Developing service-learning and community partnerships
Abstract
Pulling it Together: A Method for Developing Service-Learning and Community Partnerships Based in Critical Pedagogy is a guide to creating service-learning programs and activities that are developed through sustained collaboration between educators, students, and community organizations. The goal of the practices outlined is to move beyond finding effective ways of educating students to engaging educators and community organizations in a dialogue to address issues in their communities. Excerpted from the original document written by 2000-2001 National Service Fellow Danika Brown.Issue
Instructors often place students in community organizations to perform volunteer service in conjunction with course assignments and reflection. These projects tend to occur in relative isolation, primarily concerning individual student educational outcomes, thereby limiting the potential for students, instructors, and community organizers to understand issues within larger systemic contexts. The benefits to community are often secondary concerns. Rarely are there mutual evaluation strategies worked out between the organization and the instructor, leaving open the possibility for efforts to be simply duplicated in future service-learning projects.Action
This is a process of placing educators, students, community organizers, and others in a sustained dialogue with each other about how to construct educational activities that are mutually beneficial and collectively address social issues. The process has five essential elements, all of which are highly adaptable to specific community settings and needs.
1. Initiate diverse contacts. Identify potential participants through research and interviews; contact those potential partners. Gather information about the community issues relevant to them and their ideas about working in coalition with other community members. After a list of potential partners has been contacted and connections emerge from the interviews, determine a focus for a series of meetings or workshops where specific projects can be collaboratively developed.
2. Workshop to create curricula and projects, including articulated goals for each party. Determine a schedule that will enable a group of people to brainstorm ideas, identify specific projects, discuss goals and assessment, and see connections between those specific projects and the other projects created by participants in the group. In addition to providing participants the opportunity to create individual service-learning activities, the workshops will encourage the participants to have a genuine dialogue about the potentials and limitations of collaborating in this fashion.
3. Report back on the partnership progress. To sustain the collaboration, everyone needs the opportunity to give and receive helpful feedback, identify resources, identify connections between individual projects, and to envision possibilities for collaboratively enhancing and supporting each other's work.
4. Collaboratively assess the projects in terms of articulated goals. Provide participants with resources for and discussion about assessment, enabling individuals to determine what type of assessment is appropriate and to design instruments to meet those needs.
5. Create a resource out of the collaboration. The goal of this fifth element is to create a history and useful resource that connect and sustain the collaborations. Whatever the final "product" of the collaborative process might be, it should contribute to creating a sense of connection between the participants, their organizations, and the issues that individuals addressed.
*The source document includes worksheets and resource pages.
Context
This manual is primarily directed at educational coordinators of service-learning programs. However, the manual has been designed with a good deal of flexibility such that it can also be useful for individual instructors, community organizers seeking to make connections with educators, and students who are interested in creating their own service-learning projects.Citation
Brown, Danika. Pulling it Together: A Method for Developing Service-Learning and Community Partnerships Based in Critical Pedagogy. Washington, D.C.: Corporation for National and Community Service, 2001.Outcome
Service-learning activities tend to be more responsive to community needs, community members are able to participate in the shaping of the curricula surrounding those projects, and significant relationships tend to develop to extend partnership possibilities beyond a single semester or group of students. Additionally, educators of varying experience levels with service-learning pedagogy have the opportunity to be mentored, and both educators and community organizers gain access to supporting resources for activities such as assessment.Evidence
The theoretical framework and the detailed methodology in this manual are based on extensive research in service-learning, critical pedagogy, and participatory and action research. Additionally, they are based on the examination and review of current developments in campus-community partnership centers and initiatives. The methodology was further developed in collaboration with both academics and community members through a pilot program in Tucson, Arizona in 2000-2001.Posted On
August 31, 2001For More Information