Learning Communities and Service Learning

Below is just a few notes I made for a short 5 minute presentation I'm giving later this afternoon.

Learning is about so much more than classrooms and textbooks, and that's really the message that both Learning Communities and Service Learning send. Iowa State University has a pretty strong Learning Communities program, and a quite a few of its Learning Communities have a Service Learning component. I sure wish we could bring that model to RCTC!

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Community in and out of the Classroom

Learning Communities
What?
Learning Communities “link together … existing courses … so that students have opportunities for deeper understanding and integration of the material they are learning, and more interaction with one another and their teachers”

Why?
Wingspread Group (1993) – “What does our society need from higher education? It needs stronger, more vital forms of community.”

Major Benefit
“Students begin to recognize individual courses as part of an integrated learning experience rather than as separately taught requirements” (Shapiro & Levine, 1999).

Service Learning
Chief Academic Principles
Reflection – “Learning and development do not necessarily occur as a result of experience itself but as a result of a reflective component explicitly designed to foster learning and development” (Jacoby, 1996).

Reciprocity – “Service-Learning encourages students to do things with others rather than for them. Everyone should expect to change in the process.”

Major Faculty and Student Concern
Time: How to “add” a service learning component to an already “full” plate (class and life)

From Iowa State University (http://www.celt.iastate.edu/ServiceLearning/learningcommunities.html)

Learning communities and service-learning are a natural connection for several reasons:

1. Restructures teaching & learning
Both methods allow students to make connections in order to deepen their learning

2. Reconsiders who learns from whom
Both methods allow for multiple perspectives on the same topic by viewing through different lenses

3. Thinks about community intentionally
Both methods inspire collaboration between students and the larger community

4. Prepares students for a diverse democracy
Both methods help students extend their comfort zones and see their connection to the larger community

Fall 2008 Learning Communities
ENGL 1117 – Reading and Writing Critically – Virginia Wright-Peterson
Paired with
HORT 1315 – Plant Materials: Woody Plants – Robin Fruth-Dugstad

ENGL 0980 – Introduction to College Writing – Mike Mutschelknaus
Paired with
READ 0840 – Developmental Reading – Rae Gravenish