First-Year Civic Engagement: Sound Foundations for College ...

CASE STUDYTRINITY UNIVERSITYCivic Engagement and Service-Learning:An Initiative with First-Year StudentsDr. Roxana Moayedi, Associate Professor of SociologyDr. Jacqueline Padgett, Associate Professor of EnglishDr. Minerva San Juan, Associate Professor of PhilosophyIn the last two decades, Trinity University in Washington, DC,has undergone a transformation from its historic role as a liberalarts Catholic college serving mostly white, middle-class womento the role of an urban university whose student population in theCollege of Arts and Sciences, while still all women, is now 85%African-American and Latina.Service had traditionally been housed in Campus Ministry,and Trinity faculty and administration generally perceived it asextracurricular. Due to the changes in the student population andthe influx of students of all faith traditions over the last 20 years,the university noted a decline in volunteerism through universitychannels. Recently, some Trinity faculty expressed concernsthat our mostly minority student population might be uninterestedin or unlikely to benefit from a service-learning pedagogy,due to high personal and financial obligations and/or academicunder-preparedness. Moreover, faculty believed that their owninstructional challenges were significant without the burden ofintegrating service-learning into the curriculum. Clearly, advancingservice-learning required attention to beliefs held by the administrationand faculty about the viability and effectiveness of aservice-learning educational model for our students.First-Year Seminar – Overview of TransformationAt Trinity, all first-year students are required to take the first-yearseminar. Each semester, we offer five or six sections, with facultyfrom philosophy, physics, theology, English, and psychology.From 2002 to 2005, the faculty-selected theme was Identity: AnInterdisciplinary Exploration, with a service-learning component,Human Agency and Human Identity. This case narrates how thelearning objectives of the seminar were expanded to emphasizeservice-learning and civic leadership.New Opportunity and New PedagogyIn 2003, a sociology professor engaged in service-learning pedagogyfor more than 10 years received a Learn and Serve subgrantfrom the Corporation for National and Community Servicethrough the Community Research and Learning (CoRAL)Network to institutionalize service-learning at Trinity University.Faculty resistance seemed well entrenched until six facultyon an interdisciplinary first-year seminar team agreed to attendworkshops on service-learning supported by the CoRAL grant.The grantee’s approach to this team proved a successful strategyin overcoming faculty resistance to the pedagogy. That facultyteam, already working outside of disciplinary boundaries and accustomedto collaborative learning and teaching, turned out to bejust the grouping of risk-taking innovators research has shown arelikely to adopt models of experiential learning, particularly service-learning(McKay & Rozee, 2004).Connecting Service-Learning to CurriculaEven within this cohesive group, resistance emerged, especiallyover the appropriateness of service-learning to the teaching ofcourse content and over the suitability of the pedagogy to thelearning needs of urban minority students. They integrated civicengagement by having students choose placement sites from a listprovided by Campus Ministry or based on contact with agenciesrepresented at a Community Service Fair organized by CampusMinistry. However, as the team discovered, neither our students’academic strengths and weaknesses nor their academic and economicbackgrounds impeded their success.We assessed our initiative from the beginning, to shape ourrevision of the content, pedagogy, and community placements.What we learned emerged from a multi-constituency assessmentand an integrated set of strategies such as student portfolios, studentsurveys, and faculty reflection. Student portfolios containedreflections, journal observations, self-assessments, and a final paperintegrating their service experiences with the course objectives.Faculty discovered that many students were unable to make connectionsbetween course content and service experiences.Since students perceived the service-learning as an add-oncourse requirement not wholly integrated into course pedagogyor content, faculty concluded that they had inadequately preparedstudents to be careful participant/observers at the service sites. Inadequateintegration of service-learning occurred because