HOW DO I GRADE COMMUNITY SERVICE?

The community service is not what is graded. As always, grading involves assessing the learning of your students. What is graded is your students' mastery of course content as it has been put to the test "in the field," at the service site and of course in the graded reflections. The community service is the experience that draws out of the students dialogue or narrative in which they demonstrate their learning.

WHAT ABOUT LIABILITY

Well of course common sense should prevail in all situations, but you also need to have two sets of forms filled out. A) service learning Assignment Form, which is a student release and must be notarized by the students. B) service learning Agreement if not already signed for your service site, then this must be signed by the site where you will do your service. Finally most Service sites will have liability insurance plans that will cover volunteers in the event that they are injured while performing their duty. Again. common sense must prevail and we cannot allow service to occur in unsafe locations, so be sure to monitor the projects carefully.

WILL COSTS BE INCURRED IN A SERVICE LEARNING COURSE?

There could be some costs associated with service learning projects. For example, some agencies require persons contributing their time to carry liability insurance, and background checks may also be required. This raises the question of who pays. In addition, it is often a good idea to bring together your students along with community partners and some of their clients and others involved for a recognition and celebration at the end of the term. This too would cost money. Sometimes there is a cost associated with materials for a service learning project. For example, what if a public relations class is doing a weekly, one-page newspaper for an ongoing project at a middle school, e. g., building a gazebo to be used as an outdoor classroom by the whole school and as a performance venue for drama and music groups. So there might be unusual costs for printing and photo reproduction and distribution. Thus costs will vary and depend on the kind of course and the nature of the community service. Institutions or the agencies themselves may fund worthy service learning projects.

SHOULD I CHANGE THE WAY I TEACH?

Service learning is not a veneer that can be applied to an existing course. It's hard to masquerade as a service learning course, because service learning is a unique pedagogy that affects all aspects of a course. For example, you wouldn't send your students out into the field doing community service, then merely lecture to them when they return. If you're uncomfortable sharing some control of the class, you will want to proceed with caution. However, if you would like to learn what your students are experiencing in the field and hear them articulate the ways they have applied the course material or have seen it in action, then you might want to consider changing some of your teaching strategies to incorporate these opportunities for students to reflect on there service experiences. Reflection is the key. Whether written or oral, highly structured or free flowing, reflection is your students' chance to put into words how they see their experience at the service site making contact with the course material. Some may see no connections to make, but when they hear their peers in the class sharing authentic insights, you can be sure they will begin to look more closely, or go back and read that chapter again. Some will have insights that amount to rather simple identifications: I saw prejudice today, in the flesh; I experienced a third grader who could not read today; I helped someone who had never used a shovel, to dig a hole today. And it really gets interesting when one of your students returns from the field and challenges something in the textbook or in your lecture last week: I saw no difference in eye contact used by the African-American and Caucasian students whom I tutored today; I observed a very effective problem-solving group at the agency today, and they seemed to follow no particular agenda. So the upshot is that, if you are not ready for a change in your teaching, if you do not want to rethink your approach to instruction, then service learning may not be for you.

WILL SERVICE LEARNING TAKE MORE TIME?

Yes, if what you are doing now is pretty conventional: lecture, lecture-discussion, or lecture-cum-structured experiences or cases, all in a classroom. The extra time for service learning is largely in planning, which includes lining up appropriate service sites or finding out how to help your students to do that. Even if your campus has a volunteer clearinghouse, you might want to visit several sites and speak with the people there to establish a cooperative working relationship with them. In addition, multiple choice exams normally won't work. Rather, reflection papers spread throughout the term allow students to demonstrate their ability to integrate the course content with their service experience. Evaluating those narratives will probably also take more time than marking the usual short answer exam. Many instructors also find it useful to meet with most of the students out of class several times to go over their papers. For many students Reflection Papers represent a new genre: part documentary, setting the scene of their service site, building a narrative that draws the reader into the human experience; part analysis, parsing experience at the site, making sense of the people and activities; and part interpretation, using course concepts to understand events and personas as they play themselves out in the real-world of the service site.

HOW DO STUDENTS RESPOND TO SERVICE LEARNING?

Service learning may be new to your students or your institution. Having little or no frame of reference, some will be curious, some will balk, some will be attracted by the novelty, and some will be excited by the challenge. In addition, as we all know, how you frame service learning for them will influence their responses. It is best that students register for the course knowing it is a service learning course. When this is not possible, present the course as an opportunity: to test their ability to apply what they are learning; to enhance the quality of life in their community; to become acquainted with a segment of society with whom they may be unfamiliar; and to challenge their stereotypes and normal routines. Initial impressions aside, one reason many continue to employ service learning methods is the high level of engagement with the course material they evoke from students. Students are faced, many of them for the first time, with real problems to solve, so there is another level of engagement (e. g., conducting a communication audit for a nonprofit or tutoring a second grader in an after school program) that characterizes student responses and accounts for the common response of digging deeper into the course material. For many students, it is a new experience to share those problems around a learning circle in class and use the language of the course to talk about ways to deal with them (e. g., uncertainty reduction; trust, control, and intimacy as relational dimensions; nonverbal and verbal immediacy). Finally, be prepared to meet individually with students who experience a high level of uncertainty. Some may need to be reassured and to know that other students in the past have experienced similar initial concerns and have dealt with them successfully.

WHAT DO OTHER FACULTY MEMBERS SAY ABOUT SERVICE LEARNING?

Some faculty members may view service learning as giving academic credit for community service. The truth is, the credit is given for the learning, not for the service. Many faculty members do not at first grasp this distinction. For other faculty members, service learning is not yet on the radar screen. These need to hear about this new methodology from a trusted faculty friend. Once you locate a small group of practitioners on campus, encourage them to talk with their colleagues about their service learning courses. Those faculty members who equate lecturing with teaching will be suspicious, and many think that service learning is merely a way to get out of lecturing or a way to slack off on the rigor of the course. These faculty members will probably never be interested in using a teaching method that demands they share control of the class with their students. Many faculty members are concerned with their students' learning as much as they are focused on the scholarship in their field. Locate them! They will welcome service learning as another tool in the craft of teaching and another window into scholarship. They are on the lookout for ways to bring together their students and the central ideas of their discipline. service learning offers the kind of engagement they are looking for. Finally, some senior faculty members who have been in the profession 20, 25, 30 years, need to be reinvigorated, refreshed and re-energized with regard to their teaching. It may have become all too routine. Locate them. They are ripe to learn of service learning: it will have them interacting with students, solving problems together as co-learners; it will meet their own need to give back to the community out of their rich experience—both new experiences for many. In short, for many senior faculty, service learning is a new start, a rediscovery of the joy of teaching and learning and the satisfaction of knowing that their students’ learning is also building up the community.

HOW DO I PREPARE MY STUDENTS FOR SERVICE LEARNING?

Service learning sites may be in locations unfamiliar to many of your students, e.g., a public housing complex, an inner city community center or a rural school building. Often the sites will put your students in contact with ethnic, racial, and class groups that are not routine for them. Treat the service learning experience as a case of cross-cultural contact and intercultural communication. In these cases, orientation sessions are useful, especially when they are conducted by agency representatives. Students need to be given clear information about the agency and the individuals with whom they will be working. We would further suggest that orientation sessions be held at or near the service site, so students can, from the start, sense the ambience of the location. Such sessions should also give students a chance to ask questions about the site and satisfy any concerns they may have. If the site is in a high crime area, or one reputed to be high in crime, be prudent and point out to your student’s sensible guidelines such as going during daylight hours and traveling with a partner. Get crime statistics from the local Police Department to help inform students of the risks (see section on Managing Risk, below). Regardless of safety, dress is an issue. Students should dress appropriately and consistent with the activities in which they will be engaged. Demeanor is as important as dress. Students should adopt a confident manner and carry themselves as if they knew exactly where they were going.