Service-Learning at the American Community College

Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

A. Traver, Z. Katz, A. Traver, Z. Katz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137361707
• eBook ISBN: 9781137355737
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

This volume brings together a breadth of new research on how service-learning - combining community-based experiential learning with classroom instruction - can best be employed at community colleges. It discusses outcomes and best practices for all involved, covers both theory and practice, and draws on both qualitative and quantitative methods.

PART I

Service-Learning and Community Colleges

CHAPTER 1

The Roots of Service-Learning as a Basis for Advancing the Civic Mission of Community Colleges

Robert G. Bringle, Kathleen E. Edwards, and Patti H. Clayton

Democracy’s colleges. Originally referring to land-grant institutions and then claimed by community colleges as well (Ronan 2012), “democracy’s colleges” highlight what may be a primary tension facing many institutions of higher education today: how to fulfill—and perhaps integrate—the dual purposes of “doing the work of democracy” (i.e., preparation of students for civic life) and “equalizing opportunity” (i.e., widespread provision of the college education that is a gateway to employment and economic security) (Ronan 2012, 31). This tension may be particularly overt within community colleges, which educate approximately one half of the undergraduates in the United States (including a significant proportion of nonmajority and historically underserved undergraduates) and have a long history of providing widespread access to higher education and vocational training (American Association of Community Colleges n.d., “Community College Trends and Statistics”; Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker 2014). Therefore, both the potential for generating creative and effective approaches to navigating this tension and the stakes of doing so are high within the community college system. This book on service-learning in community colleges is an important step in the ongoing work to leverage service-learning as a strategy for deepening partnerships, nurturing healthy communities, enriching the civic work of faculty, cocreating high-quality civic learning and leadership opportunities with students, and transforming institutions. We provide an overview of service-learning in this context, examining its key role in institutional endeavors to hold fast to their civic mission—within community colleges in particular and higher education more generally—with an eye to what can be learned from community colleges as they use this pedagogy to advance and integrate these dimensions of their identity as democracy’s colleges. This chapter seeks to establish service-learning firmly as a viable and effective, albeit complex, strategy for fulfilling the civic mission of higher education institutions—including community colleges—by exploring its conceptual and practice-based roots, the evidence of its contributions to student learning outcomes, and its future evolution.

Tension around Mission in Higher Education

Internal and external pressures are stimulating re-examination of the academy’s primary role. Is the core purpose teaching the disciplines, cultivating critical thinking and problem solving, preparing students for careers, promoting economic development, contributing to local communities, generating knowledge, or cultivating the civic capacities needed for a flourishing democracy? The easy, and not inaccurate, answer is that the mission of higher education encompasses all of these possibilities and others. However, these various purposes can and do introduce points of tension and uncertainty regarding priorities, especially in a time of scarce resources and political polarization. One of the foci of the contemporary re-examination of mission is the question of how best to enact the civic purposes of the academy, which have been compromised on many campuses by neoliberalism’s corporatizing of the academy and, at some institutions, by the privileging of research over both teaching and engagement with communities (Brackmann 2012; The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement 2012; Saltmarsh and Hartley 2011). Bringle, Clayton, and Plater (2013) articulate the concern underlying calls for increased attention to civic purposes: “A focus on private gain (credentialing for employment) may displace public good (educating for citizenship) as the primary raison d’être of the academy—to the detriment of our students, our communities, and our democracy” (6).

This tension has been raised in several venues in recent years. Prominently, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future, released by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement in 2012, calls for a pervasive “civic reform movement” (8) to transform institutions of higher learning so that they “prepare students for careers and citizenship, rather than only the former” (10). The report argues that “the more civic-oriented that colleges and universities become, the greater their overall capacity to spur local and global economic vitality, social and political well-being, and collective action to address public problems” (2). Upon receipt of A Crucible Moment, the US Department of Education echoed the report’s emphasis on the necessity of producing both employees and citizens: “To fulfill America’s promise in our global society, our education system at all levels, from early learning through higher education, must serve our nation both as its economic engine and its wellspring for democracy” (Kanter and Ochoa 2012, v, emphasis added).

A Crucible Moment suggests that “it is all the more important that civic learning be integrated into the curriculum, including career training programs” at community colleges (The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement 2012, 10). These institutions may find it especially challenging to maintain the civic dimension of their mission, however. Community colleges are under pressure to serve as engines of economic development and are “especially vulnerable to the pressures of corporatization” (Jones 2008, 213). Jones offers as one example that community college students “demand education for economic success and quick progress through convenient programs, not education for citizenship” (214). One study of community colleges concludes that “community colleges see academic, economic, and civic concerns as part of their primary purpose” but “place a higher priority . . . on enabling students to reach their individual goals, providing a quality education, and pursuing economic achievements than they do on democracy, citizenship, and related issues” (Prins 2002, 40).

Although A Crucible Moment indicates that “a robust approach to civic learning is provided to only a minority of students” (2) and that civic development is not “yet an expectation for every college student” (6), The Democracy Commitment established a goal that “every graduate of an American community college will have had an education in democracy” (Ronan 2012, 32). Launched in 2011, The Democracy Commitment provides “a platform for the development and expansion of community college programs, projects, and curricula that aim to engage students in civic learning and democratic practice across the country” (The Democracy Commitment n.d., para 5). This project partners with national organizations (e.g., Association of American Colleges and Universities, American Association of State Colleges and Universities, and national civic organizations) to develop programs that integrate civic initiatives more fully on community college campuses. These programs target a broad array of democratic issues such as equal access to education, equal justice, civic skills, and diversity issues. The Democracy Commitment holds great promise for strengthening community college initiatives to sustain the civic dimension of their dual mission; decades of work to develop service-learning as an approach to civic education make clear that it has much to offer in support of this ambitious and necessary community college agenda.

Service-Learning and the Civic Mission of Higher Education

Service-learning has emerged throughout higher education as a leading strategy for reclaiming and centering civic purposes in the work of students, faculty, and staff and is viewed by many practitioners and scholars as a mechanism through which the academy can fulfill its democracy-building mission (Saltmarsh and Zlotkowski 2011; Langseth and Plater 2004; Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont, and Stephens 2003; Bringle, Games, and Malloy 1999). Sigmon (1979) was one of the first practitioner-scholars to formalize service-learning as a theory-grounded teaching and learning strategy and partnership process designed to advance academic and civic learning as well as address community concerns. Campus Compact, formed in 1985 to support colleges and universities in institutionalizing community-campus engagement and civic learning, now includes over 30 state chapters and more than 1,100 public and private two- and four-year colleges and universities (Campus Compact n.d.). Other national organizations (e.g., National Society for Experiential Education, Association of American Colleges and Universities, American Association of State Colleges and Universities, American Association of Community Colleges [AACC]) have provided venues for professional meetings and disseminated resources to support implementation of high-quality service-learning. The International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement and the Michigan Journal for Community Service Learning, among others, have enabled the development of a growing base of research, theory, and best practices focused on community-campus engagement. Launched in 2006, the Carnegie Foundation’s elective classification for Community Engagement foregrounded service-learning—and related approaches to community engagement and civic learning in the curriculum—as a defining dimension of the engaged campus.

The community college system has both connected with these initiatives and developed its own. For more than 20 years the Community College National Center for Community Engagement (formerly the Campus Compact National Center for Community Engagement) has supported service-learning course design, partnership development, assessment, and the development of best practices, including through the online, peer-reviewed Journal for Civic Commitment. As one example of the center’s work, in order to capitalize on the applied orientation of two-year institutions and the research emphasis of many four-year institutions, the 2 + 4 = Service on Common Ground grant, funded from 1997 to 2000, partnered community colleges and universities to develop service-learning courses and other joint projects focused on community issues (Chitgopekar and Swaba 1999, 3). The 2 + 4 program challenged the competitive zero-sum gain assumptions that can often be held by institutions trying to access the same resources by identifying shared areas of interest for all institutions and community organizations involved in these long-term projects.

Similarly, for 18 years the AACC provided leadership and more than $5.5 million in federal funding to community colleges through the Community Colleges Broadening Horizons through Service Learning grant program. Before closing in 2012 with the end of funding from Learn and Serve America, the program helped community colleges build capacity and infrastructure for service-learning, engage in faculty development and training resources, conduct assessment, and enhance the credibility of the pedagogy.

Led not only by these initiatives but also by regional and local organizations and networks and countless individual practitioners and scholars throughout the country and across all institutional types, service-learning has undergone steady growth for the past two decades (Campus Compact 2013). Within the community college system in particular, two-thirds of the institutions’ curricula included service-learning in 2012, up from 3 percent in 1995 (Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker 2014, 296). Service-learning is associated with and has contributed to many changes in higher education around mission, assessment, curriculum, promotion and tenure, infrastructure, and community partnerships. However, to paraphrase one of the pioneers, Timothy Stanton, rather than service-learning transforming higher education through prioritizing and leveraging its civic mission, it may be that higher education has instead changed service-learning (personal communication 2001). Many of the early practitioners had hoped that their strong emphasis on students and community members as colleagues, on reciprocal community-campus partnerships, and on civic learning and social change would transform the ways in which the academy functioned internally and partnered externally. However, too often service-learning has been implemented in a manner that neglects these fundamental principles and enacts instead the commodification that is pervasive in contemporary higher education (e.g., positioning students as helpers rather than colleagues; setting up community placements rather than partnerships; counting service hours rather than developing authentic measures of impact). Thus, service-learning has, to a large extent, not yet produced profound systemic change within the academy or, arguably, fulfilled the promise envisioned by its founders (Saltmarsh, Hartley, and Clayton 2009). Tracing the political, sociocultural, philosophical, and pedagogical roots of service-learning may contribute to understanding the possibilities for and constraints on its transformational potential for all types of institutions of higher education, including community colleges.

Roots of Service-Learning: Historical Landscape

The evolution of service-learning has been influenced by several historical forces. Dewey (e.g., 1938) provided a philosophical and intellectual foundation for service-learning by advocating an experiential education that would develop students’ democratic skills and capacities toward improving the human condition. Examining his contributions, Benson, Harkavay, and Puckett (2011, 52) explain:

Dewey theorized that education and society were dynamically interactive and interdependent. It followed, therefore, that if human beings hope to develop and maintain a particular type of society or social order, they must develop and maintain the particular type of education system conducive to it; that is to say, if there is no effective democratic schooling system, there will be no democratic society.

Building on this foundation, the trajectory of service-learning has involved refocusing the ends toward which it is implemented: social justice (phase 1), disciplinary learning (phase 2), student-centered learning (phase 3), and democratic civic engagement (phase 4) (Zlotkowski and Duffy 2010). While not encompassing all extant interpretations of the historical evolution of service-learning, these phases—which have to some extent coexisted and so are not intended as a linear, chronological outline—provide a useful structure for thinking about the philosophical, pedagogical, political, and sociocultural roots of service-learning within higher education. This section briefly reviews the first three phases; the contemporary phase of democratic civic engagement will be examined in more depth in the subsequent section.

Service-Learning as Social Justice Strategy

Service-learning as social justice was the original vision for the pedagogy (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz 1999). In the 1960s and 1970s, individuals from campus and community alike “found themselves drawn to the idea that action in communities and structured learning could be combined to provide stronger service and leadership in communities and deeper, more relevant education for students” (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz 1999, 1). Involved in community organizing, civil rights activism, and progressive initiatives to improve K-12 education, these pioneering students, faculty, staff, and community members brought experience and knowledge from a variety of fields and integrated their commitment to social justice with their vision for higher education (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz 1999).

In addition to harkening back to Dewey’s philosophical perspectives on education and democracy, these pioneers also looked to critical pedagogy a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction Service-Learning at the American Community College
• Part I Service-Learning and Community Colleges
• Part II Service-Learning in Diverse Community College Contexts
• Part III Service-Learning and Student Success in Community Colleges
• Part IV Service-Learning as Community and Community College Nexus
• Part V Future Directions and Considerations in Service-Learning and Service-Learning Research at Community Colleges
• Part VI Concluding Reflections on Service-Learning and Community Colleges
• Notes on Contributors
• Index