“community” on the pre- and post-surveys, and then to list the communities to which they belong. While 72 percent of the 51 respondents started off defining a community as people sharing a common goal or interest, and perhaps living in the same place, three more students had changed from a solely place-based definition to a shared-interest definition by the end of the quarter. Not ground breaking, but something.
Aligned with SL’s emphasis on community, the most
powerful data set from the surveys was the question students answered about their individual ties to community. Overall, 55 percent of students listed at least one additional community they identified with after completing an SL project. Some students may have actually joined more communities during the project. But it seems more likely that students developed a richer definition of community through active participation in an unfamiliar discourse community.
SERVICE LEARNING IN THE “REAL WORLD”
The B Reactor at Hanford. LEARNING BY DOING As a grad student with a teaching assistantship in Eastern
Washington University’s (EWU) technical communication program, I embraced existing SL curricula as a student and a teacher. As part of student groups, I held an instructional workshop for other students to learn underutilized, but free, bibliographic management software and edited an EWU biology professor’s proposal for a National Science Foundation grant. Then, I taught a project (three times) in which students wrote and designed a newsletter for a local nonprofit. Learning by doing struck me as a revolutionary teaching
method, albeit somewhat obvious. Researching an issue, forming conclusions, and taking action is a major growing experience. I can’t recall the number of times I’ve heard classmates and students lament that school fails to address how things are done in the “real world.” SL saved me from settling on a snoozer thesis topic like ana-
lyzing the rhetoric of software manuals. I was particularly inter- ested in many scholars’ claims that SL increases civic engagement in students, and I set out to actually measure that using anony- mous pre- and post-surveys and students’ written assignments— something no other scholarship in the field had done. Growing up in beautiful, but economically troubled, rural
northeastern Washington, I developed a deep respect for the outdoors and wanted to help educate my geographic brethren about the value of our home. So I teamed up with a friend who works for a Washington-based conservation group to have students develop outreach documents about threatened and endangered species in this area. Many students learned valuable lessons about ecosystems
through their own science-based research, becoming advocates for the threatened or endangered animal of their team’s choosing. As they crafted the language and chose images for their outreach materials, they considered how their messages might be interpreted by a rural, potentially resistant audience.
The surveys showed some interesting quantifiable data about students’ conceptions of community. They were asked to define
CLEARING 2011 After failing to find a job in the Spokane area in 2009’s
tough economic climate and taking a risky, benefits-less technical editing job for one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford subcontractors, I jumped at the chance to work for the Washington State Department of Ecology doing community outreach and environmental education. What better place to further what I’d studied and so strongly believe in: a practice encouraged by federal law.
The Corporation for National and Community Service (Learn
and Serve America is the youth division) was created by President Clinton’s National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 “to connect Americans of all ages and backgrounds with opportunities to give back to their communities and their nation.” In 2001, nonprofits and corporations looking to advance SL as a core part of every young person’s education formed the National Commission on Service Learning. I combined aspects of all three sources’ definitions of SL to describe successful projects as those that:
• Foster mutually beneficial relationships between students and community members,
• Enhance academic learning and address real-world community needs through active participation, and
• Include structured reflection about the service that encourages civic engagement.
The challenge was on. Not only was I going to be
communicating about one of the most complex technical and scientific subjects in the Northwest—with only six months experience editing nuclear cleanup documents—but I also wanted to involve students in this process. The key, however, was learning as much about Hanford as I could in a short time by reading books such as On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site and Atomic Farmgirl and watching the documentary “Arid Lands.”
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