Digital Commons Network^™

Mandatory Community Service: Citizenship Education Or Involuntary Servitude?, Susan M. Anderson

Service Learning, General

A popular topic of conversation lately among parents, educators, policymakers, students and the media is the isolation of young people from their communities. Many people feel schools have a responsibility to build bridges among diverse populations of children and youth, provide nonviolent problem-solving experiences and promote positive activities for young people, even during after-school hours. Involving young people in community service is seen as one potential solution. Indeed, some citizens and educators would like to ensure that all students — including those least likely to participate voluntarily but most likely to benefit from the experience — have the opportunity to …

Service-Learning Is A Feminist Issue: Transforming Communication Pedagogy, Eleanor M. Novek

Service Learning, General

How do we "do" emancipatory feminist teaching when we have not observed it or experienced it ourselves? The author argues here that service-learning is a useful strategy for feminist communication educators to begin challenging the power relationships of traditional pedagogy. Pioneered in the 1960s and '70s, this pairing of traditional course work with community service is now used as a learning model in schools around the nation. Because service-learning allows educators to forge relational links between ourselves, our students, our neighbors, and the communities in which we live, it deserves careful consideration from feminist educators.

National Service And The Internet: Building Bridges To Collaboration, Anne M. Ostberg

Service Learning, General

The national service fellow examined how Unified State Plans proposed using the Internet to facilitate collaboration, and how existing state service Web sites reflected the collaboration discussed in Unified State Plans.

Forty-eight states have Unified State Plans for National and Community Service. These plans include as partners several entities: the state commission for national and community service, the Corporation for National Service state office, the state education agency, representatives of higher education, and other representatives of volunteer and service programs. The majority of Unified State Plans (79 percent) propose using the Internet to accomplish goals toward achieving a broad vision …

How Can Service-Learning Strengthen Tutoring Partnerships?, Jennifer Arndt, Bob Seidel

Service Learning, General

Tutoring is usually volunteer service done to benefit learners and their communities. Tutoring should be a partnership between tutor and student. The partnership should also include the teacher, the student's family or household, the school, the tutoring program, and other tutors and students. All of these people and institutions have an interest in the success of the tutoring endeavor. All have something to contribute and something to gain. These relationships might not always be apparent to everyone involved. But if tutoring programs see all involved as learners and teachers, they can illuminate these relationships and strengthen them.

The Status Of Service-Learning In The United States: Some Facts And Figures, Robert D. Shumer, Charles C. Cook

Service Learning, General

This report focuses on service and service-learning in high schools. The report compares data from 1984 research with information from two studies of service and service-learning completed in 1997. The data suggest that community service and service-learning in 1984 was available in slightly more than one-quarter of all high schools (primarily to white students), and course-related programs (service-learning) occurred in only about 10% of all schools. The 1997 data indicate that the number of high school students involved in service-related programs has increased 686%; and the number of high school students involved in service-learning has increased3,663%. Using data from studies …

Inside A Swiss Army Knife: An Assessment Of Americorps, James L. Perry, Ann Marie Thomson, Mary Tschirhart, Debra Mesh, Geunjoo Lee

Service Learning, General

This study reviews the goals and achievements of AmeriCorps, the national service program championed by President Clinton and approved by Congress in 1993. We identify five AmeriCorps goals: satisfying unmet social needs, developing corps members, enhancing the civic ethic, reinvigorating lethargic bureaucracies, and bridging race and class. The evidence of AmeriCorps' effectiveness is not definitive. Self-reports from recipient programs, selective cost-benefit analyses, and some survey evidence indicate some positive results. More fine-grained survey and field research raise questions about AmeriCorps' overall effects. Much more research is needed before policy makers and citizens can determine AmeriCorps' productivity.

The Emerging Role Of Service Learning At Jesuit Universities, James J. Fleming

Service Learning, General

We Jesuits love teaching! We are alive when we are in the classroom. The art of teaching-and it is an art in the truest sense-is a medium in which we can create. "When it is most radical," as Madeleine Grumet has so eloquently observed, teaching as a "work of art simultaneously draws the viewer to it, engaging expectations, memories, recognitions; and then interrupts the viewer's customary response, contradicting expectations with new possibilities, violating memories, displacing recognition with estrangement." This is what the learning process can be: seductive, surprising, and transforming.

Applying Theory To Community Service: A Boyeristic Model, Lyle Flint

Service Learning, General

In 1994 fifty faculty members, representing various departments and colleges at Ball State University, met and, for several days, discussed Boyer's (1990), Scholarship Reconsidered The result of these discussions was, A Different Dawn, a proposal seeking a reconsideration of the traditional lines of scholarly productivity. While a full implementation of Boyer's model has not yet appeared in governance documentation, particularly promotion and tenure documentation, at Ball State it has been embraced by the administration and by a large number of the faculty. Central to Boyer's model is the call for service to the community outside of the academy.

Introduction To Service-Learning, Augsburg College

Service Learning, General

Information for Education students making a difference in our community (EDU 265, EDU 210).

Service-Learning For Preservice Teachers: Ethical Dilemmas For Practice, David M. Donahue

Service Learning, General

Increasingly in the United States, service-learning is being used to educate preservice teachers. Service varies greatly in its ethical foundation, however, and service-learning presents new teachers with a variety of dilemmas revealing the moral and political nature of teaching and service. This article presents one case of four preservice teachers writing curriculum as a service to a community agency hoping to promote service geared toward social justice among high school students. The case highlights ethical dilemmas faced by teachers in the process and illustrates the potential of service-learning to educate teachers for the moral imperative of their profession.

Educational Excellence For All Children Act Of 1999, U.S. Department Of Education

Service Learning, General

The President announced that he would shortly send to the Congress the "Educational Excellence for All Children Act of 1999," his proposal to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). This legislation reaffirms the critical role of the Federal Government in working with schools, school districts, and States to promote educational excellence for all children. Every child, parent, grandparent, and taxpayer deserves high quality public schools in their communities.

More specifically, the proposal would build on the 1994 ESEA reauthorization, which established the core principle that disadvantaged children should achieve to the same challenging academic standards as …

The National Society For Experiential Education Research Collaborative, National Society For Experiential Education

Service Learning, General

The National Society for Experiential Education is embarking on a new endeavor to advance our understanding of how experiential education impacts learning, teaching, and schooling in various contexts and communities. This endeavor, called the NSEE Research Collaborative, will convene national and local researchers to collaborate on a large-scale, multifaceted research study that will investigate various issues in experiential education.

Opinion: The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, And Activist Research, Ellen Cushman

Service Learning, General

While I support the good intentions of those who have recently proposed definitions of the public intellectual, I find these definitions problematic in their narrow delineation of the word "public"- they focus on a "public" consisting of middle and upper class policy makers, administrators, and professionals, and, in doing so, omit an important site for uniting knowledge-making and political action: the local community.

Self-Assessment Rubric For The Institutionalization Of Service-Learning In Higher Education, Andrew Furco

Service Learning, General

The Self-Assessment Rubric for the Institutionalization of Service-Learning in Higher Education was designed to assist members of the higher education community in gauging the progress of their service-learning institutionalization efforts on their campus.

The rubric is structured by five dimensions that are considered by most service-learning experts to be key factors for higher education service-learning institutionalization. Each dimension is comprised of several components that characterize the dimension. For each component, a threestage continuum of development has been established. Progression from Stage One: Critical Mass Building to Stage Three: Sustained Institutionalization suggests that the institution is moving closer to fully institutionalizing …