Ellington

Community service has a new look, and service-learning courses are helping to transform it. Since the UW began these courses in 1992, community involvement has been reborn in the form of a more active, more engaging curriculum.

For Cameron Miller — a UW senior majoring in sociology and minoring in education, learning and society — service learning has connected him to people who share his passion for seeking change in the public-school system as well as illustrated the kind of involvement that draws many students to service-learning courses, such as Applied and Public Anthropology, which Miller is currently taking.

“I have always valued community involvement to be very important, however, being in courses such as [the one I’m in], has shown me how much community involvement there really is,” Miller said.

The UW is attempting to make the connection between service and education more tangible, offering a new perspective on community service that emphasizes the role of students as critical connection points between communities and young people. Service learning — a relatively new concept for the nation’s schools — has offered a way to transform this community partnership.

Holly Barker has been a lecturer at the UW for the past six years and has taught the same course Miller has been taking for a year now. For her, the exciting element of service learning is its creative engagement of youth.

“I don’t think [this] generation gets asked enough to take responsibility or to be involved in efforts to address pressing social issues,” Barker said. “Finding opportunities for students to unleash their creativity and showing other generations why it’s imperative that they be active players at the table on these key issues is exciting to me. Every time I teach a class I learn so much about the skill set of [this] generation and get excited by its potential.”

In the 2008 academic year, the Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center, which serves as a liaison between students and community organizations, saw a 50-percent increase from 2007 in the number of students choosing to take service-learning courses. According to the Carlson Center, around 2,000 students were enrolled in service-learning courses during the fall, winter and spring quarters in the 2009 academic year.

Michaelann Jundt, director of the Carlson Center, and Jamie Lee, community partner liaison at the center, have some ideas about the increases.

The first idea attributes the increase to President Obama’s first year in office and his call to service, including the passage of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act.

The second reason suggests that the current economic conditions, which have resulted in a severe decrease in the number of job opportunities for new graduates, have contributed to the jump in demand.

Thirdly, students’ ideas about civic engagement on a larger scale have changed based on media sources such as documentaries and films. For example, there has been an increase in the number of students interested in education in recent years with documentaries about the public education system, such as “Waiting for Superman.”

Miller is one such student who is deeply interested in the public-school system. In addition to several community-service projects, Miller has worked in a second-grade classroom at Seattle’s Madrona K-8 school. Miller’s first course in service learning has been Barker’s class this quarter.

“My focus of interest is education,” he said. “I am very interested in ways to make the education system better and what is going on to make it better. This course has let me be able to continue with my hands-on experience in the classroom, as well as make connections with the people who are working towards making the education system a better place.”

Rachel Graf, who teaches an English 121 course at the university, describes service learning as an opportunity for students to think of themselves as members of a community and to analyze what that means for their academic and personal growth. Graf describes it as a more complex message than what was cultivated in the high schools.

“I think [service learning] makes [community service] a more personal thing — there’s something to be gained, there’s knowledge to acquire, which is a different approach than from what most people have done,” she said. “There [wasn’t] a lot of infrastructure [in high schools] to support [service projects].”

Elizabeth Simmons-O’Neill is the director of the UW’s Community Literacy Program and associate director of the Expository Writing Program. Since beginning at the university as an instructor in 1988, she has taught over 40 service-learning courses.

“Rather than seeing service as something they do once, [they] often talk about a continuum from volunteering occasionally, to becoming involved in organizing community-based work, to becoming actively involved as citizens seeking to address some of the causes of problems such as homelessness, hunger, educational and health-care disparities,” Simmons-O’Neill said of her students.

When asked about her favorite element of teaching service-learning courses, Graf commented on how community service can become a lens through which students can look at their own work.

“I think it’s really interesting to me to see when students can think about their personal experiences in relation to the community,” Graf said.

There are often trends in students’ interests when it comes to service learning each year. Lee notes, for example, that homelessness is an interest among students right now.

“This city alone is saturated with services for the homeless, so it’s kind of like the chicken and the egg,” Lee said. “Are they here because of the people, or are the people here because they come here for the services?”

However, Barker emphasizes the need to view service not as a way for students to grow their communities in a one-way relationship, but to view their work as a step toward developing a partnership with the diverse communities around them.

Barker said that being actively involved in the community also changes the way young people are received by that community and how service learning can be a force to change not only ideas of community service, but society’s perception of young populations.

“You look at the ways youth are characterized in the dominant news and most often you see ‘at risk’ attached to youth, or ‘problematic,’” Barker said. “It’s amazing how quickly … society disregards your generation. That’s not to make the grand sweeping generalization that everyone sees your generation as bad, it’s more like dismissive. I think because I see the potential and the creativity and the power of [youth], I see … how every time students get involved, things are better.”

Reach contributing writer Lauren Kronebusch at development@dailyuw.com.