The Service Learning Office programming fulfills several related functions:
The AmeriCorps Education Scholarship
We recruit students to participate in the UCAN Serve part-time Americorps Program and provide training, support and tracking of service commitments. Education scholarships from $1,000-$2,300 are rewarded to students for service to use towards tuition or student loans.
Service Learning Curriculum Development
We consult with faculty on constructing and implementing service learning courses and award Course Development Grants and small grants-in-aid on a rolling basis throughout the year for this purpose.
Support, Training and Education
We work with campus programs and departments such as the Program for Writing and Rhetoric to move their entire teaching and research culture towards engaged and committed learning.
We develop and facilitate events, projects, workshops and annual conferences on implementing service learning.
Beyond helping individual students and faculty, all of these activities are steps to helping the university reach the experiential and community involvement goals of the 2030 vision statement.
Professor Martin Bickman, Faculty Director, wins the 2009 Thomas Jefferson Award, one of the university's highest honors. Click here for article.
Philosophy
Service learning at this campus began, as it did on many campuses in the 1960s and 70s, as a channel for youthful idealism and a more “relevant” education. Since then we have learned that Service Learning helps fulfill not only social, ethical, and political goals but is crucial in creating genuine learning, as John Dewey theorized at the turn of the 20th century.
Service learning relates academic study to work in the community in ways that enhance both. We learn best and most deeply by constructing knowledge and rooting it in the immediacies of our personal experience. William James wrote: “No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of details extends” and Zora Neale Hurston has one of her characters say in another vernacular: “Yuh got to go there to know there.”
Service learning courses attempt to help students understand the world through changing it and vice-versa. They seek not just to recruit students to work in soup kitchens but to ask and begin to answer the larger questions of why there is hunger in our society. Such courses transcend the notion that the university is a detached, self-contained unit by discovering and creating vibrant relations with the world outside of it.
Marty Bickman, Faculty Director, has made this case at length in a book [www.mindingamericaneducation.edu] and in an autobiographical article , and the Service Learning Office seeks to implement these ideas on our campus.