a need to persuade others of the viability and to some degree even the desirability of incorporating a service learning element into a lower division Writing, Research, and Technologies class. Here are my thoughts, organized around the main issues of need, plan, and practicality.

Need:

For a long time now, there has been increasing attention to the need for the academic world to be socially and morally engaged. My college is currently participating in a grant program specifically devoted to fostering a culture of social and moral responsibility. We also have a large component of our curriculum already devoted to civic engagement, including 8 units of required work in what we call “Engagement and Reflection Circles.” For us, it may be good to introduce a modest first-year requirement to get students’ feet wet, so to speak, and introduce them to the culture and practice of community engagement at our University. For other programs service learning may be a good idea simply as a stand alone element or with the idea in mind that it can provide a basis for later experiential learning. Such experiences outside the classroom are highly valued in many if not most employment or graduate education settings. An early service learning assignment can prepare students for more involved experiences later on and for telling a more meaningful narrative of personal development to future collaborators, partners, or employers. I won’t even develop at length the obvious interpersonal and related skills developed in real world settings.

Plan:

My idea here is for a very simple service learning component attached to a first-year writing and research course. It will be to require a specific number of hours working with a community partner and a specific integration of other class writing and research assignments with content relevant to the community partner(s). There should also be some oral and written reflections about the experience and the issues it raises for students. There are many models that can be found for those who need direction on more complex approaches.

The standards for placements will be as follows:

• The community partner is doing work in an area related to social and moral responsibility and affected by issues of sustainability.
• Student research paired with advocacy can make a difference to the partner and in the community more broadly construed.
• The work involves a significant element of interaction with others in the community.
• The placement is arranged through our CSLCE.
• The student can participate for a minimum of 8-10 hours in an ongoing project of the community partner without putting the success of the project at risk by want of sufficient student time.

Practicality:

Benefits in our case are substantial, including interpersonal skills development, preparing students both for choosing and participating in more substantial and already required work in future semesters, providing a mechanism for more engaged participation in our public dialogues project, providing a mechanism for our stated goal of making their writing and thinking relevant to other audiences, providing a way of benefiting from the work done by UOE on learning modules for community engagement, and providing a way to engage with emerging community partners working on relevant projects. Similar benefits can be gained by others not in our particular situation.

There is sufficient support for this in our case and I suspect most teachers interested in this at the college level will find they are equally flush with possible help. I worked at the University of the Pacific where a service learning component has been an option for many of the sections of almost this exact course for a number of years. In the past year, I have also worked on this topic extensively, learning about available resources on our campus, starting an outreach program of my own that incorporates service learning students, and making some connections with community partners. We have a well-staffed office on campus specifically devoted to helping facilitate service learning and civic engagement opportunities that places 12K+ students in the community every year.

One objection I have heard is that we may not have time to do this right. Time intensive designs are not the way to do this right in my opinion. I put the standards for placements above to try and address this concern as well. I think service learning is partly about taking some risk and being open to surprises too. Spoma Jovanovic has a short and very interesting article defending this notion of surprises and generally making a good case for service learning from a communication ethics perspective. Service learning represents a high quality learning experience that, while taking some time to implement, is not more costly in this regard than the parallel time that we would spend on lesson plans not related to community engagement.

Service learning is no longer a new thing. It’s not particularly risky or cutting edge. It can be done right with simple care and diligence; it is not time intensive when campus support is considered.

What are your thoughts? Put them in the comments and I will appreciate your input.

What Do You Do on Day 1 with Your New Team?

A new speech & debate club started up today at Wexford Montessori Magnet School. I spent an hour working with 13 students and their new teacher/coach, Eric Royston. I was so excited after spending so much time advocating for new clubs in the past year to be seeing one actually getting going, and a lot of it had to do with Eric’s willingness to step up and take charge of it. He visited each classroom at the school to pitch the idea of a speech & debate team, and I think that made a big difference. 13 is a really good number for a first meeting. It bodes well for the other new programs getting started in the coming weeks and months.

We spent time discussing the difference between speech & debate and other competitive activities like soccer, how speech might enable us to have the skills and confidence to make changes in the world. We discussed what sorts of things would be worth changing and why advocating for change can be difficult. We also did a round table debate brainstorming exercise on the topic of whether the school should double its recess time. Health and productivity benefits figured prominently.

It was wonderful interacting with this group. They were very engaged with our discussion and there were always 4-5 hands up ready to make a contribution. The students did a great job and convinced me they are going to be a very successful team in Mid Michigan, a model for other new programs starting up.

Angel Tip: Making Mandatory Yet Anonymous Surveys

First of all, Angel help at MSU is exemplary, especially when one uses the phone (5-2345). I almost always get a person and my question is usually answered pretty quickly.  Don’t struggle; just call.

So, I called to find out how to make an anonymous survey mandatory after struggling to get feedback from busy MBA students last year.  The way to do it is to set a survey to “anonymous” under the submission tab and then set a milestone for item completion under the assignment tab. Later, you can use the report function in Angel to generate a whodunit report for the item. You thus find out if they did it but you don’t have an ability to match person to specific answers.

Google Maps

Google Maps

I don’t know when this happened, but now I noticed Google Maps allows the same thing as many of the third party sites I have been reviewing in terms of making one’s own custom maps. Google maps allows annotations, shapes, lines, embedded photos and videos, and just about everything you need. Plus the scroll zoom and dragging functions are there (two of the best things about gmaps). This will make it easy to create an assignment or project out of this newish mapping technology.

Update: I don’t think Gmaps allows you to have teams edit a map. You can just save your own maps and let others see them. Communty Walk is back on top then.

Grant money for middle school debate

A+ for ENERGY – A BP Energy Education Program

I attended the Middle School Public Debate Program national championships in Claremont last weekend. The above link describes the grant awarded to one of the MSPDP leagues this year for debating about energy. I met the folks involved with this grant, Kelly Beiringer and Greg Paulk of the Desert Valley Debate League, along with numerous other teachers, parents, and students.

I’m working on supporting the creation and development of speech & debate programs in the greater Lansing, MI area. I think the MSPDP example shows the viability and desirability of such programs.

Back End vs. Vision

Inside the Firm of the Future: Changing Lives . . One By One . . Until We’re All Done!

This post, from Christopher Marston, talks about an issue in the practice of law that I think relates to other professions as well: letting the nuts & bolts of the job override the story or the human element. For myself, I’ve been caught thinking, or at least behaving as if, the nuts and bolts were more important than the vision in teaching (the dubious practice of tinkering). You have control over the nuts and bolts; they are what hold the class together and directly affect learning. However, more intangible features of a class like its fun or desirability may have a larger effect even if it is less direct. Lesson: be methodical and thorough about the nuts & bolts, but don’t talk about it to your audience (students, clients, spouses). Talk about your ideas instead and give them something to be excited about. If you are talking about the nitty gritty, that’s also probably what you are most thinking about, and then where are you? Here’s a related quotation I chose from the post:

I see attorneys who are so entrenched in counting their entire lives in 6-minute increments that they go home to their loved ones and think of time with their family as an “opportunity cost.” These people know exactly how many billing units they are giving up by attempting to have a work life balance, and the very attempt to balance life is offset by a cloud of guilt and worry, knowing that they simply cannot beat the clock.

Discussion groups, Blogs, Listservs, etc. etc etc etc

I copied the list of points below out of a more extended blog entry by David Wilcox. I too felt in good company as I notice very few people in my university actually use the groupware built into our course management system. One reason may be that the sytem we are using (Angel) does not allow some of the things Wilcox mentions.

Designing for Civil Society: Charity web managers sceptical about walking the web talk

# Groups aren’t good for substantial pieces – people want to skip through e-mail and respond quickly.
# If you do write something of substance it will be seen by a limited number of people, and can’t be linked for wider discussion, unlike a blog.
# It can be difficult to follow threads of discussion, because other topics crop up.
# You can’t “be yourself” in quite the same way.
# You can’t put what you are saying in the context of other things you have written.
# You can’t add images, audio, video.
# You can’t tag.
# … in short, it is just so frustrating when you have been in the other Web 2.0 place, and so doesn’t feel worth the effort.

Comments on Platial

Platial.com

Okay, this one seems pretty easy to use and it does integrate with this WordPress blog (see sidebar). It doesn’t seem to have routes, but it seems easy to add pics and whatnot. I’m not sure what the blog integration does for me except make my blog longer to load, but I’ll keep playing. Once you make an icon, it doesn’t seem possible to move it by dragging it around. Commenting and networking features may be better here, but I’m still going to take a closer look at Community Walk.

Gmaps Pedometer; best for biking or walking routes??

Gmaps Pedometer Example (bike route)

I see that many free map services don’t allow you to put routes in. Community Walk is one exception. Also, this Gmaps Pedometer site is pretty simple. It will let you save a map with a route in it and give you the URL. The one I put here is a simple loop route I like to ride near my house. My odometer says this route is a bit longer than indicated on the map. I don’t know how it’s supposed to useful for counting calories when it forces an as-the-crow-flies route construction method. Then again, why would someone care; just get out there and burn some.. I don’t know if routes are important for using mapping as a potential writing or other assignment in a class, but they are pretty key for walking, hiking, and biking.

Beth Kanter’s Screencast on Tagging

http://www.techsmith.com/community/blogcomments.asp?thread=329

This is a good example of using Camtasia for a tutorial. She explained tagging so well, I decided I was inspired to realize I could use categories and a blog to organize my own thoughts and ideas.