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- Community-based learning connects academics and service
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- By Jan McCoy Ebbets
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- It's the Neighborly Thing to Do
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- It used to be that ivy-covered buildings, decorous classrooms and hushed
libraries were the hallowed spaces where learning took place.
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- Not so today.
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- Just ask Pam Davis '98, an Ada Comstock Scholar who is working on a
project to clean up the toxic waste the
- military left behind at Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee, Massachusetts.
Or catch the excitement in the voice of Traci Torres '99 as she explains
how she is using her Spanish and computer skills to help the Secoya natives
of the Ecuadorian rain forest survive the impact of oil production in their
jungles. Or talk to Sandie Drury '98J about her plans to practice medical
ethics law and how she is volunteering every week with a community clinic
seeking ways to encourage young low-income mothers and their children to
use the health services available to them.
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- Indeed, many Smith women are spending more time out in the community
because of what is known in higher education circles as community-based
learning, a teaching method that emphasizes the important connection between
academics and community service, between theory and practical problem solving.
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- Neither February snows nor frosty temperatures kept
Tom Litwin (second from left), director of the Clark Science Center and
adjunct associate professor, from marshaling his environmental science
students out onto the ice of Paradise Pond to work with local engineers
who were taking sediment samples from the murky waters below.
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- For educators across all disciplines -- and many at Smith -- this innovative
idea is changing how professors teach and students learn. And it's happening
at colleges and universities nationwide, including Brown, Stanford, Tufts
and Georgetown, where a growing number of faculty agree that students should
be spending more time solving problems that have some relevance to daily
life.
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- Every community-based learning project is unique. But common to each
project is the requirement that students put in four to six hours a week
of volunteer time. Locally, Smith students work in the public schools and
at agencies like the Hospice of Hampshire County, the Pioneer Valley Breast
Cancer Network, Farm Net of the Pioneer Valley, the Clean Water Action
Project, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service.
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- Seven years ago, mathematics professors David Cohen and Jim Henle started
requiring that all students taking the two-semester Math 125, Intensive
Calculus with Discrete Mathematics, combine their course work with a semester
tutoring math to local elementary schoolchildren. It's a teaching method
that has proven successful because of its emphasis on communication, Cohen
says.
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- "After you hear a mathematical idea you've been introduced to
and after you have read it at your own pace, you have become acquainted
with it. But it is only after you have explained it to someone else that
you've really learned it," Cohen insists. "This way, a Smith
student is learning to get her tongue around math ideas, and at the same
time learning how a younger child thinks, and why a child is sometimes
puzzled by math problems. She can show a child how math works in all its
beauty."
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- Likewise, in the sociology department, some three years ago, Professor
Myron Glazer built into his sociology course, Qualitative Methods, what
he calls a "component of reciprocity." Glazer explains, "We
changed the focus of the course so that students would now provide some
service to the organization they were researching."
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- Glazer requires that each student keep a set of notes on her experience
as soon as the initial research begins. "It should be a conscious
reflection of her own experience, in the context of what is already written
in the literature and what her peers and classmates are saying about their
own research," he says. This becomes the first part of the 25-page
paper each student writes at the end of the semester. "There is not
a better way to learn, to enhance your learning of what appears in the
literature," Glazer says, "than to go out and try it yourself."
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- With group discussion as well as one-on-one dialogue,
Professor of Sociology Myron Glazer shepherds his students from the conscious
reflection of the classroom out into the community.
Research biologist Tom Litwin, director of the Clark Science Center and
adjunct associate professor, agrees. This semester, after a lengthy hiatus
from teaching, he returned to the classroom to teach a course he had designed
with a large community-based learning component. Seminar in Environmental
Science is tailored to a current campus community project -- the proposed
dredging of Paradise Pond. Each of his 10 students is expected to become
knowledgeable on an aspect of that project, from project engineering to
environmental toxicology to wildlife populations and habitats.
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- "We're enriching classroom learning by interpreting the information
through an actual event, occurring in real time," Litwin says. "Why?
Because it's through these dynamic interactions with the local community
that interesting and relevant questions emerge: What is the economic impact?
What is the environmental fallout of a project? What science is needed
to help clarify policy?"
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- Environmental problem solving is a discovery process that requires
intellectual flexibility and creativity, Litwin insists. "The community-based
problems are always bigger than a single discipline can resolve. There
is no better way to demonstrate for students the value of interdisciplinary
collaboration," he says.
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- If It's Friday, I'll Be Working on Toxic Waste
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- Pam Davis '98, a 40-year-old Ada, is part of a network of people involved
in the cleanup of contaminated land in and around Westover Air Reserve
Base. An anthropology major taking Professor Frédérique Apffel-Marglin's
political ecology class, she has chosen a community-based learning project
with the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies (ISIS) in
Amherst. It focuses on issues related to cleaning up 21 identified toxic
waste sites on Westover property. ISIS's role is to mediate the issues
among groups of citizens, experts and public interest groups, to help local
residents get the technical expertise they might need and to develop policy
recommendations and a model program based on a local experience that can
be applied nationwide.
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- Davis' interest in Westover is not coincidental. Her father served
as commander of Westover in the early 1980s and was previously a commander
of a base in Niagara Falls, New York. That base also was discovered to
be contaminated with decades-old military waste that had been stored there.
Later, as an adult with children to raise, Davis went to work in northern
New York for a company that was hired to clean up the toxic waste left
behind years earlier by chemical plants.
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- "My job was to type up bills of lading for the trucks that were
taking away the contaminated dirt. The company kept digging and digging
and digging, and they kept turning up new layers of contaminated soil,"
says Davis. "No one realizes how extensive the problem is, but some
of these toxic waste products were dumped forty or fifty years ago, and
it all just sank right down into the earth. You can't just scoop it out.
Once you contaminate it, cleaning up the earth is not a simple, easy task."
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- If all goes well, Davis hopes to interview Westover neighbors and concerned
community members, citizens serving on the Restoration Advisory Board empowered
to "advise" Westover on its cleanup project, and the commander
of the base. "My sense of Frédérique's class is that
with this community-based learning, we are supposed to incorporate academic
life with real life," she says. "It's one thing to sit around
a table and discuss industrialization and its effects on nature. It's another
thing to be talking to people and seeing the effects of industry played
out in people's lives."
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- That idea--that theory can be played out in people's lives--is exciting
to Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of Philosophy,
because "learning is supposed to make a difference in your life and
in the world."
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- "Community-based learning is of national interest now because
it connects the intellectual classroom with the world," she says.
"And what's important about higher education isn't just how well you
know the textbook theories, but what you do with them outside in the real
world."
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- What is not surprising to professors like Addelson is that ideas for
community-based learning are increasingly finding expression at Smith in
new or redesigned course work as well as in recent proposals submitted
to the Smith 2020 self-study project by individual faculty members or whole
departments. For instance, Glazer and fellow members of the sociology department
have proposed a research internship program that would enable designated
seniors to spend their final year conducting a specific social research
project that has been developed with, and for, a local community organization.
And anthropology professor Marglin and philosophy professor Addelson have
proposed a Center for Mutual Learning at Smith, which actually formalizes
the work they have been doing here since 1989, and which was recently funded
by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
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- Barbara Reinhold, director of the Career Development Office, sees community-based
learning as "a very big trend in education these days." "The
science of pedagogy says that everyone learns better both with studying
and with doing, particularly the MTV generation," she insists. "When
students are doing this kind of learning as undergraduates, everyone benefits.
While a student makes valuable contributions to the community, she also
is gaining vital experience that will benefit her not only in the moment
but also in her career and in her life work."
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- Dean of the College Maureen Mahoney is committed to helping the Smith
community encourage what she also likes to call "service scholarship."
Says Mahoney, "It is important to understand that community- based
learning is not giving academic credit for straight volunteer work. Unlike
volunteerism, it is a teaching method, under the supervision of faculty
members, that adds a serious academic component to working within the community
and gives something back to the community."
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- To further her commitment to service scholarship, Mahoney has set up
a modest discretionary fund that she uses to help Smith students whose
financial resources may be strained. As long as a student is working on
an academic project with a community-based component, Mahoney can help
her with the small necessities-bus fare or gas money, for instance-as she
carries out her service project.
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- Although no decision has yet been made, the senior staff at Smith will
be considering membership in Campus Compact, a national coalition of more
than 520 college and university presidents that is headquartered at Brown
University in Rhode Island. Founded in 1985, Campus Compact works to provide
leadership in higher education at a policy-making level and to advocate
for more public service opportunities and for greater civic responsibility
in student learning.
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- "We call community-based learning a way of developing social capital,"
says Nancy C. Rhodes '58, a Smith alumna now in her sixth year as director
of Campus Compact. "It's more about civic renewal than straight community
service. And there is an intellectual content to it that makes it a very
noble effort and something that is deeply rooted in a democratic society."
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- Smith anthropology major Traci Torres, also working this semester with
ISIS, is learning what it is to be a member of a team working to preserve
a disappearing Amazonian environment and culture in Ecuador. A collaborative
effort between ISIS, an American organization, and an indigenous organization
in Ecuador, the Secoya Survival Project has enlisted people from all over
the country to help fight the environmental and cultural destruction caused
by oil exploration and industrial development in the Amazon basin.
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- Torres, who speaks and reads fluent Spanish, takes seriously her responsibility
to monitor Ecuadorian news sources, including the newspaper El Comercio,
for late-breaking stories on the country's economy, its politics and its
indigenous communities. "So when a research team makes the trip to
Secoya territory this summer, they know they won't be going into a dangerous
area," she says. "It's very exciting to be a part of the whole
project."
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- What began for Torres as a required project for Marglin's class in
political ecology has become a jumping-off place from which she can explore
her growing interest in South America. "Just today I talked to Frédérique
about doing an internship this summer in Peru through the Center for Mutual
Learning," she reports.
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- If It's Sunday, I'll Be at the Soup Kitchen
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- In order to wrap up her special studies project last semester, Smith
senior Becky Culyba got herself out of bed early every Sunday and reported
to a downtown Springfield soup kitchen by 8 a.m. There she teamed up with
a group of women from the Ladies Ministry of the Pentecostal Springfield
Church of God as they prepared and served breakfast to the homeless from
a nearby shelter.
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- "I wanted to look at religion and sociology, and particularly
at the Pentecostals as a social movement, and how the church contributes
to the creation of an identity for its members, most of them women,"
Culyba says. Through interviews, she also came to know many of the congregation's
200-plus members, including the Reverend Vern Harris, a licensed minister
who preaches every Sunday at the soup kitchen before breakfast, and the
church's pastor and spiritual leader, the Reverend Hugh Bair. "He
was very supportive of my project and shared with me his own dissertation
written for the theological seminary," says Culyba.
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- As he does with all special studies and honors students, Marc Steinberg,
assistant professor of sociology, encouraged Culyba to share her final
paper with the church, to return something to the community in which she
participated. "We want our students to get a feel for how you actually
conduct social research and to know that the ideas and methods they are
learning have considerable value to the local community," Steinberg
says.
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- So that her students may put faces to the social programs and economic
issues they are studying, economics professor Karen Pfeifer is adding,
for the first time this semester, an optional community learning project
to the course work for Twelve Economic Ideas for the Nineties. Designed
as a collaborative effort with D. Tiertza-leah Schwartz, director of voluntary
services, and S.O.S., Smith's community service program, the project gives
each student an opportunity to volunteer for six to eight weeks this spring
at her choice of a local nonprofit.
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- Schwartz frequently consults with faculty and students and offers technical
assistance to those who want help shaping their ideas for community work.
"Getting a new project going is a significant amount of work,"
she notes, "but it's a wonderful way for a student to enhance what
she's already studying through personal involvement in community action."
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- Indeed, Pfeifer reasoned that it was one way to make abstract economic
issues-such as environmental and health care problems, poverty and the
welfare system, federal budget concerns, the labor market and income distribution-more
accessible while offering a tangible contribution to the local community.
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- "I hope," Pfeifer says, "that, with some guidance from
me and a paper assignment based on their service experience, students will
see how economic issues affect the lives of real people and how the tools
of economics help us understand these issues."
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- If It's Wednesday, I'll Be at the Holyoke Health Center
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- Sociology major Sandie Drury '98J is in the second of three semesters
she has committed to working with the Holyoke Health Center, a medical
center specializing in pediatric, adult and geriatric care. Last semester,
the 44-year-old Ada Comstock Scholar and former nurse created for the center
a database of its HIV-positive patients. This semester, she begins studying
the structural, cultural and economic barriers that might keep young mothers
in the Spanish-speaking community, nearly 500 of them, from using the health
services available to them. Her study is part of a 12-credit special studies
project she is completing under Professor Steinberg's supervision.
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- Although she is enthusiastic enough to admit to being "obsessed
with the project," she is concerned about the barriers a monolingual
student from Smith will encounter in a community characterized by a large
number of residents who are of Puerto Rican descent and living on marginal
incomes.
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- But Drury brings to the project her own experiences and an intense
desire to succeed. "The young mothers I interview won't know this,
but I have lived in poverty myself, and I have been a single mother raising
two sons on my own," she says.
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- "I've wanted to look at the problems in our health care system
for a long time," says Drury, who plans to go to law school and eventually
specialize in health care and medical ethics law. "There is a lot
of victim blaming currently going on in our society. And I want to flesh
it out, find out what's going on and where it can change. It's so exciting,"
she insists. "I've been working toward this for years."
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