Disciplinary Pathways to Service Learning
Foreword
Deborah M. DiCroce, President
Piedmont Virginia Community
College
Charlottesville, Virginia
"The world is progressing a whole lot more quickly than it is evolving."
For several years now, this statement has constituted my running
commentary on the state of affairs in American society.
I remember well the first time that I articulated it. It was
before a group of freshmen in a Virginia community college American
literature survey course. The subject was Ray Bradbury's short
story "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains," and
class time was running out. I offered this seemingly harmless
profundity as a tongue-in-cheek means for bringing decisive closure
to a class discussion on Bradbury's existential approach to the
age-old literary themes of man versus machine and meaning versus
mania.
In the flurry of the moment, a student's hand shot up quite unexpectedly
as he exclaimed, "So you're against change?!" I replied
a quick "No, no one's against change" and, like judge
to jury, instructed the class to erase from their memory banks
any thoughts of world progress and evolution. And so this class
on Bradbury's short story ended.
Since then, I have given much thought to the pithy profundity
I coined in that literature course and have summoned it often
to characterize what I have come to view as a maddening clash
between our collective humanness and society's dance with change.
Indeed, if the statement offers any insight into the current
state of affairs in American society, it is that cosmic things
have become much more complex than they used to be. The world
is getting simultaneously smaller and more global. Technology
is clipping along at a bewildering pace. The knowledge-based
economy is not just futuristic theory any more; it is reality.
Information is power, and access to information at all organizational
levels is critical to an organization's success. Job descriptions
are not as clear cut as they used to be, and neither are course
syllabi. The organizational hierarchy is giving way to an organizational
web. Competition has an interdependency to it that it did not
have in the past. And everybody is looking to partner and collaborate
and form strategic alliances.
The paradigm is indeed shifting, and embedded within it is a
certain imbalance, a disconnectedness to just about everything.
"Things fall apart," noted Irish poet William Butler
Yeats to another generation. "The center cannot hold."
Disengagement, disinterest, and disenchantment have become all
too common descriptors for American society. Using the metaphor
of "bowling alone," Robert Putnam characterized the
phenomenon as "America's declining social capital."
The Eisenhower Leadership Group framed the problem as a "democracy
at risk," with too many "expecting someone else to carry
all the water." And so it goes. The world is progressing
a whole lot more quickly than it is evolving.
In the midst of this cosmic dance with change comes a call for
civic renewal and a new model of leadership. The call is clarion.
President Clinton christened the call AmeriCorps. The Wingspread
Group framed it within the context of active citizenship. The
American Civic Forum declared it a New Citizenship which "reclaim[s]
responsibility for and power over our nation's public affairs."
The at-one-time-little-known-but-now-oft-quoted, old African
proverb--"It takes a village to raise a child"--symbolizes
the inclusiveness of the call. Partnership, linkage, and collaboration;
volunteerism, community service, and servant-leadership have become
its national lexicon. Books like LappŽ and Du Bois' Quickening
of America, Coles' Call of Service, and Etzioni's Spirit
of Community have given it a scholarly credibility. And service-learning
has become higher education's hopeful response to this call and
its brave new paradigm for its learners and teachers.
The definitions for service-learning vary from higher education
institution to institution, but all share the common bond of linking
the academic curriculum to civic, social responsibility. Robert
Coles perhaps best captures the essence of service-learning with
his phrase "putting head and heart on the line." In
other words, service-learning connects the classroom to what is
happening in the community. It both recognizes and embraces the
interdependence between education and democracy which Thomas Jefferson
espoused throughout his writings. And it is reminiscent of the
Greek notion of the educated individual as one of intellect and
action, with Socratic reflection part and parcel of the educative
process.
Service-learning demands that students and teachers alike rethink
the whole education thing. It demands that we reconfigure the
how and why and what of the teaching/learning
process. It demands that we redefine leader, making her more
inclusive for one, less hierarchical for another, and more personally
committed for still another.
Let's face it: Service-learning is messy business. It gets
us right down in the muck of our communities and challenges us
to give a damn. It dares us to take a stand--whether the experience
is in a shelter for abused children or an inner city elementary
school, whether the "course" is existential philosophy
or advanced calculus.
Service-learning takes us all out of the walls of democracy's
colleges and puts us right in the middle of democracy herself.
It makes us collaborate. It makes us think critically. It makes
us reflective. It gives us real life experiences in the first
person. It fosters an interconnectivity of purpose. And, with
apologies to Robert Putnam, it prohibits our bowling alone.
Oh, to be sure, all is not sweetness and light for service-learning
in the new millennium. There is still much selling for us to
do--but more to each other than outside the academy. Questions
abound. Debate is essential.
Of two things I am certain, however. First, service-learning
is uniquely positioned conceptually to answer at least a part
of the clarion call for civic renewal and a new model of leadership.
Second, with their mission fixed so deliberately on community
and service, community colleges are the ideal place for effecting
model programs of service-learning. The two together constitute
an important educational step in the cosmic dance with change
I outlined earlier.
Published under the collaborative auspices of the Campus Compact
National Center for Community Colleges and the Corporation on
National Service, Disciplinary Pathways to Service-learning
is the second monograph in a series on service-learning in the
community college. It focuses on the experiences of community
college faculty who have incorporated service-learning into the
teaching-learning experience. The work chronicles the personal
journeys of these teachers, providing intimate vignettes of the
faculty and what attracted them to the pedagogy of service-learning.
It also offers epiphanic glimpses into the vital connections
between the service-learning experience and disciplinary core
principles and values. The essays end with practical musings
on the logistics of the instructional strategy.
The world is indeed progressing a whole lot more quickly than
it is evolving. My presidential hunch is that service-learning--particularly,
community college style--will prove powerful force in better integrating
the progress of our individual and collective life's journeys
with their evolution.
References
American Civic Forum (1994). Civic Declaration: A Call for
a New Citizenship. An
Occasional Paper of the Kettering Foundation. 9 December, p.
5.
Bradbury, Ray (1950). August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.
In The Vintage
Bradbury, with an Introduction by Gilbert Highet. New York:
Random House,
pp. 322-29.
Coles, Robert (1993) The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism.
Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company.
Eisenhower Leadership Group (1996). Democracy at Risk: How
Schools Can Lead.
College Park, MD: The University of Maryland--Center for Political
Leadership &
Participation, May.
Etzioni, Amitai (1993). The Spirit of Community: Rights,
Responsibilities, and the
Communitarian Agenda. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.
Honnet, Ellen Porter, and Susan J. Poulsen (1989). Principles
of Good Practice for
Combining Service and Learning. Wingspread Special Report.
Racine, WI: The
Johnson Foundation, Inc., 1989.
LappŽ, Frances Moore, and Paul Martin Du Bois (1994). The
Quickening of America:
Rebuilding Our Nation, Remaking Our Lives. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, Inc.
Putnam, Robert D. (1995). Bowling Alone: America's Declining
Social Capital. Journal
of Democracy, January, 6(1), 65-78.
Yeats, William Butler (1974). The Second Coming. 1920. In The
Collected Poems of
W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc.,
p. 185.
Deborah M. DiCroce serves on the Executive Advisory Board for
the Campus Compact National Center for Community Colleges.
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