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'Service-Learning' Pulls College Students Out of Ivory Towers

Posted on: Monday, 1 August 2005, 12:01 CDT

Aug. 1--The hot new idea on campus brings civic and social responsibility into daily lessons and daily life.

Raise your hand if you can still speak the Spanish you learned in college or recite every fact you wrote on your American history final.

That's what Janet Eyler thought.

So she and a swell of college employees nationwide are talking up "service-learning."

That's not new college jargon for "community service" or "volunteering," although it includes those.

Service-learning has been around for years, but many colleges still don't fully incorporate it.

It's not spending time sorting canned goods or tutoring kids for a semester and then writing a paper.

It's integrating community service with class content, and elevating students' memory, thoughts and education in the process.

For example, an East Coast student majoring in social work served at Boys & Girls Clubs of America, took a health policy class and ended up lobbying her state legislature for health care for poor children, Elizabeth Hollander, executive director of Campus Compact, said recently during a four-state Campus Compact conference in Tulsa.

The national group promotes teaching college students how to be better citizens. Its Web site is www.compact.org.

Eyler, a Vanderbilt University professor, said that when students are in service-learning classes, they discuss and reflect constantly. They apply knowledge to real problems in their communities. Their minds click into the "on" mode because they care about the issues they're helping research and address.

The idea is to train a new generation of leaders who want to further democracy and take care of their neighbors, next door and across the country.

College employees find many students have never encountered poverty or other social problems, conference speakers said. Service-learning exposes them to those issues; awareness creates the opportunity for answers.

Students also learn through talking with local political leaders, lobbying, voting and serving that one right answer doesn't exist for every problem. The world is more complex than that, and many solutions are compromises, Eyler said.

Hollander thinks Oklahoma is doing a good job of integrating service-learning into higher education. She, Eyler and conference participants listed the service-learning successes and plans in colleges here.

Hollander's hope is that people realize colleges aren't just for job training. They're also for learning to think beyond personal concerns -- they're for citizenship education.

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Copyright (c) 2005, Tulsa World, Okla.

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Source: Tulsa World

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