Sociology Commons^™

Stone Soup Community Development: Sustainability And Americorp*Vista Projects, Amy Bonn

Curriculum

The Stone Soup Sustainability research project is an evaluation of how AmeriCorps*VISTA (VISTA) projects address continuity and viability. The research examines what elements are important to a project's sustainability and what resources are needed to improve efforts for stakeholders (Corporation for National Service staff, VISTA supervisors, VISTA Leaders and members). Using Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology, stakeholders were interviewed and asked how they defined a successful project, what strategies they used to develop such a project and what tools would be useful to them. From these findings, the Stone Soup Sustainability series was developed. The series includes a supervisor's guide …

A Comparative Investigation Of Service-Learning Models In Maryland: Student Outcomes In Relationship To Employability Skills, Ruth Brodsky

Thesis, Dissertations, Student Creative Activity, and Scholarship

The purpose of this descriptive study was to describe the relationship between structured service-learning outcomes, through Maryland's replication models, and the attainment of employability skills for adolescents. Participants included fifty-five out of ninety-two service-learning coordinators and a panel of experts comprised of five key informants. The site of the study was the state of Maryland, which is divided into twenty-three counties and Baltimore City. Three data gathering procedures were utilized: content analysis of the four most frequently used replication models, a key informant rubric, and a survey of nineteen counties in the state.

A criterion sample of four models was …

The Service Sojourn: Conceptualizing The College Student Volunteer Experience, Brian C. Schmidt

Thesis, Dissertations, Student Creative Activity, and Scholarship

Despite the increasing popularity of volunteerism in student activities and service-learning courses on college campuses, little is known about the experience of volunteers. This study examines the experience of 16 students from the University of Utah who t participated in community service. The qualitative investigation is based on 54 interviews regarding student descriptions of their experience. What common events occurred? How did they make sense of their experience? What, really, did they learn? Ethnographic interviews and a "naturalistic" approach were used to identify patterns and analyze the data. Grounded in reoccurring themes such as leaving familiar surroundings. the shock of …

Associations Of Civic Attitudes In Service Learning, Christina M. Roemer

Thesis, Dissertations, Student Creative Activity, and Scholarship

Civic responsibility is comprised of actions and attitudes associated with democratic governance and social participation. Students enrolled at institutions of higher education have the opportunity to transform their social interests into advocacy through personal connections with the community. Service learning is an effective method of increasing citizenship participation and civic responsibility by incorporating community service activities with academic coursework.

This study used survey research to examine the civic attitude scores of service learning students at a large, public, mid-Atlantic state university. The research questions attained information on the associations among students who perform written and discussion reflection activities (outside of …

Service-Learning Leadership Development For Youths, Joy Des Marais, Farid Farzanehkia

Special Topics, General

Service-learning without intentional leadership development is trivial and shallow, these youthful authors point out. And such leadership development requires adults and young people to work collaboratively in the design of service-learning. When that happens, the outcome will be both profound learning and successful projects.

Service-Learning And Multicultural/Multiethnic Perspectives: From Diversity To Equity, Wokie Weah, Verna Cornelia Simmons, Mcclellan Hall

Diversity

The "missionary ideology" that currently underlies much of the service-learning movement is mostly the result of a series of decisions intended to "do good things" for others, and so the movement does not directly acknowledge what those others, particularly communities of color, might hove to offer, the authors say. It's time to change that.

Research On K-12 School-Based Service-Learning: The Evidence Builds, Shelley Billig

School K-12

Practitioners and policy makers are curious about service-learning and its effects. Ms. Billig details for Kappan readers what research tells us about service-learning today and suggests the kinds of questions that still need to be answered.

Service-Learning: An Administrator's Tool For Improving Schools And Connecting With The Community, Sheldon Berman, Sheila Bailey, Randall Collins, Dale Kinsley, Elizabeth Holman

School K-12

What should students know and be able to do by the time they graduate high school? This basic question is at the heart of most education reforms in recent years. Increasingly, the answer lies not just in strong academic skills but also in a sense of self and the individual’s role in supporting and building a vibrant community.

Free To Choose Service Learning, Michael P. Garber, Justin A. Heet

Service Learning, General

Only disciples of Ayn Rand could oppose the idea of service-learning. In the best situations, when service is part of a school's program. students are challenged to define themselves through a larger sense of their community and of their responsibility to it. They have the opportunity to apply their skills to problems that require judgment and leadership. Service-learning, if properly understood, can help re-create the functional communities that renowned University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman wrote about as being vital to increasing the amount of "social capital" generated by schools.

Learning In Deed: Service-Learning And Preservice Teacher Education, Jeffrey B. Anderson

Service Learning, General

Progressive teacher education programs face a pair of daunting yet crucial tasks. New teachers must be prepared to function effectively in schools as they exist today. They also must be educated to take a leadership role in the improvement and restructuring of P-12 education to meet students’ and society’s needs more fully. Service-learning appears to have considerable potential as a method to achieve both these goals.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation believes that meaningful service to the community, combined with curriculum-based learning, builds stronger academic skills, encourages lifelong civic commitment, and improves workplace and personal development skills among youth. Educators lead …

Development And Construct Validity Of Scores On The Community Service Attitudes Scale, Ann Harris Shiarella, Anne M. Mccarthy, Mary L. Tucker

Evaluation/Reflection

This study reports the multistage development of the Community Service Attitudes Scale (CSAS), an instrument for measuring college students' attitudes about community service. The CSAS was developed based on Schwartz's helping behavior model. Scores on the scales of the CSAS yielded strong reliability evidence (coefficient alphas ranging from .72 to .93). Principal components analysis yielded results consistent with the Schwartz model. In addition, the CSAS scale scores were positively correlated with gender, college major, community service experience, and intentions to engage in community service. The CSAS will be useful to researchers for conducting further research on the effects of service …

Nebraska Home Rule Project: Nebraska Municipal Survey, Robert F. Blair, Dale Krane

Publications

The purpose of the survey was to collect information from Nebraska municipal officials on how state government affects their operations and to identify potential areas for improvement.

Engaging Students In Community Issues, Kara A. Mccraw, Susan S. Taylor

School K-12

How can you integrate community resources in the classroom in an exciting and dynamic way? We set out to answer this question in the summer of 1999 when we attended a conference sponsored by the North Carolina Institute of Government. Our immediate goal was to help the freshmen students we teach in a course called ELPSA (Economic, Legal and Political Systems in Action) understand the importance of active citizenship and prudent fiscal decision making. What better way to teach this than through real life examples? After our conference and the introduction to a number of valuable resources and contact points …

Learning Our Freedom, Ingrid Flory, Debra Henzey

School K-12

Over the past three years, several events have drawn attention to the startling stare of civic education in North Carolina.

What Kind Of Citizen? The Politics Of Assessing Democratic Values, Joel Westheimer, Joesph Kahne, Bethany Rogers

Civic Engagement

I was visiting a middle school the other day and saw a sign on a teacher's classroom wall that said "Assessment is your friend." It had a picture of a cuddly looking puppy on it. There was no explanation for the puppy, so I'm not sure why it was there. But it was cute and the message seemed to be saying that "assessment" if perhaps not man or woman's best friend, is, at the very least, something you need not fear. Now we are living in an era of high stakes testing and standards, so many would believe that there …

Education For Democratic Citizenship, Rosemary C. Salamone

Civic Engagement

Over the past decade, pollsters and pundits have raised warning flags of moral decay and declining political understanding and commitment among Americans. Scandals from Washington to Wall Street, voter apathy and cynicism, and the regeneration of the "me generation" in a climate of unprecedented prosperity have raised increasing concerns in the media over the moral state of the country. The most alarming evidence has emerged from education, validating and documenting the anxieties that Americans share over the failure of schools to create citizens of character. By the mid-1990s, half of the nation's high school students reported that drugs and violence …

Service-Learning: Comparison Of Hospitality Programs In Two- And Four-Year Institutions, Verna M. Ward

Thesis, Dissertations, Student Creative Activity, and Scholarship

Partnerships between community and academic institutions are the cornerstones of academic service-learning. While the term "academic service-learning" emerged in the 90's, civic or citizenship education has been part of academic curriculums for centuries. Hospitality management programs at two-(n=63) and four-year (n=79) institutions were surveyed for this study using a 21 question faxed survey and two-year (52%) and four-year (48%) institutions responded. Results indicated that academic service-learning was not as prevalent in hospitality management programs of four-year institutions as anticipated, while two-year (67%) institutions had higher participation.

Overall results showed that hospitality program directors did not identify what influences inclusion/exclusion. The …

Embracing Civic Responsibility, Judith Ramaley

Higher Education

In the past year, there have been several calls for colleges and universities to take up their responsibilities as members of society in order to model the civic virtues and to become instruments of a working democracy. It is becoming clear that a genuine democracy is also a learning society and that good citizenship requires the capacity to form a learning community with others.

Involving English Language Learners In Community-Connected Learning, Lili Allen

Diversity

This brief provides policymakers and state and district-level staff with an overview of how to involve English language learners in community-connected learning programs. It lists effective strategies for involving English language learners in internships and project-based learning programs, gives guidelines for community supervisors, and points out how school structures can support these students' involvement. The brief was produced by JFF in collaboration with the Education Alliance/Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory at Brown University.

Doing Good While Doing Well: Service Learning Internships, Louise Rehling

Higher Education

Internships for students in business and professional communication have rightly been seen as a transitional form of coursework: a guided move away from academia and into the workplace. The assumption accompanying this vision has been that, since most business and professional communication students will graduate to work in industry, the best placements for them are, therefore, necessarily in industry as well. Certainly industry-sponsored internships are valuable as career preparation.

Boot Camps And Traditional Correctional Facilities For Juveniles A Comparison Of The Participants, Daily Activities, And Environments, Angela Gover, Doris Layton Mackenzie, Gaylene Armstrong

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

The environments of twenty-seven boot camps and twenty-two traditional facilities were examined in a national study of juvenile correctional facilities. Surveys with administrators and data from institutional files indicated that juveniles in the boot camps had less serious offending histories than did those in traditional facilities. Boot camp environments were more structured and most incorporated military basic training components. There were differences in the use of summary punishments and certain other matters, but few differences were found in therapeutic activities. In general, boot camp juveniles were more active but comparison facilities had more educators and other staff for each juvenile. …

Highlights From Service-Learning In California's Teacher Education Programs: A White Paper, Andrew Furco, Mary Sue Ammon

Service Learning, General

The purpose of this white paper is to provide a set of recommendations for advancing service-learning in California's Teacher Education programs. The recommendations are based on the findings from a three-year study conducted by UC Berkeley's Service-Learning Research & Development Center (SLRDC). This paper reports on the viability of various approaches for advancing K-12 service-learning in teacher education, identifies institutional barriers that hinder the advancement of service-learning in teacher education, and describes successful approaches that institutions have used to advance service-learning in teacher education. The recommendations provided in this paper are intended to inform the California Department of Education and …

Developing Project Management Skills: A Service Learning Approach, Karen A. Brown

Higher Education

This paper describes a unique approach to project management education. MBA students enrolled in a project management course have been renovating homes for low income senior citizens. Concurrent with instruction and project planning and control methods, students must communicate with the customer, plan tasks, coordinate schedules, procure materials, learn construction skills, perform physical labor and track project progress. Reflection activities ensure that students see the broadly applicable metaphors that emerge from the experience. Results indicate that a community service project can provide a powerful learning vehicle. Evidence from similar programs run through corporations suggests that this approach is suited to …

Service-Learning In Nursing: A Bibliography With Published Abstracts, Sarena D. Seifer, Rachel L. Vaughn

Bibliographies

The following list of books and peer-reviewed publications will provide direction and useful information for developing service-learning programs in nursing. The list is not intended to be exhaustive, but reflects a compilation of materials recommended by the Partners in Caring and CommW1ity Program, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health. Resources authored by PCC team members, mentors or advisors are denoted with a *. The PCC program is funded by the Helene Fuld Trust, HSBC, Trustee. Resources authored by participants in the Health Professions Schools in Service to the Nation Program (HPSISN), a national demonstration program of service-learning in the health professions that …

Day One ... In The Life Of A Program Coordinator, Unknown

Special Topics, General

As a tutoring program coordinator, you must juggle many tasks and responsibilities: forming partnerships with schools and community members, finding and training volunteers, and helping assess students' progress. The "to do" list can seem overwhelming. Day One breaks down typical beginning tasks into six steps: Assess What You Know and What You Have; Define the Program; Set Program Goals and Objectives; Meet with Stakeholders; Write a Memorandum of Understanding; and First Steps Toward Recruiting Volunteers. The information you find here will help you develop a course of action and build a successful program!

Perceived Conditions Of Confinement: A National Evaluation Of Juvenile Boot Camps And Traditional Facilities., Gaylene Armstrong, Doris Layton Mackenzie, Angela Gover, Ojmarrh Mitchell

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

In a national study of juvenile correctional facilities, the perceived environment of 22 juvenile boot camps was compared to the perceived environment of 22 traditional facilities. Self-report surveys completed by 4,121 juveniles recorded information on demographics, risk factors, and perceptions of the facility's environment. Compared to juveniles in traditional correctional facilities, boot camp residents consistently perceived the environment as significantly more controlled, active, and structured, and as having less danger from other residents. Boot camp juveniles also perceived the environment as providing more therapeutic and transitional programming. Overall, from the perspective of the juveniles, boot camps appear to provide a …

Ruptura: Acknowledging The Lost Subjects Of The Service Learning Story, Tracy Hamler Carrick, Margaret Himley, Tobi Jacobi

Higher Education

As members of the Service Learning collective in the Writing Program at Syracuse University, we have been actively designing and teaching a sequence of undergraduate writing courses that integrate community service in various ways -by asking students to write about the nonprofit agencies where they participate, to write for those sites by producing brochures and websites, and to write with people as tutors in adult literacy programs or in local urban high schools. ¹

Assessing The Effects Of Service-Learning On Student Writing, Adrian J. Wurr

Higher Education

This paper proposes methods to study the impact of service-learning on the writing performance cf native and non-native English speaking students in first-year college composition. Linguistic and rhetorical features commonly identified as affecting judgments of writing quality will be compared to holistic essay and portfolio ratings to describe the impact of different teaching and learning contexts on writing performance. The implications of the study will be of particular interest to L1 and L2 university composition instructors interested in learning more about service-learning and writing assessment.

Evaluating Experiential Teaching Methods In A Policy Practice Course: The Case For Service Learning To Increase Political Participation, Cynthia J. Rocha

Higher Education

This study compares the effects of experiential learning on policy-related values, competency, and activity levels of two groups of recent MSW graduates from one university. The study group received experiential service learning in the MSW program, primarily in an advanced policy course, while the comparison group did not. The author explains experiential teaching and service learning methods, as well the activities included in the policy course. Results indicate that both groups placed a high value on political skills. However, the experiential group was significantly more likely to perceive themselves as competent policy practitioners and to perform policy-related activities after graduation.

Creating Sustainable Service Learning Programs: Lessons Learned From The Horizons Project, 1997-2000, Gail Robinson

Higher Education

In 1997, the American Association of Community Colleges began a three-year grant project to increase the number, quality, and sustainability of service learning programs in community colleges nationwide. Fourteen colleges—selected in a national competition for grants ranging from $4,000 to $10,000 per year— worked together in AACC’s project, Community Colleges Broadening Horizons through Service Learning, to overcome challenges and learn valuable lessons in developing and sustaining academically based service learning programs.