Maintaining Stability While Promoting Change: A Service-Learning Project for First-Year Students in a General Education Learning Community

• In Event: Service Learning Discussion Circles Turns 10: Celebrate Service-Learning in Communication Classrooms

Abstract

Learning communities at James Madison University consist of small groups of 15-40 first-year students who live in the same residence hall and who are enrolled in the same section(s) of one, two or three courses. The Teer Learning Community is designed for up to 24 first-year students who are interested in enhancing their writing, oral communication, and technology skills while also performing 20 hours of service-learning in non-profit community organizations like Habitat for Humanity.
In addition to focusing on enhancing students’ writing, oral communication, and technology skills, we also aim to get students engaged intellectually, develop a sense of civic responsibility, and become more competent in a psychosocial sense.
We have tried to engage students intellectually by coordinating the course content in the designated General Education courses, getting the students involved in the community through service-learning, and having students reflect on what they have seen, experienced, and learned.
We have tried to increase students’ psychosocial competence by involving them in community-service activities outside of the regular class periods. We will continue to do this in 2009-2010.
We have also tried to develop the students’ sense of civic responsibility. In order to determine whether participation in service-learning enhanced the students’ sense of civic responsibility, the students in the Teer Learning Community completed the Scale of Social Responsibility (Markus, Howard, and Young, 1993) as a pretest measure, following the approval of the IRB. At the end of the fall 2008 semester, the Scale of Social Responsibility was administered as a posttest measure as well.
The Scale of Social Responsibility (SRI) is a 15-item self-report scale that assesses student perceptions regarding obligations of citizenship, awareness of social injustices, and interest in working toward social equity. For Questions 1-7, students were asked to rate each item on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“not important”) to 4 (“essential”). For Questions 8-15, students were asked to rate each item on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 5 (“strongly agree”).
The survey data will be analyzed and results will be presented at NCA in November 2009.

Author

• Timothy Ball, James Madison Univ