Rebekah Taussig
Annotated Bibliography: Service Learning
One of the central concerns presented in Chapter 11 ("Invitation to Further Study") of St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing relates to content in first-year writing courses. This chapter explores a multitude of questions as to what theories and forms should be addressed in the classroom, as well as how to incorporate reading and writing productively. The underlying question behind all of these questions becomes, “Is there any foundational common to all of these programs?” (267). One of the things that I see writing instructors continually strive for in our writing classes is to make the material relevant – to connect it to the world outside of our classrooms. Across theories and forms, this seems to be a common thread of concern. How can we best help our students transfer the material in our lessons and assignments to other contexts outside of our course? Service Learning is one response to this challenge. This theory does not attempt to merely make theoretical links to the world outside of the classroom but literally places students in contexts outside of the classroom. It challenges students to practically apply material presented in the classroom-bubble to meaningful, “real-world” experiences. This is a space for material to be challenged, questioned, complicated, and meaningfully absorbed. Similarly, Service Learning forges a pathway between academia and non-academia in a way that allows each to enhance the understanding of the other. If our goal, as instructors of composition, is to equip students to interact productively and meaningfully in their communities, understanding this approach to teaching becomes essential.
Bacon, Nora. “Building a Swan's Nest for Instruction in Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication 51.4 (2001): 589-609. Print.
In this article, Nora Bacon argues for the inextricable importance of teaching context in the writing classroom. Even when composition instructors teach “audience” and “purpose” to their students, Bacon asserts, these concepts remain disconnected from authentic experience. The “audience” is always technically the teacher, and the “purpose” always comes back to an assignment and a grade. In other words, in order to truly teach writing inside the classroom as it connects to authentic context or a genuine rhetorical purpose, teachers must link their classrooms to authentic experiences outside of the classroom. This is more complicated, however, than merely providing students with real-world writing opportunities, like internships or community service writing. Bacon suggests that teachers must rethink their curriculum entirely, and she uses Nancy, a teacher San Francisco State University, as a case study to support her argument.
Through her experience teaching two semesters of Community Service Writing in sophomore level English classes, Nancy realizes that traditional English classes are not conducive to teaching writing as a social act. Instead of teaching students flexible writing skills they can apply to” real-world” writing, the traditional English class teaches students to produce the kind of writing they would only replicate for future English classes. She learns that, in order to truly equip her students to write well inside and outside of the academy, she cannot rely on teaching “generalized” writing skills. Instead, she learns to teach students to be sensitive to purpose and the rhetorical needs of each writing situation. This shift in her thinking brought relevancy and a meaningful challenge into her composition classrooms.
Bacon’s main argument seems to be that composition teachers must bring authentic context and learning experiences into their classrooms if they want to equip their students for the writing demands they will encounter once they leave the classroom. This strongly supports the vital importance of bringing service learning into the composition classroom. While the “service” students offer to their “community” is limited to volunteer writing for businesses and organizations (as opposed to some of the other service learning courses, which reach out to the community in other ways), Bacon’s message resonates with the main goals of service learning approach, namely, connecting the learning that occurs within the classroom to the world outside of the classroom. If learning is not connected to real-world experience, Bacon claims, it can hardly be called learning at all.
Bacon, Nora. “Community Service Writing: Problems, Challenges, Questions.” Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Composition Eds. Adler- Kassner, Linda, Robert Crooks, and Ann Watters. Washington D.C.: American Association for Higher Education, 1997. 39-55. Print.
Nora Bacon’s chapter, “Community Service Writing: Problems, Challenges, Questions,” opens by contextualizing service learning within the broader themes and shifts in the history of education. She explains that service learning fits quite well with the relatively recent shift in composition studies “from the cognitive processes of individual writers to the relationship between texts and their social context” (39). She also lists the positive responses teachers typically have to this approach to teaching, including the inclusion of a “real” rhetorical situation, exposure to new people and places, increased insight into social issues, increased pride in finished products, and opportunity for collaboration among other things (41).
Following this contextualization, Bacon offers a sort of “trouble-shooting” session on the potential hiccups a teacher may encounter when bringing service learning into her composition course. As opposed to addressing broader, more abstract difficulties connected to service learning (a prevalent approach in a lot of the other sources addressing service learning), Bacon offers very practical, concrete advice. She talks through how to respond to the possibility that students might be assigned to work with organization to which they are morally opposed, what to do about students who offer weak writing contribution to their assigned organizations, how to approach the grading of service learning projects, and how to handle sharing the role of authority figure in relation to the students. In this chapter, Bacon addresses many of the hands-on, day-to-day problems to consider in reference to bringing service learning into a composition classroom. She ends by recognizing the fact that most teachers find their first experience with service learning quite uncomfortable and difficult. She points to this exact difficulty, however, as a sign that perhaps our composition classrooms are too narrow in their approach to teaching writing. Overall, her advice is eminently practical, but she also offers a theoretical framework to the growing respect academics have for service learning.
Beck, Evelyn. “Writing for Their Future: Students Research the Job Market.” Writing to Make a Difference: Classroom Projects for Community Change. Eds. Benson, Chris, Scott Christian, Dixie Goswami, and Walter H. Gooch. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002. 45-58. Print.
In her chapter “Writing for Their Future: Students Research the Job Market,” Evelyn Beck offers a unique perspective on how to draw service learning into a composition classroom. In the first place, she teaches at a technical college, Piedmont Technical College in Greenwood, South Carolina, so her students have a different set of needs than most of the students described in other articles on service learning. A large portion of Beck’s students are working, single mothers, returning to school in the hopes of earning a degree that will grant them access to jobs that offer more money than working at fast-food restaurants. The first time Beck incorporates service learning into her curriculum, she is teaching a Proofreading and Editing class. Unlike a lot of the service learning articles that focus on service learning as a means to expanding and complicating student understanding of social issues, Beck focuses her service learning course entirely on practical skills her students will need to navigate the job-market. She assigned her students to compose a body of work for the school’s Office Systems Technology department. This publication would include information about the companies that hire Piedmont Tech’s graduates, including job opportunities, salary ranges, shifts and hours, job application process, etc. The students are required to develop a list of interview questions, engage in telephone and personal interviews with professionals, compose a formal business letter explaining their contributions to the project, and maintain a journal expressing their daily progress through the assignment.
One of the most striking aspects of this chapter is Beck’s ability to design a service learning project that meets her students’ needs so exactly. Every component of this project prepares students for their engagement in the professional world after graduation. Not only do students learn more about the job market that they will soon enter, but they able to practice professional interaction and networking with lower stakes. Beck’s example of service learning serves as a meaningful addition to the variety of meaningful ways this approach can be implemented in the classroom. She demonstrates the impressively practical skills service learning can strengthen.
Deans, Thomas. “English Studies and Public Service.” Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Deans, Thomas, Barbara Roswell, and Adrian J. Wurr. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2010. 97-116. Print.
In his chapter, “English Studies and Public Service,” Thomas Deans offers a clear, comprehensive, and useful backdrop to service learning. This includes a brief historical context to this type of teaching, as well as a basic definition and proposed goals. He shows the way service learning aligns with the shifts in rhetorical composition studies and fits with many of the prominent pedagogical goals in the field, including, “active learning, student-centered learning, cooperative learning, lifelong learning, cross-cultural understanding, critical thinking, [and] authentic evaluation” (98). He includes research that supports the use of service learning in the classroom and shares the positives results these studies reveal. This praise of service learning is balanced with very serious critiques. He includes a long list of difficult questions one must ask when considering incorporating service learning in his or her classroom. These questions are largely abstract (as opposed to specific and concrete), and require that the instructor consider larger historical, cultural, and social implications of service learning.
Perhaps the most useful portion of Deans’ contribution to defining and understanding service learning is the way he breaks down this varied and sprawling concept into three, basic categories – writing for the community, writing about the community, and writing with the community. In addition to providing useful descriptions of each category, Deans also offers a chart which shows the defining differences between each approach to service learning. This chart adds an essential set of terms to my understanding of service learning and enhances my understanding of all of the material discussed in other service learning sources.
Duffy, Cheryl Hofstetter. “Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning: Guiding Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses.” Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Deans, Thomas, Barbara Roswell, and Adrian J. Wurr. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2010. 403-413. Print.
When she first attempted to bring service learning into her classroom, Cheryl Hofstetter Duffy did not know very much about this approach to teaching. In her chapter, “Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning: Guiding Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses,” she sets out to provide more of a comprehensive picture of service learning to teachers considering this approach for their own composition classrooms. In order to show the difference that knowledge and planning can bring to a service learning course, Duffy describes her first two experiences with service learning. Her first experience was naively planned without much guidance, while her second came from a place of more experience, understanding, and research.
Through both experiences, Duffy identified four main “lessons” about service learning. First of all, service learning needs to be integrated into the course. The project cannot be an add-on side-project, but must be an integral piece to the themes of the course. Second of all, service learning cannot be solely interested in altruism, but must be academically challenging. This can be promoted through reflective writing with guiding questions, critical class discussions, outside readings, and careful research. In addition, the service learning experience should be built on mutual participation and reciprocal engagement. In order to avoid the tendency to fall into the roles of “server” and “served,” Duffy recommends teachers find ways to involve the community in the learning experience. This emphasizes that we are all here to learn from each other. And finally, Duffy asserts that service learning should engage in a variety of discourses. She encourages a broad range of assignments, including expressive, civic, and academically minded projects. In addition, she claims that one course can engage all three of the categories Thomas Deans describes – writing about the community, for the community, and with the community.
Perhaps the most encouraging thought born from Duffy’s two experiences with service learning are summarized with her words, “I discovered that you can do almost everything wrong and still have some good results” (411). This idea is balanced, of course, with the recognition that the class will be exponentially improved by the amount of research and planning that go into one’s design of a service learning class. However, she ultimately frees inexperienced teachers to try service learning by recognizing that even the imperfect service learning class has value. At the same time, these teachers can find comfort in simultaneously recognizing that the second service learning experience will be better than the first.
In this chapter, Duffy provides concrete, practical examples to back up her theoretical conclusions. In this way, her chapter offers a useful balance of application and theory, enhancing my understanding of both as they relate to service learning.
Haussamen, Brock. “Service Learning and First Year Composition.” Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Deans, Thomas, Barbara Roswell, and Adrian J. Wurr. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2010. 414-421. Print.
Similarly to many other pieces on service learning, Brock Haussamen opens his chapter, “Service Learning and First-Year Composition,” with a backdrop to the history and goals of service learning. Most noteworthy is his proclamation that service learning is a pedagogy “that addresses not only the issue of how best to learn but also the question of the best purposes of learning” (414). He describes the many faces of service learning, but ultimately hones in on a narrower slice of service learning – the first year composition classroom.
As a teacher of first year English students and one of the directors of service learning at Raritan Valley Community College, Haussamen has much first-hand experience to share with his readers. He describes two approaches to service learning that he has incorporated into his first year composition classes – the optional and the required service learning projects. For the optional service learning option, students spend at least 15 hours over the course of the semester chatting with a senior citizen in a nursing home. Based on this experience and purposeful research, students write a researched biography on the elderly individual, incorporating meaningful historical context. In the required service learning course, students are obligated to engage in 30 hours of volunteer work at an organization of their choosing. (He provides many leads for these students, but the decision about and contacting of the organization is entirely up to the student.) These students identify a social need within the community they are visiting, engage in follow-up research, and finally write a problem-solution paper. Haussamen shows the benefits and drawbacks to both approaches to service learning, offering advice for the potential difficulties either might instigate. He also provides many interesting and helpful examples of the projects students have produced from these experiences. Emphasized through both examples, however, is the need for reflection. Haussamen insists that learning will not occur without thoughtful discussion, journaling, and research.
Haussamen ends his chapter describing the positive responses students have had to service learning. Most students, he explains, become engaged with their projects. Even students who begin the semester begrudgingly usually finish the semester involved and excited about their projects. Ultimately, Haussamen believes that service learning is ideal for community college classrooms. These students are from the local community and often stay rooted to this community. Therefore, service learning initiates a lasting and meaningful relationship between the students and their own communities.
This chapter offers a new perspective on service learning. Besides the fact that Haussamen writes from the perspective of a community college writing classroom, he offers interesting insight into optional and required service learning courses. He also provides a number of helpful examples of service learning, which broaden my picture of the possibilities service learning has to offer.
Herzberg, Bruce. “Community Service and Critical Teaching.” College Composition and Communication 54.3 (1994): 307-319. Print.
As a leader in the field of service learning, Bruce Herzberg opens this article naming some of the commonly agreed upon merits of service learning. He speaks to the refreshing sense of “purpose” found in these course designs, as well as the development of a social conscience in the students and an empowerment to use their education to help others. While Herzberg recognizes the value of these results, he also worries that students simplify and individualize the problems they encounter while engaging in service learning and fail to recognize the larger institutions which contribute to homelessness and poverty. He explains the vital importance of taking service learning past mere individualized charity work. Encouraging a deeper understanding of illiteracy, faulty educational systems, and unemployment, Herzberg pushes for big-picture social change.
In order to give a picture of how this might be done, Herzberg offers an overview of some of the service learning courses he has taught. His students engage in a variety of service learning projects, including visiting young children in their classrooms to witness the early learning in process, returning to their own high schools, volunteering as tutors at a homeless shelter, and exchanging letters with convicts in educational programs in prison. They also read controversial texts, like Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, which challenges students’ firmly rooted beliefs in things like America as a land of equal opportunity and the education system as a social liberator.
Herzberg’s main goal is to challenge and complicate some of the initial benefits of service learning. Instead of settling for teaching it in such a way that offers worthwhile experiences and practical experience for students, Herzberg sees the service learning composition classroom as a place to make better citizens interested in participating in social transformation.
Herzberg, Bruce. “Service Learning and Public Discourse.” The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing. 6th ed. Eds. Glenn, Cheryl and Melissa A. Goldthwaite. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008. 441-451. Print.
In his chapter “Service Learning and Public Discourse.” Bruce Herzberg points to the wide gap between public and academic discourses. More specifically, he reveals how he has grappled with this discord in his own classroom. In order to illustrate the way he eventually learned to draw both discourses productively into his course design, Herzberg offers a glimpse into one of his course designs used with first year composition students. These students sign-up for a year-long course, tutoring once a week at a few select schools and centers. Once they’ve spent a considerable amount of time in these communities, students begin to research a topic related to their experiences that interests them. After students have put a great deal of time and effort into researching and composing these large projects, Herzberg asks his students what will happen to this large body of knowledge they have accumulated. In order to bring to life the larger purpose of researching these larger social issues, Herzberg calls his students to find a way to bring these researched ideas to the public. As students transform their research papers into public genres, they come to truly understand the significance of rhetorical situation.
Herzberg offers both theoretical as well as applicable knowledge about his experience incorporating service learning in his classroom. He provides specific examples of the types of research in which students have engaged, as well as the creative ways students sought to reach the public about their researched ideas. In addition, Herzberg makes a case for the importance of incorporating both academic and public discourses in the classroom, speaking to the potential detriments of choosing one over the other. Overall, Herzberg’s knowledge and experience in the field of service learning offers a comprehensive vision of many of the debates coursing through this approach to teaching. He has a firm grasp on the purpose of the composition class and persuasively articulates the importance of incorporating academic and public discourses in the curriculum.
Morgan, Marjorie Kleinneiur and Lauren Kocks. “Opening the Door Between the Workplace and the Classroom.” Writing to Make a Difference: Classroom Projects for Community Change. Eds. Benson, Chris, Scott Christian, Dixie Goswami, and Walter H. Gooch. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002. 13-22. Print.
The authors of “Opening the Door Between the Workplace and the Classroom,” Marjorie Kleinneiur Morgan and Lauren Kocks, describe the process of bringing service learning into a ninth grade English class. While describing the particulars of the project, the authors emphasize two things: the sense of pride and empowerment growing in their students through the service learning experience and the removal of their own guidance and authority from the project. Even the format of the chapter brings authority to the student voice. Morgan and Kocks include student writing and lists with their own reflections on the service learning experience. Students list a variety of benefits to this experience, including, “being in charge,” “making decisions,” “leading a group of my peers toward a goal,” “working collectively in a group,” “getting work published,” “doing hands-on work,” “being motivated by high expectations,” and “joining together and uniting as a class.” These student excerpts express excitement, authority, confidence, and pride in their learning experiences.
This chapter offers a one-sided, overwhelmingly positive case for the benefits of service learning. Unlike most of my sources on service learning, Morgan and Kocks look at the possibilities for service learning in lower level English classes. Overall, they make a compelling case for service learning as a method of empowering students as writers and members of their communities.
Welch, Nancy. “‘And Now That I Know Them’: Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course.” College Composition and Communication 54.2 (2002): 243-263. Print.
In her article “‘And Now That I Know Them’: Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course,” Nancy Welch offers a complex picture of service learning as she relates and reflects on some of the experiences her students have had in her service learning classes. She explains the basic premise of her service learning project, namely, a course that involves weekly work in an after school program at a community center in combination with a classroom emphasis on community literacy as it relates to wider cultural implications. Her students are required to engage in a large amount of journal writing, and Welch includes excerpts of these journal entries from different points in the semester to illustrate some of the progressions in student understanding unfolding over time. In addition, her example of service learning offers one of the few examples of Thomas Deans’ description of “Writing for the Community.” Her students align themselves with a community of young children and teens and seek to empower these young writers and readers to own their own voices by initiating long-term literacy projects run by the youths themselves.
Besides the fact that Welch includes a detailed example of how to incorporate service learning in a writing class, her complicated and nuanced representation of the service learning experience offers a rich level of complexity to my understanding of this teaching approach. Her overarching goal seems to be to destabilize the binaries of service learning, disrupting the roles of “server-served,” “subject-object,” “active-passive,” and so on. Instead of adhering to these exclusion roles, Welch pushes for mutuality between students and the community, using feminist object-relations theory as a filter through which to understand service learning dynamics more clearly. She encourages that teachers and students shift their thinking from the traditional binaries to, “a subject-subject logic in which all participants, including the children and teens at the center, are understood and composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any one construction of who we all are” (247). While her voice is strikingly honest as she faces some of the profound challenges of service learning, she ultimately ends with a sense of hopefulness for the potential service learning has to offer. She concludes that the difficulty of navigating service learning leads students to struggle for their own understanding on challenging subjects. This nuanced and varied representation of service learning offers a new lens through which to understanding service learning and enhances my understanding of the various complications and rewards enacting when service learning is incorporating into the composition classroom.
Annotated Bibliography: Service Learning
One of the central concerns presented in Chapter 11 ("Invitation to Further Study") of St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing relates to content in first-year writing courses. This chapter explores a multitude of questions as to what theories and forms should be addressed in the classroom, as well as how to incorporate reading and writing productively. The underlying question behind all of these questions becomes, “Is there any foundational common to all of these programs?” (267). One of the things that I see writing instructors continually strive for in our writing classes is to make the material relevant – to connect it to the world outside of our classrooms. Across theories and forms, this seems to be a common thread of concern. How can we best help our students transfer the material in our lessons and assignments to other contexts outside of our course? Service Learning is one response to this challenge. This theory does not attempt to merely make theoretical links to the world outside of the classroom but literally places students in contexts outside of the classroom. It challenges students to practically apply material presented in the classroom-bubble to meaningful, “real-world” experiences. This is a space for material to be challenged, questioned, complicated, and meaningfully absorbed. Similarly, Service Learning forges a pathway between academia and non-academia in a way that allows each to enhance the understanding of the other. If our goal, as instructors of composition, is to equip students to interact productively and meaningfully in their communities, understanding this approach to teaching becomes essential.
Bacon, Nora. “Building a Swan's Nest for Instruction in Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication 51.4 (2001): 589-609. Print.
In this article, Nora Bacon argues for the inextricable importance of teaching context in the writing classroom. Even when composition instructors teach “audience” and “purpose” to their students, Bacon asserts, these concepts remain disconnected from authentic experience. The “audience” is always technically the teacher, and the “purpose” always comes back to an assignment and a grade. In other words, in order to truly teach writing inside the classroom as it connects to authentic context or a genuine rhetorical purpose, teachers must link their classrooms to authentic experiences outside of the classroom. This is more complicated, however, than merely providing students with real-world writing opportunities, like internships or community service writing. Bacon suggests that teachers must rethink their curriculum entirely, and she uses Nancy, a teacher San Francisco State University, as a case study to support her argument.
Through her experience teaching two semesters of Community Service Writing in sophomore level English classes, Nancy realizes that traditional English classes are not conducive to teaching writing as a social act. Instead of teaching students flexible writing skills they can apply to” real-world” writing, the traditional English class teaches students to produce the kind of writing they would only replicate for future English classes. She learns that, in order to truly equip her students to write well inside and outside of the academy, she cannot rely on teaching “generalized” writing skills. Instead, she learns to teach students to be sensitive to purpose and the rhetorical needs of each writing situation. This shift in her thinking brought relevancy and a meaningful challenge into her composition classrooms.
Bacon’s main argument seems to be that composition teachers must bring authentic context and learning experiences into their classrooms if they want to equip their students for the writing demands they will encounter once they leave the classroom. This strongly supports the vital importance of bringing service learning into the composition classroom. While the “service” students offer to their “community” is limited to volunteer writing for businesses and organizations (as opposed to some of the other service learning courses, which reach out to the community in other ways), Bacon’s message resonates with the main goals of service learning approach, namely, connecting the learning that occurs within the classroom to the world outside of the classroom. If learning is not connected to real-world experience, Bacon claims, it can hardly be called learning at all.
Bacon, Nora. “Community Service Writing: Problems, Challenges, Questions.” Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Composition Eds. Adler- Kassner, Linda, Robert Crooks, and Ann Watters. Washington D.C.: American Association for Higher Education, 1997. 39-55. Print.
Nora Bacon’s chapter, “Community Service Writing: Problems, Challenges, Questions,” opens by contextualizing service learning within the broader themes and shifts in the history of education. She explains that service learning fits quite well with the relatively recent shift in composition studies “from the cognitive processes of individual writers to the relationship between texts and their social context” (39). She also lists the positive responses teachers typically have to this approach to teaching, including the inclusion of a “real” rhetorical situation, exposure to new people and places, increased insight into social issues, increased pride in finished products, and opportunity for collaboration among other things (41).
Following this contextualization, Bacon offers a sort of “trouble-shooting” session on the potential hiccups a teacher may encounter when bringing service learning into her composition course. As opposed to addressing broader, more abstract difficulties connected to service learning (a prevalent approach in a lot of the other sources addressing service learning), Bacon offers very practical, concrete advice. She talks through how to respond to the possibility that students might be assigned to work with organization to which they are morally opposed, what to do about students who offer weak writing contribution to their assigned organizations, how to approach the grading of service learning projects, and how to handle sharing the role of authority figure in relation to the students. In this chapter, Bacon addresses many of the hands-on, day-to-day problems to consider in reference to bringing service learning into a composition classroom. She ends by recognizing the fact that most teachers find their first experience with service learning quite uncomfortable and difficult. She points to this exact difficulty, however, as a sign that perhaps our composition classrooms are too narrow in their approach to teaching writing. Overall, her advice is eminently practical, but she also offers a theoretical framework to the growing respect academics have for service learning.
Beck, Evelyn. “Writing for Their Future: Students Research the Job Market.” Writing to Make a Difference: Classroom Projects for Community Change. Eds. Benson, Chris, Scott Christian, Dixie Goswami, and Walter H. Gooch. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002. 45-58. Print.
In her chapter “Writing for Their Future: Students Research the Job Market,” Evelyn Beck offers a unique perspective on how to draw service learning into a composition classroom. In the first place, she teaches at a technical college, Piedmont Technical College in Greenwood, South Carolina, so her students have a different set of needs than most of the students described in other articles on service learning. A large portion of Beck’s students are working, single mothers, returning to school in the hopes of earning a degree that will grant them access to jobs that offer more money than working at fast-food restaurants. The first time Beck incorporates service learning into her curriculum, she is teaching a Proofreading and Editing class. Unlike a lot of the service learning articles that focus on service learning as a means to expanding and complicating student understanding of social issues, Beck focuses her service learning course entirely on practical skills her students will need to navigate the job-market. She assigned her students to compose a body of work for the school’s Office Systems Technology department. This publication would include information about the companies that hire Piedmont Tech’s graduates, including job opportunities, salary ranges, shifts and hours, job application process, etc. The students are required to develop a list of interview questions, engage in telephone and personal interviews with professionals, compose a formal business letter explaining their contributions to the project, and maintain a journal expressing their daily progress through the assignment.
One of the most striking aspects of this chapter is Beck’s ability to design a service learning project that meets her students’ needs so exactly. Every component of this project prepares students for their engagement in the professional world after graduation. Not only do students learn more about the job market that they will soon enter, but they able to practice professional interaction and networking with lower stakes. Beck’s example of service learning serves as a meaningful addition to the variety of meaningful ways this approach can be implemented in the classroom. She demonstrates the impressively practical skills service learning can strengthen.
Deans, Thomas. “English Studies and Public Service.” Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Deans, Thomas, Barbara Roswell, and Adrian J. Wurr. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2010. 97-116. Print.
In his chapter, “English Studies and Public Service,” Thomas Deans offers a clear, comprehensive, and useful backdrop to service learning. This includes a brief historical context to this type of teaching, as well as a basic definition and proposed goals. He shows the way service learning aligns with the shifts in rhetorical composition studies and fits with many of the prominent pedagogical goals in the field, including, “active learning, student-centered learning, cooperative learning, lifelong learning, cross-cultural understanding, critical thinking, [and] authentic evaluation” (98). He includes research that supports the use of service learning in the classroom and shares the positives results these studies reveal. This praise of service learning is balanced with very serious critiques. He includes a long list of difficult questions one must ask when considering incorporating service learning in his or her classroom. These questions are largely abstract (as opposed to specific and concrete), and require that the instructor consider larger historical, cultural, and social implications of service learning.
Perhaps the most useful portion of Deans’ contribution to defining and understanding service learning is the way he breaks down this varied and sprawling concept into three, basic categories – writing for the community, writing about the community, and writing with the community. In addition to providing useful descriptions of each category, Deans also offers a chart which shows the defining differences between each approach to service learning. This chart adds an essential set of terms to my understanding of service learning and enhances my understanding of all of the material discussed in other service learning sources.
Duffy, Cheryl Hofstetter. “Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning: Guiding Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses.” Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Deans, Thomas, Barbara Roswell, and Adrian J. Wurr. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2010. 403-413. Print.
When she first attempted to bring service learning into her classroom, Cheryl Hofstetter Duffy did not know very much about this approach to teaching. In her chapter, “Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning: Guiding Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses,” she sets out to provide more of a comprehensive picture of service learning to teachers considering this approach for their own composition classrooms. In order to show the difference that knowledge and planning can bring to a service learning course, Duffy describes her first two experiences with service learning. Her first experience was naively planned without much guidance, while her second came from a place of more experience, understanding, and research.
Through both experiences, Duffy identified four main “lessons” about service learning. First of all, service learning needs to be integrated into the course. The project cannot be an add-on side-project, but must be an integral piece to the themes of the course. Second of all, service learning cannot be solely interested in altruism, but must be academically challenging. This can be promoted through reflective writing with guiding questions, critical class discussions, outside readings, and careful research. In addition, the service learning experience should be built on mutual participation and reciprocal engagement. In order to avoid the tendency to fall into the roles of “server” and “served,” Duffy recommends teachers find ways to involve the community in the learning experience. This emphasizes that we are all here to learn from each other. And finally, Duffy asserts that service learning should engage in a variety of discourses. She encourages a broad range of assignments, including expressive, civic, and academically minded projects. In addition, she claims that one course can engage all three of the categories Thomas Deans describes – writing about the community, for the community, and with the community.
Perhaps the most encouraging thought born from Duffy’s two experiences with service learning are summarized with her words, “I discovered that you can do almost everything wrong and still have some good results” (411). This idea is balanced, of course, with the recognition that the class will be exponentially improved by the amount of research and planning that go into one’s design of a service learning class. However, she ultimately frees inexperienced teachers to try service learning by recognizing that even the imperfect service learning class has value. At the same time, these teachers can find comfort in simultaneously recognizing that the second service learning experience will be better than the first.
In this chapter, Duffy provides concrete, practical examples to back up her theoretical conclusions. In this way, her chapter offers a useful balance of application and theory, enhancing my understanding of both as they relate to service learning.
Haussamen, Brock. “Service Learning and First Year Composition.” Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Deans, Thomas, Barbara Roswell, and Adrian J. Wurr. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2010. 414-421. Print.
Similarly to many other pieces on service learning, Brock Haussamen opens his chapter, “Service Learning and First-Year Composition,” with a backdrop to the history and goals of service learning. Most noteworthy is his proclamation that service learning is a pedagogy “that addresses not only the issue of how best to learn but also the question of the best purposes of learning” (414). He describes the many faces of service learning, but ultimately hones in on a narrower slice of service learning – the first year composition classroom.
As a teacher of first year English students and one of the directors of service learning at Raritan Valley Community College, Haussamen has much first-hand experience to share with his readers. He describes two approaches to service learning that he has incorporated into his first year composition classes – the optional and the required service learning projects. For the optional service learning option, students spend at least 15 hours over the course of the semester chatting with a senior citizen in a nursing home. Based on this experience and purposeful research, students write a researched biography on the elderly individual, incorporating meaningful historical context. In the required service learning course, students are obligated to engage in 30 hours of volunteer work at an organization of their choosing. (He provides many leads for these students, but the decision about and contacting of the organization is entirely up to the student.) These students identify a social need within the community they are visiting, engage in follow-up research, and finally write a problem-solution paper. Haussamen shows the benefits and drawbacks to both approaches to service learning, offering advice for the potential difficulties either might instigate. He also provides many interesting and helpful examples of the projects students have produced from these experiences. Emphasized through both examples, however, is the need for reflection. Haussamen insists that learning will not occur without thoughtful discussion, journaling, and research.
Haussamen ends his chapter describing the positive responses students have had to service learning. Most students, he explains, become engaged with their projects. Even students who begin the semester begrudgingly usually finish the semester involved and excited about their projects. Ultimately, Haussamen believes that service learning is ideal for community college classrooms. These students are from the local community and often stay rooted to this community. Therefore, service learning initiates a lasting and meaningful relationship between the students and their own communities.
This chapter offers a new perspective on service learning. Besides the fact that Haussamen writes from the perspective of a community college writing classroom, he offers interesting insight into optional and required service learning courses. He also provides a number of helpful examples of service learning, which broaden my picture of the possibilities service learning has to offer.
Herzberg, Bruce. “Community Service and Critical Teaching.” College Composition and Communication 54.3 (1994): 307-319. Print.
As a leader in the field of service learning, Bruce Herzberg opens this article naming some of the commonly agreed upon merits of service learning. He speaks to the refreshing sense of “purpose” found in these course designs, as well as the development of a social conscience in the students and an empowerment to use their education to help others. While Herzberg recognizes the value of these results, he also worries that students simplify and individualize the problems they encounter while engaging in service learning and fail to recognize the larger institutions which contribute to homelessness and poverty. He explains the vital importance of taking service learning past mere individualized charity work. Encouraging a deeper understanding of illiteracy, faulty educational systems, and unemployment, Herzberg pushes for big-picture social change.
In order to give a picture of how this might be done, Herzberg offers an overview of some of the service learning courses he has taught. His students engage in a variety of service learning projects, including visiting young children in their classrooms to witness the early learning in process, returning to their own high schools, volunteering as tutors at a homeless shelter, and exchanging letters with convicts in educational programs in prison. They also read controversial texts, like Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, which challenges students’ firmly rooted beliefs in things like America as a land of equal opportunity and the education system as a social liberator.
Herzberg’s main goal is to challenge and complicate some of the initial benefits of service learning. Instead of settling for teaching it in such a way that offers worthwhile experiences and practical experience for students, Herzberg sees the service learning composition classroom as a place to make better citizens interested in participating in social transformation.
Herzberg, Bruce. “Service Learning and Public Discourse.” The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing. 6th ed. Eds. Glenn, Cheryl and Melissa A. Goldthwaite. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008. 441-451. Print.
In his chapter “Service Learning and Public Discourse.” Bruce Herzberg points to the wide gap between public and academic discourses. More specifically, he reveals how he has grappled with this discord in his own classroom. In order to illustrate the way he eventually learned to draw both discourses productively into his course design, Herzberg offers a glimpse into one of his course designs used with first year composition students. These students sign-up for a year-long course, tutoring once a week at a few select schools and centers. Once they’ve spent a considerable amount of time in these communities, students begin to research a topic related to their experiences that interests them. After students have put a great deal of time and effort into researching and composing these large projects, Herzberg asks his students what will happen to this large body of knowledge they have accumulated. In order to bring to life the larger purpose of researching these larger social issues, Herzberg calls his students to find a way to bring these researched ideas to the public. As students transform their research papers into public genres, they come to truly understand the significance of rhetorical situation.
Herzberg offers both theoretical as well as applicable knowledge about his experience incorporating service learning in his classroom. He provides specific examples of the types of research in which students have engaged, as well as the creative ways students sought to reach the public about their researched ideas. In addition, Herzberg makes a case for the importance of incorporating both academic and public discourses in the classroom, speaking to the potential detriments of choosing one over the other. Overall, Herzberg’s knowledge and experience in the field of service learning offers a comprehensive vision of many of the debates coursing through this approach to teaching. He has a firm grasp on the purpose of the composition class and persuasively articulates the importance of incorporating academic and public discourses in the curriculum.
Morgan, Marjorie Kleinneiur and Lauren Kocks. “Opening the Door Between the Workplace and the Classroom.” Writing to Make a Difference: Classroom Projects for Community Change. Eds. Benson, Chris, Scott Christian, Dixie Goswami, and Walter H. Gooch. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002. 13-22. Print.
The authors of “Opening the Door Between the Workplace and the Classroom,” Marjorie Kleinneiur Morgan and Lauren Kocks, describe the process of bringing service learning into a ninth grade English class. While describing the particulars of the project, the authors emphasize two things: the sense of pride and empowerment growing in their students through the service learning experience and the removal of their own guidance and authority from the project. Even the format of the chapter brings authority to the student voice. Morgan and Kocks include student writing and lists with their own reflections on the service learning experience. Students list a variety of benefits to this experience, including, “being in charge,” “making decisions,” “leading a group of my peers toward a goal,” “working collectively in a group,” “getting work published,” “doing hands-on work,” “being motivated by high expectations,” and “joining together and uniting as a class.” These student excerpts express excitement, authority, confidence, and pride in their learning experiences.
This chapter offers a one-sided, overwhelmingly positive case for the benefits of service learning. Unlike most of my sources on service learning, Morgan and Kocks look at the possibilities for service learning in lower level English classes. Overall, they make a compelling case for service learning as a method of empowering students as writers and members of their communities.
Welch, Nancy. “‘And Now That I Know Them’: Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course.” College Composition and Communication 54.2 (2002): 243-263. Print.
In her article “‘And Now That I Know Them’: Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course,” Nancy Welch offers a complex picture of service learning as she relates and reflects on some of the experiences her students have had in her service learning classes. She explains the basic premise of her service learning project, namely, a course that involves weekly work in an after school program at a community center in combination with a classroom emphasis on community literacy as it relates to wider cultural implications. Her students are required to engage in a large amount of journal writing, and Welch includes excerpts of these journal entries from different points in the semester to illustrate some of the progressions in student understanding unfolding over time. In addition, her example of service learning offers one of the few examples of Thomas Deans’ description of “Writing for the Community.” Her students align themselves with a community of young children and teens and seek to empower these young writers and readers to own their own voices by initiating long-term literacy projects run by the youths themselves.
Besides the fact that Welch includes a detailed example of how to incorporate service learning in a writing class, her complicated and nuanced representation of the service learning experience offers a rich level of complexity to my understanding of this teaching approach. Her overarching goal seems to be to destabilize the binaries of service learning, disrupting the roles of “server-served,” “subject-object,” “active-passive,” and so on. Instead of adhering to these exclusion roles, Welch pushes for mutuality between students and the community, using feminist object-relations theory as a filter through which to understand service learning dynamics more clearly. She encourages that teachers and students shift their thinking from the traditional binaries to, “a subject-subject logic in which all participants, including the children and teens at the center, are understood and composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any one construction of who we all are” (247). While her voice is strikingly honest as she faces some of the profound challenges of service learning, she ultimately ends with a sense of hopefulness for the potential service learning has to offer. She concludes that the difficulty of navigating service learning leads students to struggle for their own understanding on challenging subjects. This nuanced and varied representation of service learning offers a new lens through which to understanding service learning and enhances my understanding of the various complications and rewards enacting when service learning is incorporating into the composition classroom.