Service-learning courses sustain the link between campus and community
Students in Heather Reynolds' class learn ecological concepts and take those concepts into the community. Here volunteers clear the autumn garden at Harmony School on Bloomington's east side.
Students in an IU biology course called The City as Ecosystem grow food and volunteer for Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, a Bloomington nonprofit organization that provides healthy food and nutrition education to needy families and individuals.
In a course titled Charts, Graphs and Tables, introductory sociology students design and carry out their own research and provide data to help the campus become more environmentally sustainable. And intermediate French students can take an eight-week course in which they lead simple, fun French lessons for elementary school students.
Those are among Indiana University Bloomington courses that give students a chance to help the community while learning new skills -- and that fall under the heading of service learning.
"Many students see service learning as an opportunity to give to the community as well as to engage more practically with concepts and theories being discussed in the classroom, and that's a winning combination," said Sonya Stephens, vice provost for undergraduate education at IU Bloomington.
"The many dedicated IU faculty who embed community engagement in their course design and goals do a tremendous job of providing challenging learning opportunities for students alongside service to the wider community. The enthusiasm and intellectual energy of the students involved is itself testimony to a level of commitment and a depth of understanding that are not always possible to create in an exclusively academic setting."
While there is a rapidly increasing number of service-learning courses offered at IU Bloomington, involving almost all schools and many departments on campus, the emphasis remains on quality, said Nicole Schonemann, director of the Office of Service-Learning on the Bloomington campus.
Service learning is not merely community service, she pointed out. It combines classroom learning with real-life experience, giving students a deeper understanding of the subject matter and, at the same time, fostering their sense of civic engagement.
The City as Ecosystem
Heather Reynolds, an associate professor of biology, created The City as Ecosystem in 2001, soon after she joined the faculty at IU. Students in the course not only learn basic ecological concepts, but put the ideas into the practice of creating more sustainable cities.
For example, ecologists distinguish between systems that are autotrophic, or self-sustaining in food, water, energy, etc.; and those that are heterotrophic, or dependent on outside sources. Students in The City as Ecosystem experience the concept by working in community gardens that grow fresh food, and then by helping distribute it to needy families, helping students to experience the interdependency of environmental, social, and economic factors in building sustainable communities.
"It's very exciting for students to see that cities are changing to make themselves more autotrophic -- and that they're getting to see a little of that in our own community," Reynolds said.
Getting outside the campus "bubble" and helping at a food pantry, she said, gives students a connection to the larger community. "It combats the placelessness that has become sort of pathological in our society today," Reynolds said.
Stephanie Solomon, a 2004 IU graduate, took Reynolds' class while an undergraduate and went on to serve as assistant director of Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, running its gardening and nutrition programs. She credited her passion for civic engagement to her service-learning studies and her experience as one of IU's Advocates for Community Engagement, undergraduates who serve as liaisons between campus and community organizations.
"It's really fun to have Heather's class working with this agency that I'm so passionate about," she said.
Charts, Graphs and Tables
Oren Pizmony-Levy, a doctoral student in sociology and the School of Education, developed a service-learning approach to teaching the 100-level course Charts, Tables and Graphs. The course title may sound boring, he said, but the course is not. The students have a unique opportunity to collect and analyze new data on IU students' attitudes toward sustainable development and diversity.
Pizmony-Levy said students in the course are more engaged because while learning about sociology, they are also doing sociology.
"They learn differently because they are learning through experience," he said. "For me, it is very important for them to see sociology as a process. It's a scientific process, not just a theories and interesting stories about our society. Sociology is not only something to learn about, but it's something we do and, more important, it's something that matters."
During the previous two semesters, students collected survey data from 700 students and used the data to explore different research questions. With their analyses of the IU Survey of Students' Engagement with Social Issues, students developed policy recommendations -- for example, placing recycling bins in the dorms. "I believe that students' research and their perspectives on these issues could help inform campus sustainability policies," Pizmony-Levy said.
Last semester, the course surveys dealt with IU students' "ecological footprint" -- their approach to transportation, food consumption and energy usage, and students explored whether there are differences between men and women, freshmean and seniors and so forth.
Senior Justin Aguirre took the course last year and served as a teaching assistant in the fall semester. By designing and conducting research, he said, the students take ownership of what they learn. And they learn practical skills that will serve them well after college.
"Of all the kids in this class, half are going to get jobs where they work with statistics," Aguirre said. "These students are going to have a huge advantage over others who haven't had this experience."
Teaching French to Bloomington elementary students
For Kelly Sax, a senior lecturer in the Department of French and Italian, creating the service-learning course F251 was a way to make the French language more relevant to students' lives. Students can sign up for her course if they have reached at least the second year, second semester level of French at IU.
The eight-week course meets only informally, with students responsible for preparing lessons in basic French and teaching them to children in after-school programs at Fairview and Templeton elementary schools and the Bloomington Boys & Girls Club. Fairview and Templeton are Bloomington schools that serve mostly children from low-income families.
"I was interested in having my students get off the beautiful, well-to-do IU campus and come into contact with another Bloomington," Sax said.
Sax said children are more likely to learn to speak a non-native language if they are exposed to languages at a young age. But with schools facing budget constraints and strict curriculum requirements, most students won't study languages until high school, or at least middle school.
The IU students learn basic approaches to teaching a language to children, using games, crafts and pictures. In some semesters, they have created children's books to support their lessons, illustrating the books with clip art, photographs or their own drawings. "They are astounding," Sax said, looking through some of the books she kept. "These people really could be children's book authors, I think."
The students also do reflective writing as part of their class assignments. "Some say, 'This has confirmed that I want to work with children,'" Sax said. "And others say, 'It has definitely confirmed that I don't want to work with children.'"
But whether the students choose to become teachers or not, the experience invariably helps make them more confident in their own use of French. And that is the point of service learning -- that students retain much more when they learn by doing than when they take notes in lectures.
"Pedagogically," said Reynolds, the biology professor, "it's very compelling."
