Changing the Way Academic Institutions Engage the Community

CSC News & Reflections
Summer 2004

The Center for Social Concerns came into existence as a merger of the Volunteer Services Office and the Center for Experiential Learning. Today, many still believe that the purpose of Center and of its programs is to promote student volunteer service to local and national communities. However, a growing movement—one that the Center actively promotes—seeks to further develop the way academic institutions engage the community.

In the following Q&A, Mary Beckman, Ph.D, associate director of Academic Affairs & Research at the Center, explores the changes within the community-based learning field and at the Center. In a future newsletter, she will continue this exploration, articulating the elements of a broad “community engagement pedagogy.”

Question: What does the Center do in addition to promoting volunteer service?

Answer: Since its beginning in 1983, the Center has fostered service and learning, not volunteer service alone. Going back to the early 1970’s, before the term “service-learning” was used nationally, Fr. Don McNeill, CSC, brought to life a vision that involved reflection – through reading, writing, and discussion — on service, explicitly through academic course work. So the work of the Center has always included this academic integration.

One of the things that’s changed is the form of the service. In the early years, it was largely direct service – tutoring prisoners, providing lunch for people who are homeless. This continues today, of course. Also, though, the Center attempts to integrate other forms of community engagement into students’ academic work. For example, students currently are helping register voters. Others are involved in community organizing activities. And still others are conducting research for community organizations.

Q: Why is it important for students to have opportunities for these other forms of community involvement?

A: So that they can come to know as many ways as possible that they can work to create a more just and humane world. So students can see a variety of avenues to use their talents and their skills to make the world a better place.

We hope they will consider, down the road, using professional expertise to assist in their communities when they leave the university. Some students will have obvious skills to contribute, those who become engineers, for example. We also want those with less obviously applicable backgrounds to see how they can contribute. We want them to think about using the more general skills they acquire here in writing and research. This past summer, for example, an economics student has been doing research for a local neighborhood organization. He didn’t really need knowledge specific to his major to make a contribution. What he’s doing is basic internet searching, and other forms of research, looking for best practices related to housing policies in urban areas across the U.S. He’s using general skills he’s learned in college.

All Notre Dame students develop basic research skills. Do they think, as they’re doing so, that they can use these to help their local parish? Their neighborhood organizations? We want them to. So we want students to experience multiple ways of contributing to their communities, and beyond, through their Center-related course work.

Q: Isn’t all of what you’re talking about service? What’s really different here?

A: Yes, indeed, it’s basically all about service. It’s important to see this. What’s different is that we’re suggesting a broader range of ways students can serve.

The field of service-learning is less focused on the concept of service itself, and increasingly using the term civic participation. Civic participation includes activities that we generally think of as service, like visiting the elderly. But it is broader. Voting is civic participation. Organizing an effort to recycle in your neighborhood is, too. We could call each of these “service.” But don’t they seem different from what most of us think of when we talk about volunteering?

If students are going to be civic participants, it is important that we open out the meaning of “service” as broadly as we can.

Q: The Center has long distinguished between social service and social action when talking about student work in communities off campus. Is this distinction related to what you’re talking about?

A: To some degree, yes. Social service is viewed as addressing the effects of an injustice or social challenge. Tutoring a child who can’t read well, for example.

Social action is thought of as getting at root causes of situations of injustice and oppression. So instead of tutoring the child who can’t read, the student might instead work to change policies that leave inner city schools with fewer resources for teaching kids to read.

In most of the Center’s one and three credit courses, this distinction between social service and social action is made through the readings that are assigned. Typically, however, students in these classes do social service – e.g., the tutoring – but not social action – e.g., the affecting of policy. So part of what we are talking about here is more attention to social action.

Q: Is the point of community-based learning courses what students learn? Or the contribution students make in the community?

A: This is another area in which the field has changed somewhat. Initially, when service-learning was just emerging in the 1970’s and 80’s, the emphasis was on student learning. Many studies over the years have pinpointed the ways that service-learning enhances participants’ education.

More recently, the emphasis has broadened to pay greater attention to the effects of students’ actions on their communities.

This increased concern that community needs get met by students is part of what has led to the broader orientation discussed already.

Community organizations often need information, or facilitation of meetings, or organizing skills. To respond to the community needs means to offer a broader range of involvement than once dominated in service-learning courses.

The term “community-based learning” is often used over “service-learning” these days to indicate a larger scope for student community involvement than had previously been the norm, and to suggest greater emphasis on the needs of the community while still being concerned for student learning.

Q: What are the key components for academic service learning? Can you briefly describe each one?

A: Regular community involvement on the part of students enrolled in the course, readings on topics related to student community engagement, opportunities for students to discuss and write about their experiences in the community in light of readings. These are the central elements.

Meaningful learning is strongly influenced by the quality of the student community placement. A quality placement, we know from many studies, is one where students are given feedback about their efforts, and where they know they have in fact made a contribution.

Many practitioners and writers on the subject suggest that explicit attention should be given to civic learning, that is, that courses labeled “community-based learning” ought to have clearly laid out aims about just how the student is going to learn through the course to be a more capable civic participant.

Q: To develop academic service learning, can we add a service requirement into an existing academic course or do we need to approach it differently?

A: Yes, that’s legitimate, as long as the community involvement aspect is well integrated into the course as a whole.

For example, if an existing course addressed the topic of homelessness, it makes sense to require students to spend two hours a week in some capacity working with people who are homeless. This could be added in. Students would already be reading about the subject, and writing about it.

Community action gives them one more text, if you will, one more type of information to consider in the course.

It would not be a good idea, however, to create an option for some students in a course on, say, principles of economics or calculus to volunteer instead of doing a paper or mathematical calculation.

The key is that readings, class discussion, and written work all go together; the community activity is one of a number of course components around the same theme and tied together with the other components in various ways.

Q: Catholic social thought is a key element in the attainment of the Center’s mission. How does CST integrate with the view of community engagement you are describing?

A: Two ways in particular. First, Catholic social thought gives the work of the Center its primary lens for analysis. Let me explain through an example.

In a course I taught on ethics and economics, students engaged in a discussion about whether or not a U.S. urban factory should be moved to a developing country. We read Catholic social teaching to gain guidance.

Students considered the principle of solidarity. This led some of them to believe the move could be a good thing as it would provide jobs to people living in a developing country.

For some, consideration of the principle of option for the poor likewise supported this point of view.

Students also investigated the meaning of subsidiarity; some then concluded that the plant should stay local and provide jobs in the U.S. community. And so on.

Many lenses for analysis can be used. Students may use an ethical lens, like consequentialism, for example. They would ask: what would a conseqentialist do in this situation? They could use an economist’s lens: what would a free marketeer do?

We use these frameworks for analysis as well, but our priority is to ask: how does Catholic social tradition help us decide?

Second, we want students to leave the university with knowledge of Catholic social thought, so that it can be drawn upon for guidance as they go through life; we believe our community-based learning method of teaching and learning, or pedagogy, if you will, provides an excellent way to encourage this.

According to many who have written and thought about this, Catholic social tradition is best learned through practice, in the midst of living life and dealing with hard issues that come while doing so. A good way to come to understand Catholic social thought is through its application, and that’s something that can be done through community-based learning.

In the Catholic Social Tradition minor program of the university, students are required to do an internship or community-based learning course for precisely this reason: to give them real world experience about which to consider Catholic social thought.