Background and Goals

Over the past decade, service learning programs in higher education have prospered and have given many students the opportunity to connect course work with nonprofit service, exposing those students to the ethic and necessity of community work, enhancing their academic skills with experiential education, and providing community organizations with much needed help. As an English instructor, having incorporated service learning into my courses since 1993, having helped other instructors do the same, and having served on two service learning advisory boards, I have seen first-hand the growth and potential of service learning in meeting the Corporation for National Service's goal of inspiring in individuals the desire to serve in communities and tying that service to educational experience.
 

However, as a graduate student who researches pedagogy and service learning, and as a community activist myself, I have observed limitations in current approaches to service learning, especially in terms of meeting the Corporation for National Service's goal of making communities stronger through "implement[ing] effective strategies and processes for collaboration among local national service programs and with other organizations responsible for addressing community needs" (CNS Strategic Plan). The processes by which service learning is currently implemented by Universities and individual instructors often work in a somewhat isolated fashion and do not actively fulfill the goals of creating larger systemic networks of collaboration between the university and the community. That is, the university remains an entity that provides necessary resources in order to send students into the community through service learning programs, but does not necessarily function itself as an integral actor with community organizations. However, universities have the resources and institutional structures necessary to be powerful players in the Corporation for National Service's mission to support and collaborate with communities in addressing community needs. It is possible to envision an approach to service learning that would meet the goals of both promoting and expanding service learning and of building stronger communities.
 

Currently, service learning programs tend to approach service learning curriculum by identifying ways to fit community organizations' needs for volunteers to specific course content and individual student experience. The success of a service learning activity is generally measured in terms of individual student experience, both academically and in relation to the student's desire to continue participating in community involvement. While this approach is certainly effective and beneficial, does it most effectively mobilize university resources for the systemic benefit of the community? Does this approach make the university genuinely responsive to the needs of the community, or does it tend to only fulfill short-term personnel needs for specific community organizations?
 

My experience in community activism and service suggests that what the community really needs from the university is more extensive, systemic participation supporting the strategies the community organizations themselves have identified as effective in addressing social issues, and for programs such as service learning to be integrated into that partnership more effectively. The way these goals would be achieved would be through comprehensive steps that included:

• ïCollaborating with the community to identify the strategies found effective in addressing community issues

• ïDrawing on the considerable expertise and resources from the University to develop research on those strategies
• ïIdentifying the ways local service learning curricula could incorporate the research done with the community organizations and creating a process to develop and implement that curriculum
• ïCreating a model of methodologies by which this process could be reproduced in other communities

Universities currently take a similar approach as this to working with the business sector. Programs in higher education commonly work with local business interests to identify needs and corporate trends, and provide research and resources to evaluate and support those trends. In turn, curriculum is shaped by the needs of the business sector and higher education programs respond to those needs in immediate and direct ways. One needs only to look at "Business Writing" curricula and the textbooks developed for those curricula to see evidence of that process. This approach has proven an effective way for universities to be responsive to one sector it serves, but the university also needs to be as responsive to the nonprofit sector in order to be a more effective community participant.
 

General Outcomes

The project I would like to pursue with support from the Corporation for National Service would approach the development of an extensive local service learning program through the principles described above with the following outcomes:

• ïCollaborative Research: The creation of a collaborative research methodology for assessing community organizations' self-identified strategies for addressing community issues, resulting in specific research and evaluation generated for local community organizations regarding those strategies
• ïLocal Service Learning Program: The creation of a process for developing and implementing a service learning program in relation to that research, resulting in the development of a specific service learning program, resources, and curricula around local needs and issues
• ïModel: The extrapolation of the local program in conjunction with the methodologies for collaborative research and curriculum development into a model that could be reproduced in other communities

Local Context

This project proposal originates in my current involvement in the Tucson community and my work as a service learning instructor. What makes me certain this project is feasible and welcome in this community is the degree to which steps in this process have already been made by local community organizations, and the extent to which the local context reflects trends in communities across the nation.
 

Recent local and national efforts at coalition building, academic study regarding structural causes for social inequity, and the current activist successes of coalitions built around issues of environmental concerns, labor, and trade suggest that nonprofit organizations function most effectively when coalitions are built that address community issues under a dominant rubric of economic structures. That is, when organizations address specific issues from the framework of economic causes and implications, those organizations are more able to connect those issues with the missions of other organizations. For example, when homelessness is connected to local labor issues and living wage campaigns, the number of actors in support of both issues is greatly increased, and those actors work in unison toward solutions that address multiple problems. In such coalitions, organizations are in the position to lobby for shared resources and to support each other in more effective ways.
 

In Tucson, there has been significant effort to address coalition building through the framework of economic issues, which has met with considerable success. One of the major benefits of such coalition building locally has been the integration of various aspects of the university into such activity, most notably with the increase in student and campus activism. Just a couple examples of those coalitions include:

• ïStudent organizations such as Students Against Sweatshops and the Coalition to Organize Graduate Students working with local groups such as Jobs with Justice, the Southern Arizona Alliance for Economic Justice, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Primavera Foundation to support a Workers' Rights Board and a successful community living wage campaign, as well as to see progress on graduate student issues and university corporate relationships.
• ïThe University of Arizona Lesbian and Gay Studies program initiating a "Sex, Race, and Globalization Committee"-academics and local activists studying the global economic factors that connect and impact a variety of social issues. The Rockefeller Foundation is likely to grant the committee a large sum to continue studying and collaborating on themes of activist responses to globalization, identifying sites of coalition and common action, including sponsoring visiting scholars and a spring seminar and workshop

What is clear from this local context is that the first step of the process, working with the community to identify the strategies found effective in addressing community issues has already taken place. On both the local and national level, community organizers have found the strategy of coalition building through common economic causes of issues to be a potentially effective means of sustaining community activism. As part of that coalition building has already included the attempt to bring the university in on that process, we have a significant place to start implementing a project with outcomes that support the community through research and service learning.
 

Methodology

First Outcome: Collaborative Research

As the community continues to develop and act on coalitions created around overarching systemic economic issues, there is a need for research and assessment of those strategies in order to facilitate and sustain those coalitions. Community organizations would benefit from information and data related to economic systems, systemic patterns that mutually impact and create social issues, and the long term implications and needs for sustaining coalitions without creating situations where organizations are working at cross-purposes regarding individual issues. Much of this research and information already exists in various forms and from various academic disciplines. One of the roles the university is in a position to play as a member of community coalitions is in terms of providing access to and synthesis of such research, as well as providing specific localized research possibilities for the community directly.
 

In order to take this step in the Tucson community, I will work with the groups and organizations I already have relationships with and that have expressed support for this project (see table 1) to identify research and information needs. Additionally, I will make contacts with other organizations and programs in the community (see table 2) to include them in the process of developing the research methodology. We would develop a collaborative research methodology that would address the research questions they felt most important to facilitate their coalition strategies. The research methodology might include an assessment tool for evaluating the effectiveness of coalitions; methods of identifying and demystifying economic structures in relation to specific issues; or even more practical details of strategies for dealing with diversity in collaboration or making long-term goals and plans. A significant part of the research methodology will be ways of identifying and including members of the university and professionals from the community as part of the process of research, thus drawing on existing resources and expertise.
 

Table 1: Current Partners
 

Organization or Group	Description and Mission
Sex, Race, and Globalization Committee	Academics and community activists working to understand social issues in terms of globalization. Joint activities between scholars and community organizers; education; meetings; action.
Primavera Foundation	Community organization seeking to address homelessness through service as well as through activism on systemic economic issues.
Students Against Sweatshops	Student organization taking activist positions on global labor conditions and local responsibilities for those conditions.
Coalition to Organize Graduate Students	Student organization to address academic labor conditions and labor issues in general.
Jobs With Justice	Local chapter of national worker's rights organization.
Southern Arizona Alliance for Economic Justice	Coalition of activists around labor and economic issues.
American Friends Service Committee	Local chapter of national organization working for social justice. Local initiatives include border and economic issues.
Salt of the Earth Labor College	Provides education, resources, and events around labor issues.

 

Table 2: Potential Partners

Tucson Volunteer Center	Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project
Southern Arizona Aids Foundation	Southern Arizona People's Law Center
University of Arizona, Southwest Project	Tucson Area Literacy Council
Pima County Adult Education	Valley Coalition for Justice
Casa de los Niños	University of Arizona, Center for Service Learning
Wingspan	Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy

The results of this step of the process will include the creation of resources such as bibliographies, literature reviews, handbooks, and specific local data for coalitions to use to address and strategize around community-wide issues. This information will form the basis by which I will coordinate the organizations and identified instructors from the university to develop the service learning component of the project.
 

Second Outcome: Local Service Learning Program

As I develop critical research materials on local community coalition building and the needs that those organizational strategies create are made clear, I will work with university instructors from various disciplines and launch the development of a service learning program that is responsive to the goals identified by the community organizations (including the university). Rather than simply developing placement possibilities in isolation, the program will develop out of extensive dialogue between the instructors and the organizations, and curricula will be created and revised through workshop techniques. I will coordinate, schedule, and conduct a series of workshops with instructors and community organization representatives to identify where course content areas relate not only to the various organizations' individual issue missions but to the overarching systemic issues through which coalitions are built. The multi-disciplinary curriculum will be developed through sharing of research results, discussions of expectations for both instructors and community organizations, and the synthesizing of resources in a way that is beneficial for both the instructors and the organizations. In addition, we will document the processes by which the curriculum is constructed in terms of a model methodology.
 

In the spring semester, the service learning curriculum that is developed in the first part of the workshops will be piloted by the participating instructors. The workshop sessions will continue, but the focus will change to develop strategies of evaluation and assessment of the service learning curriculum in terms of both instructor and community organization goals. Students participating in the service learning curriculum will be invited to attend the workshop sessions to provide feedback and to gain an understanding of the larger goals of the curricular activity.
 

I will collect all of the materials developed for the local curriculum-sample assignments, critical resources, curricular goals, evaluation and assessment instruments and results, and the instructor, student, and organization feedback-as a print resource, and as a comprehensive Internet Web-site. Additionally, I will investigate the possibility of publishing a textbook from the materials. The local service learning program and resource materials will be distributed to the English Composition Program-a site at which a significant amount service learning development takes place, and to the Southwest Project-a highly successful University of Arizona program that integrates the mission of the university with local research and community projects. The collection of the materials from the local curricula as well as the documentation of research and process methodologies for the local community organizing strategies and the service learning program development will facilitate the expected outcome of a reproduceable model of these processes.
 

Third Outcome: Model

As I conduct this local project and as the curricular resources are developed that are tailored specifically for the Tucson community, the products of that local work will serve as examples of how this process might be utilized in other communities. Each step of this project will begin by developing methodologies to manage the components of the process. For example, while the research regarding coalition building in the Tucson area will be specifically generated for the Tucson community organizations, the methods of identifying community strategies, bringing the expertise of the community and of the university to the same table, and the process by which groups might work together to generate collaborative community research will be applicable to other communities. Similarly, the process of developing a service learning program in response to that research and in a workshop model will also be a portable process. In addition to the print and Web-site resources that are developed for the local curriculum, I will develop versions of those materials that serve as model resources, with the local materials as concrete examples.
 

In fact, the benefit of the project I am proposing is that its priority is meeting the goal of creating structural processes in order to build stronger community interaction. The principles of the project are to create a structure that brings university programs, instructors, students, and community members together in order to respond to community needs. Whatever specific local materials are created from this project, the methodology ensures that it is a collaborative venture that will impact community organizations' effectiveness and student involvement in addressing community issues.
 

Conclusion

This project has already been enthusiastically received by local community organizations and interested instructors, and as the project's goal is to be an integral part of programs that are currently in place (such as the Sex, Race, and Globalization Committee, the English Composition Program, and the Southwest Project), there is every reason to believe that it will receive continued support if it is successful. As a Corporation for National Service fellow, I would have the ability to ensure its success. I have the experience necessary in service learning instruction, program and curriculum development, and community activism to successfully carry out the process I have outlined here. I also have the skills necessary to generate the materials to make the project a useful model and resource both locally and nationally. I have extensive research, analysis, and writing experience, as well as experience developing Web-sites. My experience as a community education coordinator will enable me to successfully plan and administer the meetings and workshops for the project. I have already presented and written on service learning, and will therefore be able to disseminate the results of the project through academic conferences, community and academic publications, and community and academic workshops.
 

I strongly believe that this project reflects the goals of the Corporation for National Service, and with the Corporation's support, the project will be an example of the how the strategic mission of the Corporation can be met. I look forward to the opportunity of working with the Corporation for National Service to further shape and refine this project, do the exciting work to complete the project, and to see it developed and reproduced in other contexts.
 

Project Schedule
 

Activities	Expected Outcomes
September, 2000 ïWork with CNS on revising project schedule and goals. ïMeet with current collaboration contacts to review project scope, gather feedback, and outline process. Set specific goals. ïEstablish new collaboration contacts with organizations and instructors. ïArticulate preliminary research agenda and methodology.	Groundwork for success of project.  Initial phases of first outcome: developing collaborative research methodology
October  ïCollect data on coalition strategies and needs for support. ïWork with identified instructors from at least four disciplines to identify connections of content material and goals. ïDevelop Workshop schedule and format ïBegin assembling of resources for print and Internet materials	Synthesis of collaborative research with service learning program development. Creation of necessary materials for local and national model resources
November ïContinue theoretical and practical research and working with instructors and organizations on goals, evaluations, and expected outcomes. ïDevelop Sample Curricula ïAssemble Bibliographies and begin Literature Reviews.	Secondary phases of first and second outcomes
December ïBegin Workshop Series-gather participants in orientation and discussion.  ïContinue gathering sample curricular models and resources.	Local program development, second outcome
January, 2001 ïWorkshop curricular models and methodology for creating effective curricula in relation to coalition building goals with instructors and organizations ïContinue developing print and Internet curricular resources. ïSubmit conference proposals and identify journals for article publications.	Program development    Materials for third outcome, model development and dissemination of project
February ïMeet with CNS to report progress and make revisions as necessary. ïPilot courses developed in workshop. Continue workshop meetings. Invite students to attend. ïContinue to collect data from instructors and organizations and collaboratively create assessment tools	Second and third outcome materials; local program assessment and methodologies for model
March ïWorkshop meetings to monitor, revise, and evaluate service learning goals and outcomes. ïContinue developing print and Internet resources. ïContinue writing and preparing articles/presentations. ïEstablish contact for textbook publishing possibility.	Steps to ensure service learning program is meeting goals of project.    Dissemination of project
April  ïContinue expanding local and national contacts to reproduce project. ïWork locally with University of Arizona Composition Program and Center for Service Learning to institutionalize program model.  ïSubmit articles to targeted journals. ïSeek support to reproduce model on national level.	Dissemination and promotion of project to ensure continued support  (second and third outcomes)
May ïComplete print and Internet curricular resources. ïSynthesize research results. ïPlan and develop workshops for following academic year.	Materials to complete second and third outcomes
June ïWrap up resource materials and article submissions. ïPresent final results and critique to CNS.