April (March 18-April 17, 2001)
In order to meet the above goals for the month, I:
Having established the major criteria that I am interested in measuring for the methodology, I have been able to formulate evaluation questions that enable participants to qualitatively assess this methodology for its impact on:
1. Contributing to and including higher
education in community coalition building
2. Expanded partnerships between a diversity
of community organizations and university members
3. Increased access to university resources
for community organizations and increased access to community resources
and knowledges for university sponsored work.
The evaluation questions will be part of the worksheets (not yet published on the website). The responses I have received (about 15%) have given me substantial support for the methodology's principles. I have also suggested ways project participants might think through their own projects, service learning assignments, collaborations, and research in terms of the goals above. The benefit of this approach to assessment is that it has the participants considering ways that their individual projects relate to these goals. They are both reflecting on their efforts in current collaboration as well as projecting and developing ideas that will significantly shape future projects. Many of the instructors I have spoken with have expressed excellent ideas for revisions and recognize where they could have done things differently to make the experience more conducive to effective educational practice as well as to bolster community relationships. Many of the community organizers are interested in how to develop future projects and feel that some important doors have been opened.
One element of assessment that has become evident to me and everyone who has participated is that these relationships take time and effort, and evolve over continued working relationships. This indicates that a model such as the one I am advocating here is more effective for long term impact than a model where students (in semester-long courses) bear most the responsibility for developing the relationships. This assessment has helped me to articulate the various forms of the methodology a bit more clearly in order to allow for issues of time and collaboration for creating long-term coalitions and a more in depth understanding of the issues being addressed.
Developing materials
My main focus this month and for the remainder of the fellowship is to complete the writing for this project. This month, I developed a thorough outline for the sections of the project, major organization issues, determined the areas that will require "additional resources" tied into the text, and began writing drafts. I completed the introductory statement that outlines the organization and content of the product, as well as identifies the potential audiences: service learning practitioners, community groups interested in utilizing connections to educational institutions, students creating service learning opportunities, administrators seeking to evaluate ideas for implementing service learning or (more broadly) campus-community partnership programs. I have also written the first section of the product which provides an overview of service learning (the definition, examples, and theoretical support for service learning), goes on to review the critiques of service learning and identify the potential limitations in various approaches to such activities, and outlines the theoretical framework for the particular approach to service learning that I am providing in this methodology. Throughout this first part I have identified sources for additional reading and information on the theories as well as of programs which provide models of the various approaches I am discussing. In the introduction, I suggest that this piece of the product is the explanation or justification for this approach, and that it tends to be more theoretically-based. The second part (of five) of the document will be the more practical explanation of the principles and basic approach to the methodology. The third part will provide alternative models for adaptation by various groups. The fourth part will be about assessment and sustainability. The final part will be conclusions, evaluations of the pilot project, and an example for a local center based on the specific characteristics of a community (Tucson) with suggestions of identifying the appropriate model for any other community.
I have disseminated the draft of what I have completed at this point to several readers and am listening to their advice and working through adjustments, revisions, and editing as I move along. I feel confident that the writing of a complete draft will be done by the end of May and I will be able to make major revisions and deal with text-design issues in June. I hope to have a draft that I can migrate to the web by the end of June. I have decided to focus primarily on the print-version of the document in the next two months and will work on design issues for the web-based version in June-July. In as much as the web-site for the current materials gets a good number of hits weekly from various dissemination points and web-searches, I am anxious to present a fully developed and designed version on the web, but feel that the print version should take priority from the perspective of the Corporation. I will need to find out from CNS about hosting the final product on my website, if that is acceptable with appropriate copyright and acknowledgement information. The local materials generated are not part of the final product and will probably be turned over to a group to maintain and develop in conjunction with related efforts locally.
Avenues for Sustainability and Dissemination
Although I am focusing on writing the product for these last months, I am also committed to seeing the product's methodology used, locally and in larger contexts. Therefore, I am taking steps to continue the dissemination and sustainability of the product of my work over the past months.
Recently, I met with the Tucson Service Learning Coalition-a group made up of K-12, community college, university, and university extension, and of community members and organizations to develop and share service learning resources and promote service learning in the city of Tucson-to discuss strategic planning for a "Tucson Service Learning Resource Center." The meeting included representatives from the University of Arizona, Tucson Unified School District, Pima Community College, Arizona International College, and the Institute for Children and Families. Ron Interpreter, with Arizona International College and a Navajo Nation service learning program, invited members to volunteer for the strategic planning group. I will participate this summer as part of a committee to create a short-term and long-term strategic plan for a local service learning resource center. At this meeting, we met with Susan Straight of The Center for Service Learning Opportunities in Education in Santa Fe, New Mexico (and co-author of the "Service Learning in New Mexico and Nation Schools: An Administrator's Handbook). We met with Ms. Straight to discuss issues and strategies for developing a resource center and to discuss how we might affiliate with the successful New Mexico center as well as to draw on that center as a model. We also discussed the possibility of utilizing my methodology as a resource. I believe that as a member of this strategic planning team, I will be able to facilitate a certain relationship with the Corporation for National Service and Learn and Serve, and to ensure a dissemination site and perhaps model of the methodology product I will submit to CNS at the end of my fellowship.
In addition, I have met with local activist projects to find a home for the local resources and materials generated by the pilot I conducted of this methodology this past year. One of the reasons I chose to pilot the methodology with an activist group was that I believe that certain groups of instructors and organizations are often left out of some models of service learning activities, and I wanted to demonstrate that this methodology would appeal to those groups as well as to other more traditionally served groups. I also wanted to tap into the existing work that was going on in this community and had identified a project in the LGB Studies program at the university that was looking for ways to connect community and academic activism. I collaborated with the director of that program and several of the key members of the program and they participated in the pilot project in order to expand their own program's reach and structure. This has been an ideal situation because it has ensured that the resources and projects started under this methodology pilot will be sustained by a developing infrastructure and that my methodology has informed the development of that infrastructure. I will be working with the program to explore possible funding opportunities for designing, implementing, and maintaining the web-site version of the local issue resources, history, and analyses. I will also work with this group to institute the methodology to maintaining and creating more partnerships for courses and research collaboration between university instructors/researchers and community organizers.
I have set aside the two articles I am revising for the time-being, but plan to return to them when a significant part of the product is completed.
TO DO
At times in this process, I have felt as if the written product would be much different than I had anticipated. I had second guessed myself at various points of the pilot project, convinced myself that elements of the method were not working. However, in retrospect, I was coming to hasty conclusions. If anything, various elements of the methodology have been reinforced as necessary for me, and the various obstacles to the full methodology have been demonstrated as legitimate and real. For example, the community members I work with require much more contact and facilitation and I have found that they see progress most when they receive concrete updates on specific projects. University instructors and members tend to be far more comfortable with less contact and more ambiguous status on various projects. People from the university tend to be far less responsive to constant updates. Those in the community are not generally enthusiastic about reflecting on the process, but very much appreciate hearing analyses of projects. What this suggests to me is the need for a facilitator in these relationships who understands the various needs of each group. I have tended to operate at times very much from a university-type of perspective. I have let project ideas bubble and evolve, and have found that the community organizers (because they hadn't heard from me regarding the status of those ideas) assumed that the idea went nowhere. On the other hand, I have checked in with instructors because I hadn't heard from them or wasn't sure what the status of their projects were, only to find that they felt the projects were going along quite well. They were quickly able to identify ways in which my project helped them to articulate course goals and projects with their students, and they could almost all identify ways their students benefitted from the projects. Of course, the problem here is that the community organizations are not clearly seeing the benefits, for lack of communication, and that is the main function of this methodology. I realize that this isn't a failing on the part of the method, but a failing of my own time commitments and ability to facilitate the communication. I have attempted to provide worksheets and guidelines to address this issue in the methodology itself.
Overall, in the pilot work, in my conversations with practitioners and organizers and students, and in my research of various model programs and elements of programs, I feel confident that the approach to this work that I am articulating is the appropriate model for a variety of goals. I still believe that it is probably the most appropriate for instructors and organizations interested in focusing on systemic issues and social change because of its emphasis on coalition collaboration and the building of history and analysis into not just individual projects but into cohorts of projects as a means of identifying common systemic causes and possible actions in relation to those causes. However, it is confirmed for me that this approach to various goals in service learning is effective because it also emphasizes educational experience, effective relationships between educators and community organizations, and because it is academically/theoretically oriented.
I look forward to continuing the writing and to submitting the final product for the Corporation's use and review.